In 1772, Dr. Joseph Priestley’s Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air (fixed air being his name for carbon dioxide gas) also excited the interest of those seeking a reliable antiscorbutic. Priestley was by no means the first scientist to interest himself in the possibility of artificially reproducing the properties of natural mineral waters. As Sir John Pringle put it when Priestley received the gold medal of the Royal Society in 1773:
Having learned from Dr. Black that this fixed or mephitic air could in great abundance be procured from chalk by means of diluted spirits of vitriol; from Dr. Macbride that this fluid was of a considerable antiseptic nature; from Mr. Cavendish that it could in a large quantity be absorbed in water; and from Dr. Brownrigg that it was this very air which gave the briskness and chief virtues of the Spa and Pyrmont waters; Dr. Priestley. . . conceived that common water impregnated with this fluid alone, might be useful in medicine, particularly for sailors on long voyages, for curing or preventing the sea scurvy (Pringle 1774:15).
Intellectual curiosity, rather than commercial advantage, seems to have prompted the early scientists to find ways of extracting and analyzing the salts from natural mineral waters and reconstituting them in their laboratories. Much the same spirit led Priestley to show how water might be artificially carbonated on a commercial scale, and although carbonated water proved no cure for scurvy, Priestley’s invention was soon adapted to the commercial production of artificial mineral waters.
Despite the traditional widespread suspicion of water because of its close connection with disease, natural waters were nonetheless valued so long as they either contained mineral salts found in practice to be healthful or were drawn from an exceptionally pure and reliable source. Such waters, however, had to be highly regarded indeed, in light of the high cost of transporting them, usually in heavy glass bottles, over any but short distances. During the reign of George II,
Henry Eyre of London was not only importing from the Low Countries the mineral waters of Spa and dealing in various native waters, but he was also ensuring that all bottles were appropriately sealed to protect his customers from spurious imitations.
Provided the artificial waters carefully replicated the chemical composition of their natural counterparts - which analytical techniques enabled them to do - the economic advantage of manufacture close to the consumer was obvious. As Priestley himself put it: “I can make better than you import; and what cost you five shillings, will not cost me a penny” (Rutt 1831, 1: 177). At much the same time, Torbern Bergman of Uppsala, Sweden, was also experimenting with equipment for the production of artificial mineral waters, and within the next decade, Dr. John Mervyn Nooth was demonstrating to the Royal Society in London a glass apparatus for the production of small quantities of carbonated water.
The first known manufacturer of artificial mineral waters bottled for sale was Thomas Henry, a Manchester apothecary who, by the end of the 1770s, had modified Nooth’s apparatus in order to produce artificial Pyrmont and Seltzer waters, as well as to imitate an earlier preparation known as “Bewley’s Mephitic Julep,” all of which were intended for medicinal purposes rather than for refreshment. Indeed, Henry recommended drinking with the julep “a draught of lemonade, or water acidulated with vinegar or weak spirits of vitriol, by which means the fixed air will be extricated in the stomach” (Henry 1781: 29). This suggestion reflected earlier advice on taking the natural waters; there was no hint, as yet, that flavorings might be added to the waters themselves.
J. H. de Magellan, claiming that Nooth’s apparatus took several hours to impregnate water, published (1777) his own method for producing, in a few minutes, artificial versions of “the best Mineral Waters of Pyrmont, Spa, Seltzer, Seydschutz, Aix-la-Chapelle etc.” (Magellan 1777: Title), as well as appropriate recipes for doing so. At the same time, he mentioned that he had sent copies of Priestley’s pamphlet to different parts of Europe and that a French translation had appeared soon afterward. In 1787, mineral waters were also said to have been manufactured on a commercial scale in Germany.
It was, however, Jacob Schweppe who took up a theoretical suggestion of Priestley’s that the use of a “condensing engine” or pressure pump would allow a greater volume of gas to be absorbed in the water than was otherwise possible. Schweppe, German born and a citizen of Geneva by adoption, pioneered the manufacture of artificial mineral waters in that city before setting up business in London in 1792. Producing Seltzer water, Spa water, Pyrmont water, and acidulous Rochelle salt water on something approaching a factory scale, Schweppe also offered a less specific line of aerated alkaline water, soon known as acidulous soda water, which he sold in three strengths - single, double, and triple - according to the amount of soda present, the double being “generally used.’’
The success of such ventures depended not merely on carbonating the water but on retaining the gas in the liquid until the consumer opened the container, and this in turn depended on the careful corking and sealing of all bottles, which Henry had stressed at the very outset of commercial manufacture. For Schweppe, who was supplying sometimes over long distances, the problem was a real one. As a postscript to a repeat order of 1805: A Birmingham customer complained that many of the bottles from his last order were nearly empty when they arrived because of bad corking.
To prevent the corks from drying out, Schweppe recommended that the bottles be laid on their sides in a cool place or even better kept covered with water - no easy task on a carrier’s wagon! Schweppe also made an allowance on empty bottles returned, a custom often retained thereafter in a trade where the bottle represented a significant proportion of the total cost of the product.
Schweppe s partner in Geneva, Nicolas Paul, also made his way to England and operated commercially in London from 1802, having been in business in Paris for a while en route. Like Schweppe, Paul used the process known as the Geneva system or Geneva apparatus, but although he apparently achieved even higher levels of carbonation than Schweppe, the additional gas was, no doubt, largely lost in the pouring out.
By then, soda water had reached Dublin, where it was recommended by Dr. Robert Percival, Professor of Chemistry at Trinity College. Indeed, at one time it was claimed that a Dublin firm had invented soda water, but the product would seem conclusively to have originated with Schweppe. Nonetheless, its early success in Britain, like that of the other artificial waters, was undoubtedly medicinal; in fact, between 1804 and 1833, soda water was subject to stamp duty under the Medicine Tax. The first known manufacturer of soda water in the United States was Benjamin Silliman, operating in New Haven in 1807, and the first United States patent for manufacturing artificial mineral water was issued two years later.
Attempts to match spa waters artificially probably reached their apogee in the 1820s, when Dr. F. A. Struve, of Dresden, opened a range of artificial spas at Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Brighton, supplying careful imitations of the Carlsbad, Ems, Kissingen, Marienbad, Pyrmont, Seltzer, and Spa waters to invalids and a wider public without the necessity of their traveling to the original waters’ respective sources.
Elegant and Refreshing Beverages
Gradually, however, the new drinks began to be promoted for refreshment rather than for their specifically medicinal properties. In 1819, an advertisement in the London Morning Chronicle described as “elegant and refreshing" the ginger beer and soda water available from one of the new metropolitan makers, and it was by the brewing of ginger beer that the industry expanded from the soda waters, on the one hand, to the sweetened, fruit-flavored drinks of later manufacturers on the other hand.
In Elizabethan times, Arthur Barlowe’s “The discovery of Virginia" had referred to the. American Indians drinking water “sodden [i. e. boiled] with ginger in it, and black cinnamon, and some times sassafras, and divers other wholesome and medicinable herbs and trees" (Barlowe 1589). A subsequent early. American drink was “switchell,” a mixture of molasses, vinegar, and ginger. But no reference has been found to ginger beer as such before the first decade of the nineteenth century. After it was first marketed in England, however, its popularity grew swiftly. Perhaps, as Leigh Hunt wrote at the time, because it was found to have “all the pleasantness and usefulness of soda-water without striking cold upon one" (Hunt 1862), ginger beer soon became a staple commodity of even the most modest refreshment stall.
The commercial origins of flavored, sweetened carbonated waters remain more obscure. As early as 1784, Karl Wilhelm Scheele, the Swedish chemist, had produced, from lemon juice, a crystalline substance that he called citric acid. One old trade historian claimed to have seen a manuscript reference to citric acid powder (or concrete acid of lemons, as it was also known) dated 1819, and a recipe for lemonade made with citric acid dated shortly thereafter. Lemonade “syrup" was known at about the same time, and all of these substances may well have been used for making lemonade in the home, employing a variant of Nooth’s apparatus later known to the Victorians as the “gazogene" or “selt-zogene.” Despite such speculation, however, the first positive reference in England to commercially produced effervescent lemonade dates from no earlier than 1833. Such lemonades would have been flavored with citric acid and essential oil of lemon mixed with a sugar syrup, topped up with water, and impregnated with carbon dioxide gas derived in the factory from the action of sulfuric acid on whiting or other forms of chalk. Only at the end of the century did carbon dioxide gas come to be supplied to the soft-drink factory by a specialist manufacturer.
At London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, lemonade, ginger beer, spruce beer, seltzer water (by now a generic name), and soda water were among the refreshments available to visitors, alcoholic drinks not being countenanced on the premises. A million bottles of aerated beverages were sold there, according to one contemporary estimate, and the success of the show and of the soft drinks reflected the slowly increasing leisure and spending power of those able to attend, two vital factors in the growth of the industry, not only in Britain but elsewhere in the developed world.
At fairs and race meetings, London costermongers sold lemonade and ginger beer, which they made at home in stone barrels. At the street markets of the mid-nineteenth century, according to Henry Mayhew (1851), soft drinks were available to refresh those shoppers “who have a penny to spare rather than those who have a penny to dine upon.” Besides lemonade, raspberryade, and ginger beer, the street markets offered “Persian sherbet, and some highly coloured beverages which have no specific name, but are introduced to the public as cooling’ drinks; hot elder cordial or wine; peppermint water.” Sherbets had been available since at least the seventeenth century as cool fruit drinks originating from Turkey and the East, but later the name became attached to drinks made from effervescent powders containing bicarbonate of soda, tartaric acid or cream of tartar, sugar, and flavorings. As to the drinks with “no specific name,” perhaps it is as well that their composition remains a mystery. In the street markets, Mayhew also noted that “some sellers dispensed ginger beer in plain glass bottles which was drank straight from the bottle after the cork obviatry the necessity of a glass.”
In France the development of the industry seems to have been slower, with pharmacists holding a monopoly on what remained a localized trade, until their grip was challenged and weakened during the Orleanist years of the 1830s and 1940s. From France, too, at that time, came the soda siphon for dispensing carbonated soft drinks.
The pharmacists of the United States also became adept at producing artificial mineral waters, and as they discovered that the installation of soda fountains brought customers to their retail drugstores, they were encouraged to experiment with an ever wider range of flavored drinks by the mid-nineteenth century. Soda fountains were also taken up in Europe, where, for example, Germany had its Trinkhallen and France its buvettes a eaux gazeuses. An innovation of the American soda fountains was the addition of sweet cream to many of their products, and the popularity of ice-cream soda, as a vanilla-flavored drink, spread overseas as the century progressed.
Other drinks originating as soda fountain beverages included sarsaparilla, originally a medicinal flavoring derived from plants of the smilax species. Curiously, by the time sarsaparilla had become established among the bottled drinks, its flavor had come to be derived from a blend of oil of wintergreen, sassafras, anise, orange, and sometimes licorice. According to Charles Sulz in 1888, sarsaparilla itself was seldom included among the ingredients of what was by then a staple beverage of the American industry, but when it was, the bottler advertised its presence as proof of the superiority of his product over those of his competitors. Root beer was another blend of root, herb, and fruit flavors originating at the American soda fountain but later widely bottled. Sarsaparilla root beer, too, was available in the America of the 1880s. It also contained sassafras, a flavoring derived from the sassafras tree of the eastern seaboard.
World History
