He was creepy.
The hairy man with yellowed teeth smelled awful – a mix of cigars, beer, and sweat. He didn’t talk, only grunted. He pursed his lips, glared, and heaved a scarred wooden crate onto his shoulder.
The seltzer man scared me.
He wasn’t the candy man or the smiling mailman. He didn’t bring bakery cupcakes or milk from the dairy.
He brought seltzer in heavy clear, green, and blue bottles to my home in Queens, New York City where I grew up.
Some called it Jewish Champagne. Others used it for classics like egg creams and cherry lime rickeys. Many drank it plain.
We didn’t realize that it was an iconic beverage from thousands of years ago.
No one knows when people started drinking bubbly mineral waters. The first recorded use dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. People believed in the healing powers of mineral waters. They bathed and drank it. The taste wasn’t always great. Emily Pawley in Distillations Magazine, wrote that mineral water was believed to help everything from joint diseases and gallstones to tumors and infections.
“Hippocratic medicine temporarily declined during the Middle Ages,” Pawley adds, while “the use of mineral springs continued . . . holy wells reassigned to Christian saints.”
In 1685, Robert Boyle published an essay, The Imitation of Natural Medicinal Waters by Chymical and Other Ways. A decade later, botanist Nehemiah Grew commercialized Epsom salts as a “simple and lasting re-creation of the mineral waters” from the town of Epsom.
The search was on.
By the 1700s, it became fashionable to “take the waters” in spa towns. They offered curative, therapeutic, recreational, and social services. There were baths, drinking halls, and treatment facilities. Think Vichy (France), Spa (Belgium), and Bath (U.K).
It was inevitable that scientists would figure out how to produce man-made (artificial) mineral water.
Enter Joseph Priestley. He was a U.K. clergyman with unpopular political ideas, like supporting the French Revolution and defending religious freedom. That led to arson – people set fire to his home and chapel. He eventually fled, along with his wife and family, to Pennsylvania.
Similar to his buddy Ben Franklin, Priestly the scientist first experimented with electricity. Then he turned to chemistry. Along with Carle Scheel, they are credited with discovering oxygen.
Priestley published a paper, Directions for impregnating water with Fixed Air.
He began by suspending a bowl of water above a beer vat at a local brewery. The vat gave off carbon dioxide which dissolved into the water and created bubbles.
In a recent Distillations podcast, Michel Meyer described Priestley’s recipe for carbonation:
Drip a little sulfuric acid on a mixture of chalk and water, then use a bag to capture the carbon dioxide that fizzes off the chalk. Stick the bag in water and release the carbon dioxide.
Joseph Priestley, Complements of Wikimedia Commons
Creative chemists searched for new ways to make artificial mineral water. Profitability crept into the formula. According to the Brooklyn Selzer Museum, the goal was to turn it into a beverage for the masses.
Colin Emmins, in Shire Album, attributes the “first maker of artificial mineral water for sale to the public” in the 1770s. Manchester apothecary, Thomas Henry, mixed mineral salts, carbon dioxide, and water.
Can you image how it tasted?
New systems emerged. Jason Schweppe (the father of today’s company) introduced a forced pump/syphon. The syphon – what we now call a seltzer bottle – appeared in Great Britain in 1837. Schweppe added medicinal flavors like ginger and kola nut.
Pawley concluded that “in sipping a glass of ginger ale, seltzer water, or Perrier, we are participating in a centuries-old tradition of therapy.”
Flavors, sweeteners, even wine have been added to carbonated water. By the mid-1800s sweet soda (pop) appeared. Syrups ranged from grape and cherry to strawberry and melon. People loved it. It achieved new status in 1886 with American Pharmacist John Smith Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola. The name referred to two of its original ingredients: coca leaves (used to make cocaine) and kola nuts (a source of caffeine).
Pemberton sold his rights to Asa Griggs Candler, a businessman who marketed and expanded the soda without coca – although he kept the name.
Colas and other sodas flooded the market. New words entered the language, like soda fountain and soda jerk.
Complements of Wikimedia Commons
Movies like the 1927 The Soda Water Cowboy and the 2012 Soda Springs, filled screens. Seltzer bottles joined many comedy routines.
Today you can get soda flavors from cream to cherry and coke to diet coke. The largest soda brand in the world, Pepsi, earns $86 billion a year; the global soft drink market is worth over $416 billion.
Plain seltzer, club soda, and sparkling waters are making a comeback. They don’t contain sugar or artificial flavors. Experts advise avoiding sugary sodas because they’re unhealthy.
Even the old seltzer bottles, once delivered to my home, now sell for as much as $1,900.
Whether seltzer, club soda, sparkling water, or pop – we’re all in.
What a sparkling article! Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I love the part about the seltzer man in Queens when you were growing up. We love our very slightly flavored seltzer water; so refreshing when it’s ice cold. Just that little bit of kick – and now I know why… It’s not the carbonation, it’s the history! Fun and fascinating, thank you!