soft drinks | Page 5

the means of articially carbonating water by dissolution of
CO
2under pressure is attributed to Dr Joseph Priestley in the late 1760s, though
there were many other workers active in this eld at the same time who probably
deserve equal credit. He published his work,Directions for Impregnating Water with

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2CARBONATED SOFT DRINKS
Fixed Airin 1772 and Dr John Mervin Nooth developed an apparatus for preparation
of effervescent waters, which he reported in thePhilosophical Transactions of
the Royal Societyin 1775. Torbern Bergman, Professor of Chemistry at Uppsala
University in Sweden, published his work on preparation of articial mineral waters
in 1773. His treatise on Bitter, Seltzer, Spa and Pyrmont Waters has been termed
the world’s rst textbook on the manufacture of mineral waters. In 1780, Duchanoy
in France published a treatise on the art of imitating naturally occurring mineral
waters. The initial commercial development, deriving from all this scientic work,
was that of selling imitation mineral waters, that is, waters to which were added
minerals in the proportions found in naturally occurring mineral waters and then
articially carbonated. Hence the term in English of ‘aerated mineral waters’, which
became synonymous with all carbonated drinks. The commercial development of
carbonated waters took off very rapidly following the initial scientic and technical
discovery.
Thomas Henry, a Manchester apothecary, is generally credited to have been the
rst commercial manufacturer of articially carbonated water in the late 1770s. He
improved and developed Nooth’s design to make an apparatus capable of carbon-
ating batches of up to 12 gal (54 l). The product was sold in tightly corked glass
bottles. Henry recommended consumption of lemon juice and soda water for the
stomach but did not state whether the two were combined. By the late 1770s he was
also selling articially manufactured Pyrmont and Seltzer waters, that is, imitations
of the naturally occurring spa waters. Thomas’s son, Dr William Henry, was the
inventor of Henry’s Law of Gases (1805). The storage of fresh water on board ships
during long sea voyages, which could last many months, was a serious problem and
the antiseptic effect of carbonation and hence its long ‘shelf-life’, made an imme-
diate impact upon the British Admiralty. It was also claimed (wrongly) that soda
water cured scurvy and one of the rst uses of carbonated water was on board a ship.
Bottles of soda water have been salvaged from the wreck of the ‘Royal George’
which sank in 1782. Early effervescent drinks, similar to Bewley’s Mephitic Julep,
were manufactured by mixing sodium bicarbonate solution with lemon juice or
lime juice, which would of course cure scurvy. This was probably the cause of the
misconception that CO
2was a cure for scurvy.
The manufacture of carbonated drinks also rapidly became popular across
Europe. Paul, Schweppe & Gosse established a successful business in Geneva,
before Jacob Schweppe moved to London in 1792 to set up a factory-scale oper-
ation there. The production of mineral waters was well established by 1800, and
J. Schweppe & Co opened another factory in Bristol in 1803. His former part-
ner, Nicholas Paul also moved to London in 1802 and set up in competition with
Schweppe. Paul is credited with the rst commercial use of a high pressure gas
pump to aid dissolution and achieve high levels of carbonation, his mineral waters
were famous for containing several volumes of CO
2.
Carbonated waters were imported into the USA from the UK prior to 1800. The
rst commercial production is attributed to Benjamin Silliman, who was professor
of chemistry at Yale College. He had seen carbonated waters on his travels to
England and had met Joseph Priestley, who had emigrated to the USA. In partnership

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INTRODUCTION3
with a Mr Twining, he began selling carbonated waters in 1807 in Newhaven. Joseph
Hawkins established an enterprise in Philadelphia the same year and operations
rapidly sprang up in other cities in the north-east, for example, New York, Baltimore
and Boston.
An excellent account of the development of the soft drinks industry in the USA
was written by John J. Riley.
1.2 The growth of carbonates – production
The carbonated soft drinks industry continued to grow steadily as the nineteenth
century progressed. By 1840, there were at least 50 manufacturers in London. At
the Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851, J. Schweppe & Co paid £5000 for the
concession to sell ‘soda and other mineral waters’. They sold in excess of 1 million
bottles during the course of the exhibition. Throughout the nineteenth century the
popularity of carbonated soft drinks increased steadily and the number of avours
expanded likewise, driven by the popularity of the temperance movement. This
growth of carbonates coincided with the industrial revolution through the nineteenth
century. Production of soft drinks became more industrialised and a process of
continuous improvement soon developed. TheMineral Water Maker’s Manual for
1885lists over 80 patents, which were registered in the previous year, related to
the manufacture and packaging of bottled soft drinks. It also lists approximately
300 trademarks which had been approved between the passing of the Trade Marks
Act in 1875 and 1881, including that for the Buxton Mineral Water Co., Faireld
Works, Buxton, in 1876.
Continuous