Fizz

by Tristan Donovan

  Copyright © 2014 by Tristan Donovan

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61374-722-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Donovan, Tristan.

  Fizz : how soda shook up the world / Tristan Donovan.

  pages cm

  Summary: “This social, cultural, and culinary history charts soda’s remarkable, world-changing journey from awe-inspiring natural mystery to ubiquity. Off-the-wall and off beat stories abound, including how quack medicine peddlers spawned some of the world’s biggest brands, how fizzy pop cashed in on Prohibition, how soda helped presidents reach the White House, and even how Pepsi influenced Apple’s marketing of the iPod. This history of carbonated drinks follows a seemingly simple everyday refreshment as it zinged and pinged over society’s taste buds and, in doing so, changed the world”— Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61374-722-3 (pbk.)

  1. Soft drinks—History. 2. Carbonated beverages—History. I. Title.

  TP630.D66 2013

  663’.62—dc23

  2013023222

  Cover design: Rebecca Lown

  Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  To JAY

  Contents

  Introduction: To the Stars

  1 The Beverage of Kings

  2 Meet Me at the Soda Fountain

  3 The Medicine Men

  4 A Snail in a Bottle

  5 The Bar Is Dead, Soda Is King!

  6 Was Ist Coca-Cola?

  7 Cola-Colonization

  8 Racists, Eco-Freaks, and Cancer Rats

  9 A Better Mousetrap

  10 Beverage Backlash

  Acknowledgments

  References

  Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  To the Stars

  It was 1984, the height of the Cola War. Pepsi was riding high on the back of the Pepsi Challenge and an endorsement from Michael Jackson, the world’s biggest star. After more than 60 years of trying to beat Coca-Cola, victory was in sight. But the Atlanta soda giant still had a trick up its sleeve to use against its fast-growing Yankee rival: it would take soda into outer space.

  Coca-Cola announced to the world that NASA would take its world-famous cola into orbit when the Challenger space shuttle blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in July 1985. “As more people explore outer space, it was our judgment that it would be a darn shame if people on these long voyages wouldn’t have the opportunity to have a moment of refreshment with Coca-Cola,” Coke president Don Keough informed USA Today. After all, he could have added, when you’ve conquered the world, the only direction is up.

  Coca-Cola spent a fortune on its space mission, assigning a team of its finest engineers to build a unique soda can capable of dispensing its fizzy nectar to astronauts as they floated in zero gravity. It had taken months to develop and been tested to destruction on high-altitude flights aboard NASA’s “Vomit Comet,” the Boeing KC-135 that the space agency would fly on a parabolic flight path so astronauts could train in a near weightless environment.

  The tough steel can featured an adhesive fastener strip so that it could be attached to the spacecraft walls to stop it from floating around. It had a special paint that would not melt in intense heat or flake in extreme cold (in which case it could float off and damage the shuttle’s circuits). There was a safety lock to stop the liquid from escaping and a spout, activated by a plunger, from which Coca-Cola could be squirted down the throats of space travelers.

  At the offices of Pepsi in Purchase, New York, the news that its archrival was to be first into space came as a shock. Bob McGarrah, the equipment development manager at Pepsi when Coca-Cola made its announcement, remembers the reaction: “What! Coke’s going to space and we’re not?” There might not have been moon bases or Martians out there to buy their fizzy drinks but this was the Cola War and the contest to be crowned soda king was on a knife edge. Pepsi couldn’t let Coca-Cola be the first into space. No way. If Coke was going where no soda had gone before, Pepsi was coming too.

  Roger Enrico, the president of Pepsi-Cola, ordered his staff to gatecrash Coke’s orbital party. Pepsi got in touch with NASA and pointed out to the agency that “PepsiCo is strongly identified with the Republican Party and the support of President Reagan and his administration.” In short, put us on that shuttle or expect trouble in Washington. What could NASA say except “OK”?

  Having gotten their ticket on the same shuttle flight as Coca-Cola, Pepsi now needed a space can of its own that could pass NASA’s rigorous tests. Pepsi assembled its best engineers and told them to make a space can. Fast. One of those on the team was McGarrah: “In something like 14 weeks, a really compressed period of time, we had to come up with a package that could go up in a spaceship. Everything that’s going to go onto that spaceship has to be tested for things like flammability, ability to withstand a vacuum, and on and on and on. You have to create the product and go through this elaborate testing process out in New Mexico to get approval.”

  Working out of Pepsi’s research facility in Valhalla, New York, and with support from spray technology specialists Enviro-Spray, the team raced against the clock to build the kind of space-worthy can that Coca-Cola had spent months developing. “One of the team, Scott Gillesby, was the main courier to the testing facility and he would fly back and forth to the testing grounds in New Mexico,” McGarrah recalls. “He was literally in the air more than he was on the ground; flying out to the test site and back. He had to keep coming back and forth because a lot of the time the can failed.”

  After several weeks of ferrying prototypes back and forth, Pepsi had their can. Essentially a repurposed aerosol canister, Pepsi’s steel space can contained small plastic pouches that would mix citric acid and sodium bicarbonate when the spray nozzle was pressed down. The acid and baking soda would react to produce carbon dioxide gas that would cause the pouches to expand, increasing the pressure inside the can and forcing the cola out through the nozzle. On July 8, 1985, with just four days to go before takeoff, NASA gave Pepsi permission to fly. Coke’s hopes of being the first soda in space were over. As takeoff approached, the seven astronauts found themselves besieged with questions from journalists wanting the scoop on the Cola Space War. “We’re not up there to run a taste test between the two,” exasperated astronaut Colonel Gordon Fullerton told reporters.

  The orbital Pepsi Challenge didn’t take off quite as planned. At T minus 3 seconds the shuttle launch was canceled and delayed until July 29 when, finally, the world’s favorite sodas made the journey into space. Back on Earth, Pepsi marked the day with newspaper ads declaring the venture “one giant sip for mankind.” Once in space the astronauts tested out the cans, blowing wobbly spherical globules of zero-gravity cola around the ship before gulping them down. And when they returned to Earth the assembled press couldn’t wait to find out who had won the outer space taste test. Neither, replied the astronauts. The shuttle didn’t have a refrigerator, the crew explained, and warm soda just doesn’t cut it.

  Even worse were the zero-gravity burps from drinking carbonated drinks in space. “On Earth, that’s not such a big deal, but in microgravity it’s just gross,” Vickie Kloeris, the food systems manager at NASA, reported on the space agency’s website in 2001. “Because there is no gravity, the contents of your stomach float and tend to stay at the top of your stomach, under the rib cage and close to the valve at the top of your stomach. Because this valve isn’t a complete closure
(just a muscle that works with gravity), if you burp, it becomes a wet burp from the contents in your stomach.” Not that Pepsi cared. “Was Coke’s can better? Probably,” says McGarrah. “But Coke was there and we were there too.”

  That either of them were there was more surprising. After all Coca-Cola and Pepsi were little more than fizzy flavored water at heart. Yet here they were traveling to space and back at the cost of millions for a publicity stunt that captivated a nation, saw the world’s leading space agency told it would have to deal with the Oval Office if it didn’t put Pepsi on the flight, and ended with astronauts complaining that their space cola wasn’t cold enough. That soda had become this important was somehow even more miraculous than the ability to send people into space.

  But humanity has always been strangely mesmerized by fizzing water. For people living in ancient times, naturally carbonated spring waters with their strange, unexplained bubbles must have seemed magical. What were they? Many civilizations concluded that these waters had healing powers or could give people strength. Others speculated that these springs were home to dangerous supernatural beings. These beliefs endured for centuries.

  Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician often regarded as the father of modern medicine, promoted the idea that mineral waters could cure disease in 400 BC. As the Romans expanded their empire across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, they sought out natural springs in the lands they conquered, convinced that these special waters could rid them of gallstones and infections. In 216 BC, when the great Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees on his way to fight in Italy, he reportedly paused his forty-six thousand troops and thirty-seven war elephants at the fizzing waters of Les Bouillens near Vergèze, France, before marching on to victory against the Romans. Today the spring where Hannibal’s army rested provides the world with Perrier bottled water.

  The obsession continued into the Dark Ages. In pre-Christian Scotland brides and grooms would marry while standing deep in the bubbling waters of the Marriage Well, near the banks of the River Clyde, in the belief that its effervescent waters would bless their union. At the same time, more than two thousand miles to the east, the people of Borjomi in the Caucasus nation of Georgia built stone bathtubs so that they could bathe in the area’s carbonated spring water.

  But even as people gathered around these waters, the mystery of why the water bubbled remained. So people began trying to figure out what created them, hoping that if they could understand that, they could recreate the phenomenon. The search for the secret of effervescence would last for centuries. In 1340 the Italian physician Giacomo de Dondi studied the hot springs of Abano Terme, hoping to uncover what gave its waters their curative power. After evaporating the water and examining the residue left behind by sight, smell, and taste, de Dondi concluded that the residue was some kind of mineral salt, a finding he believed proved that this spring’s water was indeed of medicinal value.

  More than two hundred years later, in 1535, the Swiss-German physician Theophrastus Paracelsus began to study the waters of Bad Pfäffer, Switzerland. Paracelsus believed that an imbalance of minerals in the body caused illness, and he tried to re-create the Swiss spring’s mineral-rich waters without success. His theories did lead him to pioneer the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine. His belief that astrological talismans could cure disease proved less successful. But the 1600s finally saw some breakthroughs.

  In the first half of the century the Flemish scientist Jan Baptist van Helmont identified a number of different gases through a series of experiments with mineral water, fermenting wine, and charcoal. One of these gases he named spiritus sylvestris, known today as carbon dioxide—the gas responsible for most of the fizz in naturally effervescent waters. In 1684 the Anglo-Irish scientist Robert Boyle published Short Memoirs for the Natural Experimental History of Mineral Waters. Boyle’s publication drew on his own studies of well waters in and around London and set out—for the first time—a clear method for analyzing the chemical composition of mineral water.

  A year later, Friedrich Hoffmann, a professor of medicine at the University of Halle in Germany, published his own study of mineral waters in which he attacked the wilder beliefs people held about bubbling water while setting out an improved method for analyzing its content and potential health benefits. Physicians and naturalists, Hoffmann wrote, “have generally remained grossly ignorant” in their studies. “We must here note and reject that common imaginary notion, as to the existence of gold, silver, lead, tin, antimony, etc. in these waters.” Hoffmann also had little time for physicians who subscribed to the ancient but largely untested belief in the healing powers of mineral water. “No less preposterous has been their manner of prescribing such waters,” wrote the German doctor, before dismissing such physicians as quacks.

  Instead, he argued, physicians needed to pay attention to the minerals present in effervescent waters, because that was the source of their medicinal power. Based on his assessment of the composition of different waters, he identified several distinct types such as iron-containing “steel waters” and the “bitter purging waters” with their neutral salts. Steel waters, he claimed, would strengthen limbs and heal ulcers if people bathed in them, while the bitter purging waters of Sedlitz in Bohemia should be drunk as remedies for “intermitting fevers.” Hoffmann also suggested that these waters could be made artificially by putting plain water, acid, and alkali in a bottle and shaking it vigorously. But when he tried to put this theory into practice, Hoffmann was unable to replicate the waters as he hoped.

  In the following century, however, Europe’s leading scientists would finally decode the secrets of the effervescent springs in a rush of breakthroughs. The gases of the air were identified, as were processes for producing “fixed air,” as carbon dioxide was now being called, by applying acid to chalk. In 1741 William Brownrigg, the English physician who identified platinum as an element, confirmed that the gas found within the acclaimed waters of Pyrmont in Germany was fixed air. In 1750 the Frenchman Gabriel Venel demonstrated a way of duplicating the waters of Selters, Germany, before the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. Venel succeeded in creating his bubbly “aerated water,” but his process also left an unpleasant residue of salts in the liquid. It was a step nearer but still far from the real thing. By 1766 Henry Cavendish, the English scientist who discovered hydrogen, had established a method for producing fixed air and testing its solubility in water.

  These various strands of research into salts, gases, and the generation of carbon dioxide eventually came together when Joseph Priestley began his own experiments with mineral water. Born in the West Yorkshire village of Birstall on March 13, 1733, Priestley was a remarkable child. At the age of four he could recite all of the 107 theological questions and answers that formed the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and at school he proved himself a capable student of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, algebra, math, physics, and philosophy. When a serious life-threatening illness left him with a stutter, he began to question his Calvinist upbringing. After further theological study, he became a Presbyterian minister. But while religion was central to his life, Priestley—like many scientists of the age—was a polymath who effortlessly moved between studying history, higher mathematics, physics, and foreign languages.

  Science was a particular fascination for the devout Presbyterian. He believed that science was a force for good that could improve the quality of all human life, a belief that fit perfectly with his religious convictions. One of the first scientific subjects he studied was electricity. He hoped electricity could purify fixed air produced by the burning of charcoal. It turned out it couldn’t. But his experiments led him to suggest that, just like gravity, as the distance between two electrically charged objects increased, the forces of attraction and repulsion between them decreased by the square of that distance. Priestley’s theory was later proved by the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb and became known as Coulomb’s law, a crucial step in the development of the science of
electromagnetism.

  After his electrical experiments, Priestley turned his attention to mineral water and how it could be made. Like many, Priestley believed that mineral water could heal numerous ailments, and doubtless he thought that perfecting a method for producing it artificially would greatly benefit the health of all humanity. As it happened, Priestley’s home in the English city of Leeds was next to a large brewery, and the smell of the fermenting grain in its vats attracted his attention. In the summer of 1767, aware that the gas produced by fermentation was fixed air, he began a series of experiments with the aim of capturing the gas emerging from the vats within plain water. Eventually he succeeded by pouring water back and forth between containers that were held above the vats of fermenting beer until the water became carbonated. The fizzy drink had been born.

  In 1772, having refined the process, Priestley presented his findings to the Royal Society of London and published a paper called “Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air” that explained how to create carbonated water. Priestley’s method required a narrow-necked glass vessel to be filled with distilled or filtered water before being placed upside down in a basin that contained enough water to cover its neck. A leather pipe attached to a pig’s bladder would then be inserted into the neck of the upside-down container. Next, a small amount of sulfuric acid would be poured into a phial two-thirds full of chalk that had been covered with water. As the acid reacted with the chalk to produce carbon dioxide gas, the other end of the bladder, which contained a cork through which a quill had been inserted to create a narrow pipe, would be plugged into the neck of the phial.

  Briskly shaking the phial would encourage the production of carbon dioxide, which would fill up the bladder. The gas could then be pumped into the upturned glass vessel through the leather pipe. Once enough carbon dioxide had been pumped in to push most of the water out into the basin, the gas-filled container would be vigorously shaken for fifteen minutes so that the water and gas would mix and produce fizzy water.