New ideas just kept bubbling up

Many people take a bottle of water with them almost wherever they go. I like water, but prefer an effervescent drink, such as soda water, because I find it to be a better thirst quencher. Water always has been available, but not drinks with bubbles.

Food historians claim that the soft drink is a descendant of other non-alcoholic beverages, primarily based on fruit or roots, prepared in America in Colonial days. Some of these drinks included cranberry juice, apple juice and sassafras tea. They could be used to quench thirst or wash down a meal.

In those days it did not matter if there was an alcoholic content to the drink, as in the case of apple juice, which was prepared to be drunk fresh: If left for even a short time it fermented and became alcoholic. Sweet cider could quickly become hard cider.

A natural air

The use of effervescent water in beverages also was a natural development. Gaseous mineral waters, as they were found in nature, eventually were imitated by manufacturers. A way of doing this was discovered in 1767 by Joseph Priestly, who is better known for his discovery and work with oxygen.

He apparently regarded the production of carbonated water as an amusing laboratory trick. Priestly did nothing to exploit his invention, even when he moved to the United States, where he spent the last 10 years of his life.  He died in Pennsylvania in 1809. He was quite unconscious of the fact that he had fostered a multimillion-dollar industry.

The first person to produce and bottle soda water in commercially significant quantities in the United States also was unaware of the possibilities of the beverage. He was Benjamin Stilliman, a professor of chemistry at Yale, who put his unflavored water on the market in 1807. Apparently it never occurred to him to patent so simple a process as pumping carbonic gas into water.

Market the machine

Thus the field was left open for Joseph Hawkins, a soda water maker who took out a patent not on the idea of making soda water but the machinery he had devised for doing so.

It was the marketing genius of a young man named John Mathews, who popularized soda water. His was no better than that of his competitors, but his advertising was.

Mathews’ pitch was that “Youth, as it sips its first soda, experiences the sensations, and like the sensations of love, cannot be forgotten.” It is hard to believe that these unforgettable sensations came from a flavorless soda water.

The progression from plain gaseous water to flavored gaseous water probably should have been taken automatically. But it was 50 years before anyone thought of it.

Of course, along with sodas came the soda fountain, the first of which appeared at a pharmacy in Philadelphia in 1825 when Elie Durand, a pharmacist, added cigars and soda to his stock. He was followed by Eugene Roussel, who added a soda counter to his perfume shop in 1838.

A mere 10 years later there were 64 soda plants in the United States and in 1859 more than 100 plants were making soda and pop (a more elegant name for belch water). Soda water, an American drink, had become a $1.5 million business. A century later, in the 1960s each American was consuming 185 bottles of soda-type drinks annually.

The early soda flavors, which the American public grasped with great enthusiasm, were root beer, birch beer, spruce beer, pepsin, ginger, lemon, kola, cherry and sarsaparilla. Ice cream and soda frequently were being sold in the same place, but it took some 35 more years before the two were put together.

Robert M. Green, who had the soda fountain concession at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, made his sodas with cream. One day, running out of cream, he slipped in a spoon of ice cream instead, hoping nobody would notice the substitution. Everybody noticed — and everybody clamored for more. Before the end of the summer season, Green’s sales had multiplied from $6 a day to $600.

This bonanza did not escape the notice of Philadelphia’s city fathers. When James M. Tufts applied for the ice cream and soda concession at Philadelphia’s centennial for the Declaration of Independence, he was charged $50,000. Nevertheless he made a fortune.

The first of all the cola drinks, and the one that still outsells all its competition, is Coca-Cola.

It was devised in 1886 by John S. Pemberton, a druggist in Atlanta. He did not think of it as a beverage drunk for pleasure, but saw it as a remedy for headaches.

The story goes that Pemberton mixed the first batch of his concoction by putting together extracts of coca leaves and cola nuts in an iron kettle and stirred with an oar. There were enough headache and hangover suffers in Atlanta to almost immediately consume 25 gallons of Coca-Cola, as he had named the concoction. It was only sold at Pemberton’s drugstore and it netted a $50 profit the first year.

Food historians credit the success of Coca-Cola to aggressive and skillful advertising. It has a name that is easy to pronounce with a homely abbreviation — Coke.

None of the rival companies, which sprang up in imitation of Coca-Cola, has hit upon a succession of syllables that are so easily rippled off the tongue. Nor have they succeeded in creating a rival formula to Coca-Cola.

Pepsi has come close.

Today the Coca-Cola formula is worth more than $1 billion.