Fizz (3 page)

Paul took advantage of Schweppe's double-crossing friend. After inspecting the equipment he built an inferior version for Schweppe's traitorous pal, and for himself he built a version with improved mechanics and used it to launch his own artificial mineral water business. Schweppe didn't want to compete with Paul, and instead he persuaded the talented engineer to go into business with him rather than against him. Paul brought in another partner, Henry Gosse, a Genevese pharmacist who shared Paul's interest in hot air ballooning and kept a chest containing a mummified saint—or at least what the Parisian salesman he bought it from told him was a saint—in his pharmacy, much to the disgust of his employees, who refused to go near the creepy antique.

The new business was formed in April 1790 and the combination of Schweppe's breakthrough, Paul's refinements, and Gosse's knowledge of chemistry made their imitation mineral waters even more popular. The trio started to think big. They talked of expanding into Paris, London, even Calcutta and Pondicherry in India. The partners eventually settled on starting their global expansion in London, and Schweppe landed the job of moving to the city and starting the business there. So in late 1791 the fifty-year-old Schweppe left his wife and his daughter Colette, the only one of his nine children who did not die at birth or before the age of 10, to make the journey from Geneva to London.

When Schweppe arrived in the British capital in January 1792, it was fast becoming the most populated city in the world. Its narrow cobbled streets, darkened by its tall buildings, teemed with carts, coaches, horses,
people, pickpockets, rats, vagrants, and coffin-carrying undertakers. Coal fires belched out thick, choking clouds of soot, and despite the fine squares and splendid buildings that showcased the British Empire's growing wealth, the place stank. It was said that if the wind was blowing in the right direction, London could be smelled long before it could be seen. The muddy waters of the River Thames were a mass of fast-flowing garbage that doubled as the city's reservoir and sewer. With private toilets a luxury even among the rich, most people flung their excrement onto the streets, where it mixed with spoiled food and other waste before being washed by rain into open drains to putrefy while waiting for the “soil men” to come at night and shovel it onto carts so it could be dumped into the Thames. Worst of all, reported German visitor Charles Moritz in 1782, were the city's butcher shops. “Guts and all the nastiness are thrown into the middle of the street, and cause an insupportable stench,” he reported to his countrymen on his return. Clean water was scarce too, and outbreaks of cholera and other diseases were a regular occurrence. In short, it was the perfect place to sell bottles of pure, healthful artificial mineral water.

The British, however, had not been idle in the twenty years that had passed since Priestley published his guide to producing artificial mineral water, and people across the country had started mineral water businesses. Priestley's friend Richard Bewley, an apothecary from Great Massingham in Norfolk, got the ball rolling. In 1767 or 1768, after Priestley told him about his experiments with carbonated water, Bewley began producing fizzy water under the name Mr Bewley's Mephitic Julep. Bewley's operation was a small one, limited by the constraints of Priestley's system, but others soon followed his lead.

Thomas Henry, an apothecary who ran a store on Manchester's King Street and one of the city's leading scientists, was one of those followers. After hearing about Mr Bewley's Mephitic Julep, Henry built a carbonation device based on Priestley's apparatus and started selling imitation mineral waters in the early 1770s. Henry regarded mineral water as a medicine, and he gave his customers strict instructions on its use. Take four ounces at a time, he would tell them, and make sure the bottle is kept tightly sealed so that the gas does not escape. But while his mineral water operation was
bigger than Bewley's, Henry was only able to produce carbonated water in small quantities until he came across Nooth's Apparatus.

This superior carbonation device was the 1775 invention of John Nooth, a Scottish physician who believed Priestley's apparatus was hard to use and that the pig bladder caused the resulting waters to taste of urine. Nooth's solution was a device that consisted of three glass chambers stacked on top of each other and connected by valves. In the bottom chamber marble chips and sulfuric acid would be mixed to produce carbon dioxide. The gas would then rise into the central chamber, where it would mix with water drawn down from the uppermost chamber, which—thanks to the water inside it—also provided the pressure necessary to cause the gas to carbonate the liquid. The freshly fizzed water could then be dispensed from a faucet attached to the central chamber. The result was an eighteenth-century SodaStream, a device for making carbonated water at home that was small enough to sit on a sideboard. It also carbonated water more effectively than Priestley's apparatus.

Priestley was far from amused, however, when Nooth explained that he made this glass contraption because Priestley's method created water with a urinous flavor. The scientist-theologian responded that if the water Nooth made with Priestley's apparatus tasted of urine that would be down to a servant relieving himself in his equipment and that Nooth deserved nothing less. But even Priestley had to concede that the Scottish physician had made the superior device.

Nooth's Apparatus became wildly popular among rich Europeans. Within its first three years more than a thousand had been sold; in France, more people got their carbonated water from these devices than from bottles. Nooth's Apparatus would evolve into the gasogene, which worked on the same principle but replaced the upper chamber and the faucet of the central chamber with a soda siphon. The gasogene would still be a common sight in 1891 when Dr. John Watson spied one lurking inside 221B Baker Street during Sherlock Holmes's adventure
A Scandal in Bohemia.
Anesthesiologists also found that a slightly modified gasogene was ideal for vaporizing ether and delivering it to patients, and they used the device to create some of the very first ether inhalers.

Henry used a modified version of Nooth's Apparatus to produce artificial mineral water in large enough quantities to secure a lucrative contract with Manchester Infirmary. The success of Henry's mineral water business would eventually lead his son William to use the insights he had gained while working for his father to come up with Henry's law, one of the physical laws explaining the nature and behavior of gases. Henry's law stated that the amount of gas absorbed in water is in proportion to the pressure of the gas. This explained why carbonated water would keep its fizz when bottled under pressure but go flat when the pressure is reduced by opening the bottle. It also explained why more nitrogen is absorbed into the blood of divers at deeper depths, causing the drunken feeling of nitrogen narcosis and the risk of getting the bends, a life-threatening condition caused by the nitrogen fizzing out of the blood if the diver ascends too rapidly.

While Henry and his son fizzed up water for ill Mancunians, down in London the sight of mineral water makers roaming the streets and hawking their wares from carts was already common when Schweppe arrived in 1791. Despite the established competition, Schweppe was pleased to find that none of the British waters could match the level of fizz that his cutting-edge equipment could create. Schweppe opened a factory on Drury Lane, then a notorious slum packed with gin shops and prostitutes selling themselves for six pence. Keen to keep his carbonation technique secret this time, he added superfluous parts, hid the crank behind a useless wheel, and encased the equipment in wood so that no one could see how it worked. In spring 1792 the first waters he produced in Drury Lane went on sale, and Schweppe began sending samples to respected establishment figures, including Priestley, hoping to get glowing endorsements in return.

The endorsements never came, and Londoners ignored his waters. In July a depressed Schweppe wrote to his partners back in Geneva to tell them business was bad and he wanted to come home. They wrote back insisting that he stay. It was too soon to give up, they told him. Lonely, Schweppe asked his fifteen-year-old daughter Colette to travel to London to keep him company. It was a dangerous journey. The turmoil of the French Revolution was ongoing, and as she made her way to London that summer, an armed mob stormed the royal palace of Tuileries in Paris. While the
mob massacred the five hundred Swiss Guards charged with protecting the palace, the French royal family fled through the gardens. The royals were eventually captured and imprisoned, and rumors of a counterrevolution spread panic through the country.

Despite the dangers, Colette made it to London, but Schweppe's business situation was still dire. In December Paul and Gosse decided that Schweppe was right after all, and they sent him a letter telling him to pack his bags and return to Geneva. Schweppe was furious. They had made him stay in London and caused his daughter to make a perilous journey through revolutionary France. Now, he fumed, they wanted him and Colette to risk their health and life by traveling through France in winter. Schweppe wrote an angry letter to his business partners informing them that he would not be leaving London until winter was over. But when winter turned to spring it was too late to leave. France had declared war on Britain, making travel impossible. With Schweppe trapped in London, the partnership with Gosse and Paul fell apart. Paul and Gosse opened rival mineral water businesses in Geneva, and Schweppe returned to the task of trying to build up the London operation.

Schweppe slogged away, growing the business bottle by bottle until in 1796 he finally secured the high-profile endorsements he needed to win over London's high society. The first endorsement came from Dr. George Pearson, the head physician at St. George's Hospital. The second came from the prominent physician Erasmus Darwin, who in 1794 had published
Zoonomia,
a two-volume compendium of knowledge about the animal world that set out early ideas about evolution that his grandson Charles would develop further in
The Origin of Species.
Pearson's and Darwin's support turned Schweppe into the leading producer of carbonated water in London, although the joy of this long-awaited breakthrough was tainted by the death that very same year of his wife, whom he hadn't seen since leaving for Britain. In 1798 Schweppe sold the business for the then-considerable sum of £1,200 to three businessmen from Jersey and returned to Geneva with Colette to spend his retirement tending peach trees.

The business that bore Schweppe's name would go from strength to strength, rapidly outflanking Henry's business to emerge as Britain's
leading maker of mineral water. Schweppe's former colleague Paul also struggled to challenge the company's position. In 1799 Paul left Geneva for Paris, where he impressed the French Faculty of Physicians with carbonated water so fizzy that the noise of its uncorking was compared to the sound of a pistol being fired. After mild success in Paris, Paul moved to London in 1802, by which time Schweppes was beginning to export its waters throughout the British Empire. By 1806 Paul gave up on London and returned to Geneva. He died that same year at the age of forty-three.

By the time Schweppe died in November 1821, British high society had made Schweppes its mineral water supplier of choice. Schweppes waters were a common sight in the gentlemen's clubs of Pall Mall, the finest hotels, and the most exclusive restaurants. Almost every West End theater stocked Schweppes and Schweppes alone. Schweppes had even become the choice of royalty, with King William IV appointing the company as the royal household's mineral water supplier in 1831.

Schweppes wasn't the only imitation mineral water business that had caught the eye of the British king, for he had also endorsed the Royal German Spa in the seaside resort of Brighton. Opened in 1825, the spa was the brainchild of Frederick Struve, a chemist from Saxony who realized that spas no longer needed to be located at natural springs now that mineral waters could be fabricated. In 1818 he opened his first artificial spa in Dresden, which offered the city's rich a choice of waters as well as a place to relax and socialize without the inconvenient travel that going to a spa usually involved. It was an instant success, and the king of Saxony rewarded him with an Order of Merit for his innovative spa resort. Struve opened a second in Leipzig and then a third in Berlin before embarking on an expansion that would see his artificial mineral water spas popping up all across Europe, from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Warsaw and Brighton.

Like all his spas, Brighton's Royal German Spa emphasized exclusivity. The front of the building offered a Grecian portico lined with grand classical columns. Inside, an inviting staircase led its aristocratic clientele up to a finely decorated room with Ionic columns and a counter containing faucets from which they could select the mineral water of their choosing. For the rich and fashionable visitors to the English seaside resort, the Royal
German Spa became the place to be seen. In its first season, which ran from May to November 1825, it had 333 subscribers paying a guinea a week to partake of its waters. It became so popular that Schweppes struck a deal to produce and sell Struve's Brighton Seltzer Water. The artificial spa craze boomed in popularity during the 1820s and 1830s, only to lose its allure after Struve's death in 1840, by which time a new, more enduring craze had bubbled up: flavor.

No one knows who first added flavoring to carbonated water or even when, but since mixing still water with fruit juice and other ingredients was already widespread, it was an obvious thing to do to enliven the taste. By 1795 spritzers of sparkling water and wine were popular throughout Europe, and as the 1800s progressed flavored fizz became increasingly commonplace.

Sparkling lemonade was one of the most popular. Still lemonade evolved out of lemon drinks that dated back to ancient times, but the drink reached new heights of popularity in the seventeenth century when street vendors, called
limonadiers,
began wandering the streets of Paris with tanks of honey-sweetened lemonade on their backs that they would dispense to thirsty passersby. While there's no exact date for the emergence of sparkling lemonade, it was already being advertised as “aerated lemonade” to a seemingly unfamiliar audience in March 1807 by Sutcliffe & Co., a pharmacy in the city of York, which advised readers of the
York Herald and County Advertiser:
“To those who are strangers to it, an early trial is recommended.” By the 1830s fizzy lemonade was widespread and being sold alongside mineral waters on the streets of London as well as being bottled by Schweppes. It would remain the United Kingdom's most popular soda until after World War II, when colas gained the upper hand.