soda water , aerated water, or carbonated water is the commercial offspring of naturally sparkling spring water. One of its most famous sources was the Selters spring, situated near the town of Neiderselters, Germany. Discovered in 772 ce, these light, effervescent waters were first lauded for their health benefits in 1581 by physician Jakob Theodor, called Tabernaemontanus. A spa was built on the site so royalty and the elite could “take the waters.” The village also profited, a century later, from the bottling and shipping of “Selters waters,” which commanded a high price and thus inspired scientists to find a way to replicate this miracle cure for indigestion.
Swedish chemistry professor Torbern Bergman was frugal man who could not afford imported aerated waters to cure his digestive problems. Bergman developed a process in 1771 that replicated sparkling spring water by dissolving chalk and sulfuric acid in water to generate carbon dioxide gas. That same year, the British clergyman and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley contrived an alternate method, suspending a bowl of water above a fermenting beer vat. Both men published their methods, yet neither of them pursued commercialization. In 1776, a critic for the London Review, commenting on Manchester apothecary Thomas Henry’s description of Priestley’s aerated water, postulated that it might become as “fashionable as French wine at the fashionable taverns.”
The Swiss watchmaker Jean-Jacob Schweppe read both of these accounts and conducted his own experiments. Drawing also on the results achieved in 1777 by French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, he found a viably commercial solution. Schweppe’s discovery became a reality in 1783, when he wrote: “I use a compression pump which I named the ‘Geneva Machine’ because of my origins. In a stirring apparatus, I produce gas with chalk and sulfuric acid; I then purify it with water before heating it with a container full of charcoal… . The taste is pretty strong. Maybe I should add natural plant oil.”
More interested in gaining certification from the medical community than a profit, Schweppe unfortunately trusted the sales of his water to a friend, who commissioned engineer Nicolas Paul to fashion an aeration device to go into direct competition. (Schweppe’s water exceeded the sales of Selter and other spa waters, so it was not surprising that a greedy rivalry emerged.)
The tables turned when Paul made Schweppe’s friend a substandard machine and himself a refined one. In retribution, Schweppe went into partnership with Paul and rival pharmacist Henry Albert Gosse in 1790, making a product with distilled water and expanding their offerings and operations to London. From their first factory at 141 Drury Lane, the partnership produced three waters, which were reviewed by industrialist Matthew Boulton and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of naturalist Charles Darwin): “No. 1 is for common drinking with your dinner. No. 2 is for nephritic patients and No. 3 contains the most alkali given only in more violent cases.”
It wasn’t until the 1820s that soda water consistently found its way into mixed drinks, with an assist from George Gordon, Lord Byron, who sang the praises of “hock [Rhine wine] and soda-water” in his poem Don Juan, written between 1819 and 1824. By the 1830s, Brandy and Soda had become a common London drink, and that city’s Garrick Club was serving a Gin Punch cooled by iced soda water—the invention of its manager, Stephen Price, an American. It took a few years for American drinkers to follow the British lead, but by 1862 Jerry Thomas’s groundbreaking How to Mix Drinks was listing a number of soda-water drinks, including a “Soda Cocktail” (soda water, sugar, and bitters). See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, soda-water drinks proliferated, with whole classes of them being created and flourishing: coolers and daisies, Collinses and highballs, and spritzes and fizzes and on and on ad infinitum. Soda water assumed the role it maintains today, as a way of diluting a drink without making it uninteresting.
See Americano; Aperol Spritz; cooler; daisy; fizz; highball; John Collins; rickey; and Singapore Sling.
W. Review of Essays Physical and Chemical by M. Lavoisier by Thomas Henry. London Review, September, 1776, 214.
Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, 2nd ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.
By: Anistatia R. Miller and Jared M. Brown