Fizz (4 page)

Other sweet mixes of sparkling water and fruits followed. There were orangeades, limeades, raspberryades, cherryades, and Persian sherbets, a carbonated twist on the refreshing Persian fruit drink
sharbat.
Another still drink to get with the fizz was tonic water, also known as quinine water. Quinine came from the bark of the
Cinchona
plants, a genus native to the Andes Mountains. The bitter-tasting bark had been widely used by the Quechua people of South America, who would mix it with sweetened water to
produce a drink they believed could prevent shivering in the cold. When European explorers reached the continent they picked up on the Quechua's interest in the plants, and in the early 1600s, Agostino Salumbrino, a Jesuit brother living in Lima, successfully treated patients suffering from malaria using the Quechuan shivering cure. Quinine would remain a popular antimalaria remedy until well into the twentieth century.

In 1858, Erasmus Bond, the owner of London soft drink company W. Pitt & Co., developed the first carbonated tonic water. Since Bond envisaged it as a medicinal product to help the British in Africa and India overcome the risk of malaria, he packed his tonic water with so much quinine that even the sweetened water couldn't hide the vile bitterness of the substance. So the British abroad started using gin to blunt the acrid tonic. The gin did more than bring an alcoholic component to the beverage. At the molecular level, the structure of the essential oils of the juniper berries that give gin its flavor are similar to that of quinine. This chemical similarity causes the molecules to combine to create a more palatable drink that dampens the bitterness of the quinine. This taste-improving combination may have started as a way to help the medicine go down, but gin and tonic went on to become one of Britain's favorite cocktails. The combination proved so popular that Schweppes launched its own Indian Tonic Water in the 1870s, which rapidly eclipsed Bond's original in sales.

By the time Schweppes Indian Tonic Water went on sale, the company was the biggest soft drink company in Britain by far, selling millions of bottles of its waters and flavored drinks every year. In 1884, flush with its success, the company ventured into America and opened a plant in Brooklyn. But the company's bid for success in the United States was short-lived. In 1892 the company shut down its Brooklyn plant, having discovered that, unlike Europe with its gasogenes, tonic waters, and bottles, Americans preferred to get their fizzy kicks from an altogether different source: the soda fountain.

It was night on July 14, 1791, when the mob reached Joseph Priestley's home in Birmingham, England. By then the furious throng was on a roll, having torched the two meetinghouses of Priestley's dissident Unitarian Church. Now they wanted the man himself.

Since his influential experiments with carbonation, Priestley had also discovered oxygen, but his religious ideas had turned the scientist-clergyman into one of the most controversial figures in eighteenth-century Britain. His incendiary 1782 book
An History of the Corruptions of Christianity
caused outrage with its all-out attack on the Anglican Church and questioning of Christ's divinity. As if that weren't enough, he wrote another book declaring that he and his followers were “laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion: in consequence of which, that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually that the same foundation can never be built upon again.”

The analogy instantly reminded readers of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators led by Guy Fawkes tried unsuccessfully to blow up the Houses of Parliament using barrels of gunpowder hidden in the building's cellars. Although Priestley denied that was his intention, his ill-judged words heightened suspicions about the mild-mannered preacher and earned him the nickname “Gunpowder Joe.” At first his outspoken
views were tolerated, but the outbreak of revolution in France hardened attitudes. Many in Britain were appalled by the French Revolution and feared that people like Priestley were out to stir up a similar revolt at home.

So when the news broke that Priestley and his fellow Birmingham radicals intended to hold a dinner at Dadley's Hotel to celebrate the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, fury erupted. The final straw for the city's Anglican majority was the distribution of a mischievous pamphlet purporting to be from the dinner's organizers that called on “every enemy to civil and religious despotism” to celebrate Bastille Day. Violent threats poured in and a spooked Priestley decided not to attend. The remaining guests pressed ahead but ate and left early, sneaking away from the scene before the growing crowd of protestors outside the hotel could realize they were gone. It took until the early evening before the hundreds of demonstrators realized they had been duped.

Infuriated at missing their chance to confront the radicals in person, they stoned the hotel and set off to destroy the properties of the dissidents in their midst, starting with the New Meeting House of Priestley's Unitarian Church. After setting this and many other buildings on fire, the suggestion that they head to Priestley's home rippled through the crowd. The mob began marching toward the controversial minister's residence. The terrified Priestley family could hear the rioters getting closer and closer to their home so they fled. On reaching his home on Fairhill, the mob ransacked the house, smashed up his laboratory, and set the building on fire. The flames tore through the house, reducing Priestley's extensive collection of scientific equipment, books, and studies to a smoldering pile of ash.

As their home burned, the Priestley family fled through the city's dark back streets. Eventually they reached London, but there was little sympathy for the Priestleys. When King George III finally sent in the army to quell the violence in Birmingham, he made it clear whose side he was on: “I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light.” After the riots Priestley became an object of national hatred. Effigies of him were burned alongside those of fellow radical Thomas Paine. Shopkeepers refused to serve him and his family. People wrote letters accusing him of
being in league with the devil and newspapers lampooned him with vitriolic cartoons. Even the Royal Society turned their back on the man who had discovered oxygen.

By April 1794, Priestley had had enough. He and his family packed their bags and set sail for the United States, hoping—like so many before him—to find freedom in this new country with its ideals of democracy and liberty. Priestley's exit from Britain was well timed. By the time his ship docked in Battery Park eight weeks later, the British government had begun rounding up prominent radicals and charging them with seditious libel for their criticisms of the king, his government, and the Anglican Church. Priestley settled in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, but he spent a lot of his time in Philadelphia mixing with the pioneers of American science. Many of the scientists he befriended in the City of Brotherly Love shared his fascination with sparkling water, especially Founding Father and physician Benjamin Rush.

Such was Rush's belief in the curative abilities of fizzing water that in 1773 he published a comparative study of three mineral water sources in Pennsylvania, which sought to identify not just their composition but also what diseases they could remedy. One of the water sources he examined was a twenty-six-foot-deep well in Philadelphia, close to the corner of Sixth and Chestnut. This water, he wrote, “has a slight fetid smell, is somewhat turbid, and after standing a few hours exposed to the air, deposits a yellow sediment.” It also had “a strong ferruginous taste” that he attributed to the presence of iron. Despite this sparkling water's disagreeable aroma and flavor, Rush had no hesitation in recommending it as a treatment for a ragbag of ailments including hysteria, worms, kidney disease, and “foul ulcers of long standing,” although he warned that it could be harmful in cases of hypochondria and consumption. The only mystery was the smell. “To what is the peculiar odor of the Philadelphia water owing,” he wondered. “It has been ascribed to sulphur; but there are few direct proofs of sulphur being dissolved in a simple state in water.”

Undeterred by Rush's unanswered question, Philadelphians flocked to the well and held their noses while they drank for their health. Eventually the well ran dry, so the determined citizens began searching for a way to reconnect the well to the source of this special water. Their search swiftly
ended when it was discovered that the unpleasant smell that so puzzled Rush was caused by a leak in a nearby privy.

Despite such mishaps, Americans remained just as convinced as their counterparts in Europe that mineral waters had medicinal properties. Scientists investigated the properties of America's spring waters, doctors prescribed them, and citizens journeyed for miles to try them in the hope of curing their illnesses. The most highly regarded natural springs could attract huge crowds. At its peak, the iron-rich waters of Yellow Springs in Chester County, Pennsylvania, would draw as many as three hundred bathers and drinkers a day. The springs of Saratoga in upstate New York were another popular destination. According to legend, the British war hero Sir William Johnson was the first white man to visit the springs. Johnson had found fame in 1755 during the French and Indian War, when his army of colonials and Native Americans held back the French advance at Lac du Saint-Sacrement, which he promptly renamed Lake George in honor of the British king. While the British celebrated Johnson's victory, he left the battlefield permanently wounded by a lead shot that lodged itself in his upper leg. By August 1767 this persistent wound, coupled with gout, had left Johnson unable to walk. So when a group of Mohawks offered to take him to the “medicine spring,” he readily accepted. After several days at the spring Johnson claimed he was well enough to walk the rough trail home without assistance.

The story is almost certainly false. Johnson was a man prone to grand fibs. His claims of military expertise were repeatedly disputed by those he commanded, and while serving as a British diplomat, he deliberately overstated the strength of the Iroquois Confederacy to boost his own standing. It is also unlikely that no other white person would have found the spring by 1767, since there were already settlements close by at that time. But no one really cared if Johnson's tale was true or not. The story of the distinguished war veteran cured by a secret Native American spring hidden in the wilderness captured people's imaginations and put Saratoga on the map. Visitors came from far and wide to sample its fizzing waters, including George Washington, who was so impressed that he later tried to buy the land around it, without success.

The fascination with the water of Saratoga and the nearby Ballston Spa was such that people began trying to bottle it. But this was an idea fraught with difficulty, as Colonel Otho Williams told Washington in a 1784 letter: “The water … cannot be confined so that the air will not, somehow or other, escape. Several persons told us that they had corked it tight in bottles, and that the bottles broke. We tried it with the only bottle we had, which did not break, but the air found its way through a wooden stopper and the wax with which it was sealed.”

A solution to the problems that Colonel Williams described would be found by Benjamin Silliman, another fascinated visitor to the springs, and his solution would change America. The serious-minded son of a wealthy Connecticut lawyer, Silliman first visited Ballston and Saratoga in 1797 during a bout of depression. He spent a month at the springs, resting and drinking water “brisk with carbonic acid gas” before leaving, convinced that the iron-rich liquid had banished his dark moods. This visit would have had little significance were it not for an unexpected turn of events as Silliman completed his legal studies at Yale University in New Haven in March 1802.

The twenty-three-year-old planned to follow his father into the legal profession, but on finishing his exams, Yale asked if he would be interested in becoming its first chemistry professor. While Silliman's utter lack of chemical knowledge might have seemed like a severe handicap, chemistry was so new a science at the time that Yale figured it would be easier to get the capable student to learn the subject than to find someone who knew anything about it. After some hemming and hawing, Silliman accepted and set out to learn everything he could about the science he would soon have to teach.

Silliman's search for chemical knowledge began in Philadelphia, the hub of American science. There he dined with Priestley, and they discussed the practice of science, the Birmingham riots, and their opposing views of Christianity over their meal. After soaking up the insights of the city's preeminent scientists, Silliman headed to Europe in 1805 to further his knowledge and amass a collection of books and specialist equipment to bring back to Yale. During his travels in Europe he witnessed the lighting of London's first gas-powered light (which, he excitedly reported, “made
noonday in the streets”), made the arduous journey to Cornwall to see its steam-powered mining operations, and found himself being questioned by police in Antwerp who suspected him of being a British spy. He also noted London's booming trade in bottled mineral waters, a sight that bubbled up again in his mind when he returned to America in 1806.