The Wise Book of Whys (7 page)

Why Carbonated Beverages are Called “Soft Drinks”

Today, the term “soft drink” is typically
used for flavored carbonated beverages, but originally it was just any drink that didn’t contain a significant amount of alcohol (“hard drink”).

The push to have “soft drink” primarily refer to just sugary carbonated beverages is thanks
to a concerted effort by carbonated beverage makers. Flavored carbonated beverage makers were having a hard time creating national advertisements due to the fact that what people call their product varies from place to place. For instance, in parts of the United States and Canada, flavored carbonated beverages are referred to as “pop”; in other parts “soda”; in yet other parts “coke”; and there are a variety of other names commonly used as well. If we go international with the advertisements, in England these drinks are called “fizzy drinks”; in Ireland sometimes “minerals.”

To account for the fact that they can’t refer to their product in the generic s
ense on national advertisements because of these varied terms, these manufactures chose the term “soft drink” to be more or less a universal term for flavored carbonated beverages. Thanks to the subsequent advertising campaigns that followed featuring this, today “soft drink” almost exclusively refers to these beverages, rather than any non-alcoholic drink as before.

Why We Divide the Day Into Seconds, Minutes, and Hours

Today the most widely used numerical system is a base 10 system (decimal)
. This seems appropriate given we all have 10 fingers and toes, so grade-schoolers (and myself, after a few beers) can do math easily! Unfortunately for us, the pre-Dewey Decimal civilizations either never tried to count their sheep drunk, or just plain hated their kids because they all seemed to use other more complicated systems like a base 12 (duodecimal) or base 60 (sexagesimal).

The first society credited with separating the day out into smaller parts was the Egyptians
. They divided a day into two twelve-hour sections: night and day. The clock they used to measure time was the sundial. The first sundials were just stakes in the ground and you knew what time it was by the length and direction of the Sun’s shadow. Advances in technology, namely a t-shaped bar placed into the ground, allowed them to more accurately measure the day in 12 distinct parts.

The drawback to this early clock was that at night there was no real way to measure time
. Egyptians, like us, still needed to measure time after dark. After all, how else would we know when the bars close? So their early astronomers observed a set of 36 stars, 18 of which they used to mark the passage of time after the Sun was down. Six of them would be used to mark the 3 hours of twilight on either side of the night and twelve then would be used to divide up the darkness into 12 equal parts. Later on, somewhere between 1550 and 1070 BC, this system was simplified to just use a set of 24 stars, 12 of which were used to mark the passage of time.

There were many other methods, in ancient times, for measuring the passage of time after dark. The most accurately known clock was a water clock, called a cl
epsydra. Dating back to approximately 1400-1500 BC, this device was able to mark the passage of time during various months, despite the seasons. It used a slanting interior surface that was inscribed with scales that allowed for a decrease in water pressure as the water flowed out of a hole at the bottom of the vessel.

Whatever method of tracking time used, the idea of dividing up time into 24 hour cycles was now firmly entrenched.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until about 150 BC that the Greek astronomer Hipparchus suggested that a fixed interval for each hour was needed. He proposed dividing up the day into 24 equinoctial hours observed on equinox days. That said, it wasn’t until about the fourteenth century, when mechanical clocks were commonplace, that a fixed length for an hour became widely accepted.

Hipparchus and other astronomers
used astronomical techniques they borrowed from the Babylonians who made calculations using a base 60 system. It’s unknown why the Babylonians, who inherited it from the Sumerians, originally chose to use 60 as a base for a calculation system. However, it is extremely convenient for expressing fractions of time using 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30.

U
sing this base 60 system as a means of dividing up the hour was born from the idea of devising a geographical system to mark the Earth’s geometry. The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes, who lived between 276 and 194 B.C., used this sexagesimal system to divide a circle into 60 parts. These lines of latitude were horizontal and ran through well-known places on the Earth at the time. Later, Hipparchus devised longitudinal lines that encompassed 360 degrees. Even later, the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy expanded on Hipparchus’ work and divided each of the 360 degrees of latitude and longitude into 60 equal parts. These parts were further subdivided into 60 smaller parts. He called the first division “partes minutae primae,” or first minute. The subdivided smaller parts he called “partes minutae secundae,” or second minute, which became known as the second.

Why Salt Enhances Flavor

This is partially
due to the fact that “saltiness” is one of the five primary basic tastes the human tongue can detect. Those five tastes being: salt, bitter, sweet, sour, and umami (if you’re not familiar with this one, it is from glutamic acid, which is found in many foods, particularly some meats, and is the basis of the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG).

The extra salt has other effects as well though, outside of simply making things more salty
. Particularly, adding salt to foods helps certain molecules in those foods more easily release into the air, thus helping the aroma of the food, which is important in our perception of taste.

A
dding a bit of salt won’t just increase your salty taste perception, but it will also suppress your bitter taste perception in any given food (which is why it is often sprinkled on grape fruit, for instance, before eating).

Finally, adding salt to sweet or sour things, while not shown to s
uppress sweet or sour flavors like it does with bitter flavors, will help balance the taste a bit by making the perceived flavor, for instance of sugary candies or lemons, less one-dimensional.

Why Lead Used to Be
Added to Gasoline

“Tetraethyl lead” was used in early model cars to help reduce engine knocking, boost octane ratings, and help with wear and tear on valve seats within the motor. Due to concerns over air pollution and health risks, this type of gas was slowly phased out starting in the late 1970s and banned altogether in all on-road vehicles in the United States in 1995.

For a more detailed explanation of why lead used to be added to gasoline, it’s necessary to understand a little bit more about gasoline and what properties make it a good combustion material
in car engines. Gasoline is a product of crude oil that is made of carbon atoms joined together into carbon chains. The different length of the chains creates different fuels. For example, methane has one carbon atom, propane has three, and octane has eight carbon atoms chained together. These chains have characteristics that behave differently under various circumstances; characteristics like boiling point and ignition temperature, for instance, can vary greatly between them. As fuel is compressed in a motor’s cylinder, it heats up. Should the fuel reach its ignition temperature during compression, it will auto-ignite at the wrong time. This causes loss of power and damage to the engine. Fuels such as heptane (which has seven carbon atoms chained together) can ignite under very little compression. Octane, however, tends to handle compression extremely well.

The higher the compression in the cylinders a car’s motor can produce, the greater the power it can get out of each stroke of the piston. This makes it necessary to have fuels that can handle higher compression without auto-igniting. The higher the octane rating, the more compression the fuel can handle. An octane rating of 87 means the fuel is a mixture of 87% octane and 13 percent heptane, or any mixture of fuels or additives that have the same performance of 87/13.

In 1919, Dayton Metal Products Co. merged with General Motors. They formed a research division that set out to solve two problems: the need for high compression engines and the insufficient supply of fuel that would run them. On December 9, 1921, chemists led by Charles F. Kettering and his assistants, Thomas Midgley and T.A. Boyd added Tetraethyl lead to the fuel in a laboratory engine. The ever present knock, caused by auto-ignition of fuel being compressed past its ignition temperature, was completely silenced. Most all automobiles at the time were subject to this engine knock so the research team was overjoyed. Over time, other manufacturers found that by adding lead to fuel they could significantly improve the octane rating of the gas. This allowed them to produce much cheaper grades of fuel and still maintain the needed octane ratings that a car’s engine required.

Another benefit that became known over time was that Tetraethyl lead kept valve seats from becoming worn down prematurely. Exha
ust valves, in early model cars that were subject to engine knocking, tended to get micro-welds that would get pulled apart on opening. This resulted in rough valve seats and premature failure. Lead helped fuel ignite only when appropriate on the power stroke, thus helping eliminate exhaust valve wear and tear.

The potential health issues with Tetraethyl lead were known even before major oil companies began using it. In 1922, while plans for production of leaded gasoline were just getting underway, Thomas Midgley received a letter from Charles Klaus, a German scientist, stating of lead, “it’s a creeping and malicious poison
,” and warned that it had killed a fellow scientist. This didn’t seem to faze Midley, who himself came down with lead poisoning during the planning phase. While recovering in Miami, Midgley wrote to an oil industry engineer that public poisoning was “almost impossible, as no one will repeatedly get their hands covered in gasoline containing lead…” Other opposition to lead came from a lab director for the Public Health Service (a part of the US Department of Health and Human Services) who wrote to the assistant surgeon general stating lead was a “serious menace to public health.”

Despite the warnings, production on leaded gasoline began in 1923. It didn’t take long for workers to begin succumbing to lead poisoning. At DuPont’s manufacturing plant in Deepwater
, New Jersey, workers began to fall like dominoes. One worker died in the fall of 1923. Three died in the summer of 1924 and four more in the winter of 1925. Despite this, public controversy didn’t begin until five workers died and 44 were hospitalized in October of 1924 at Standard Oils plant in Bayway, New Jersey.

The Public Health Service held a conference in 1925 to address the problem of leaded gasoline. As you would expect, Kettering testified for the use of lead, stating that oil companies could produce alcohol fuels that had the bene
fits that were provided by lead; however, the volumes needed to supply a growing fuel hungry society could not be met. Alice Hamilton of Harvard University countered proponents of leaded gasoline and testified that this type of fuel was dangerous to people and the environment. In the end, the Public Health Service allowed leaded gasoline to remain on the market.

In 1974, after environmental hazards began to become overwhelmingly apparent, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) anno
unced a scheduled phase-out of lead content in gasoline. One way manufacturers met these and other emission standards was to use catalytic converters. Catalytic converters use a chemical reaction to change pollutants, like carbon monoxide and other harmful hydrocarbons, to carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water. Tetraethyl lead would tend to clog these converters, making them inoperable. Thus, unleaded gasoline became the fuel of choice for any car with a catalytic converter.

The requirements by the EPA, emission control mechanisms on cars, and the advent of other octane boosting alternatives spelled the end for widespread leaded gasoline use. Manufacturers soon found that cars could no longer handle such a fuel; public tolerance of the environmental and health hazards would not allow it; and it became cost prohibitive to continue producing it. On January 1, 1996, the Clean Air Act completely banned th
e use of leaded fuel for any on-road vehicle. Should you be found to possess leaded gasoline in your car, you can be subject to a $10,000 fine.

This hasn’t completely gotten rid of leaded gasoline. You are st
ill permitted to use it for off-road vehicles, aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment, and marine engines in the United States.