The import ban was the latest salvo in a period of worsening relations between Britain and its former colony. At the core of the dispute was the British Royal Navy’s practice of press-ganging sailors into naval service. Despite Britain’s defeat in the Revolutionary War, the Royal Navy took the view that anyone born British could be forced into naval servitude and that included all those born in the United States before independence. So with little regard for its former colony’s status as an independent nation, the British dragged thousands of American men from the decks of US ships and the streets of US ports to serve in the Royal Navy. Unsurprisingly, these actions infuriated the American people, but the nation’s navy was no match for the British war machine, and the peace treaty between the two nations had left the issue of press-ganging unresolved. Thomas Jefferson was also wary of raising the matter, preferring to stay on friendly terms with the British while he tried to gain control of Florida.
The tension over press-ganging finally exploded in 1805 as Britain’s fight with Napoleon’s France intensified. Keen to contain the French emperor’s ambitions, the British declared that any neutral nation that traded with its enemies could not trade with any part of its empire. But as Britain tried to use trade to punish countries that supplied the French, America was secretly helping nations to circumvent the British policy. European nations shut out by the British policy were allowed to dock at US ports and pick up duty certificates so they could pass off their cargo as originating in America even though it was never unloaded. The British were furious when they discovered America’s deceit, and they retaliated by blockading New York harbor and stepping up the press-ganging of American sailors. Unable to respond militarily, America hit back by banning the import of a wide range of British goods. Eventually this dispute led to the War of 1812, but for Silliman the import ban was a show stopper, cutting off his supply of British bottles.
With his dream of replicating London’s water businesses shattered, Silliman gave up on bottles and moved his equipment into the apothecary’s store, where he started selling fizzy water by the glass. It was a decision forced by circumstance, but Silliman’s new approach would have a profound impact on American life, for in that moment in 1806 Silliman created the first soda fountain. It was the fork in the road where America’s approach to carbonated water found its own direction, one distinct from the bedside gasogenes of France and the bottled waters of Britain. This direction took carbonated water into an environment closer in spirit to the bar or the coffeehouse, and it turned soda drinking into a social, public activity open to people of all classes.
Selling water by the glass proved popular enough for Silliman to start thinking big. He moved out of the apothecary’s premises and opened a dedicated store for his healthful waters in New Haven. The store struggled to turn a profit, but Silliman’s belief in his business was convincing enough for three of his friends—Yale math professor Jeremiah Day, attorney Stephen Twinning, and New York apothecary Noyes Darling—to become partners in the venture. As they strived to get the New Haven store into the black, they got wind of a rumor that a similar enterprise had been founded in Philadelphia and the owner was now planning to expand into New York City. Eager to forestall this unknown competitor, the four agreed to open a store in New York as fast as possible.
In spring 1809 they opened their first soda water fountain in New York within the Tontine Coffee House, a popular spot on the corner of Wall and Walter that shared its building with the New York Stock Exchange. Darling set up three sets of carbonation equipment in the cellar, one for each type of water they would dispense—soda, Seltzer and Ballston. Soda was a plain water carbonated using bicarbonate of soda while the other two were replicas of famous natural springs. Although it would later become, like soda water, a generic term for carbonated water, their Seltzer was based on the waters of the Selters springs in Germany, which contained sodium, calcium, and magnesium salts. The Ballston water was, of course, an imitation of the waters that had captured Silliman’s own imagination and contained sodium, calcium, magnesium, iodine, and iron salts as well as silica.
Each carbonator was connected to the bar above with tin pipes. At the bar level Darling hid the unattractive pipes within mahogany pillars placed a foot apart, each with a silver stopcock from which the fountain’s operator would draw the pressurized water from below. The final touch was gilt urns placed on top of each pillar that displayed the name of the type of water the pillars would dispense.
While setting up the Tontine fountain, Darling discovered that the rumors of the competitor from Philadelphia were true. The challenger was Joseph Hawkins, a former secretary to the American ambassador to France, who had started his fountain business in 1807 on Chestnut Street, a short stroll from the polluted well that once got Benjamin Rush so excited. Hawkins sold his water for six cents a glass and won glowing endorsements from local physicians including Rush and the pioneering surgeon John Syng Dorsey. Flush with the success of his Chestnut Street business, Hawkins was now preparing to make his move on New York City. But Hawkins wasn’t the only threat to Silliman and his friends, as an Irishman named George Usher had also opened a soda fountain on Broadway.
As the summer of 1809 approached, the scene was set for a clash of the soda fountain pioneers, and it didn’t take long before the cash-strapped Silliman and his partners found themselves on the back foot. The Tontine Coffee House might have been a prime location but sales were disappointing. Within a few weeks its owner had resorted to sticking labels on wine bottles that encouraged customers to mix it with soda water to drum up business. Silliman’s rivals also had distinct advantages. Hawkins’s custom-made carbonation apparatus was far more precise and reliable than Silliman’s cranky and outmoded equipment and, much to Silliman’s annoyance, both he and Usher had access to a reliable supply of bottles capable of withstanding the pressure of their sparkling waters.
Usher in particular proved to be a formidable and forward-thinking rival. There appear to be no first-hand records of Usher’s motivations and approach, but Silliman and his colleagues’ correspondence highlights how the Irishman’s approach captured the imagination of New Yorkers. While Silliman emphasized the health benefits and science behind his replica mineral waters, Usher made his fountain a stylish venue for the city’s fashion-conscious residents. He provided free newspapers and novels for his clientele to read while they sipped his waters so they could “combine amusement with utility in this novel and salutary establishment.” The Irishman also allowed men and women to mingle at his fountain and opened on Sundays. As the competition between the two businesses intensified, Silliman relented on his opposition to serving women, but he stubbornly drew the line at doing business on the Sabbath.
Usher’s innovative streak didn’t end there, either. He made a point of making his waters extra bubbly and ice-cold. The latter was an especially daring move for the time. A great many people believed that drinking cold drinks was dangerous, possibly fatal. Doctors warned patients to avoid cold drinks, and those who dared to sip icy water often poured some on their wrists before drinking in the hope that it would prevent them from dying of the shock of imbibing the chilled beverage. But with the oppressive summer heat bearing down and the healthy image of carbonated water, Usher’s chilled drinks overcame people’s fears of death by cold soda. The growing appeal of cold soda water presented another challenge for the cash-poor Silliman. Ice was an expensive commodity in the days before refrigeration. Supplies were limited by how much ice could be gathered in the winter and stored at a low enough temperature to remain solid. To get around the expense of buying ice, Silliman tried chilling his water by having the fountain operator pour the liquid over ice, only to find that New York’s ice came from stagnant ponds and that no New Yorker would want to drink a beverage that had come into contact with such ice.
As summer turned to fall, Silliman’s venture was struggling. Even the opening of a second fountain in the City Hotel had failed to turn things around. Despite his busin
ess struggles, Silliman finally married on September 17, 1809, and the newlyweds headed for Newport, Rhode Island, to enjoy their honeymoon. But while he honeymooned, trouble was brewing back in New York. A visiting sailor had died unexpectedly after drinking at a soda fountain, and his death was quickly attributed to chilled water. Panicked by the news, New Yorkers stopped going to the soda fountains, wiping out the trade overnight. Something had to be done and fast.
With Silliman away, Darling was left in charge. He froze, unsure of how to remedy this sudden turn of events. In contrast Usher, ever the canny businessman, wasted no time. He made a public point of throwing out the wooden casks he had been using to store his water, and he replaced them with brand new copper ones. The copper casks came with a host of benefits. The metal made it easier for him to cool his water, and the airtight design helped retain the bubbles. The copper also looked more attractive to the public, and since doctors had declared that copper was an excellent tonic, it reassured people that Usher’s water was safe to drink. Customers defected from Silliman’s establishments and joined the queues at Usher’s fountain.
Silliman returned from his honeymoon in October 1809 to find his business was finished. Darling bore the brunt of Silliman’s failed soda dream, having racked up debts of $40,000, a sum equivalent to more than $740,000 in today’s dollars. Faced with this debt mountain, Darling vanished, leaving behind a letter implying he had committed suicide. He later resurfaced in Pittsburgh before vanishing again as he sought to evade his creditors. Meanwhile Silliman sold his equipment and the City Hotel operation to his rival Joseph Hawkins. Silliman, with his science and health-focused appeals to the public, had misjudged the desires of his customers. They might have wanted the curative fizz but they were just as, if not more, keen on having somewhere to go that was fun and inviting.
Silliman and his friends might have walked away bruised, but the soda fountain concept that they pioneered thrived. The business model established by Usher, Hawkins, and Silliman during that competitive New York summer spread like wildfire as entrepreneurs latched onto the idea of profiting from soda water. In the decade that followed, fountains sprouted in cities and towns across the Eastern Seaboard before moving, step by step, ever westward toward the frontier. As the soda fountains spread they weaved themselves into everyday life, unseating tradition as they converted people to the refreshing appeal of ice-cold drinks. The curative carbonated waters that were once only available to the richest citizens were now everyday commodities, available in plentiful supply on Main Street. As Adlard Welby, an English visitor to Philadelphia in 1819, reported in a book about his travels to America: “During the hot season, mineral waters (chiefly soda), sometimes mixed with syrups, are drank in great abundance. The first thing every American who can afford five cents … takes on rising in the morning, is a glass of soda water: many houses are open for the sale of it, and some of them are fitted up with Parisian elegance.”
Welby’s words not only provided a snapshot of how rapidly the soda fountain entrenched itself in American life within its first decade but also pointed to how this new retail experience was evolving with ever more eye-catching interior decoration. The move toward more elaborate fountains was underway even as the 1809 contest of the pioneers drew to a close. After taking over Silliman’s City Hotel fountain, Hawkins gave it an overhaul. He ditched the plain gooseneck spigots and installed a marble fountain where consumers could choose between three fizzy waters that would gush from the mouths of sculptured eagles. This fantastical fountain design was just the beginning. As the 1800s progressed a decorative arms race that would last a century broke out between competing fountains as they vied for customers by reaching for ever greater heights of bling and downright bad taste. From exotic polished marble and silver spigots to sculptures of near-nude nymphs, coats of arms, Greek gods, and wild animals, the displays of the soda fountain became ever more elaborate as the manufacturers that formed to service the fountains jostled to produce the most talked-about designs.
One leading light of fountain manufacturing was the Englishman John Matthews, who immigrated to America in 1832. Matthews learned how to build fountain equipment back in Britain while working as a teenage apprentice for Joseph Braham, the inventor of the hydraulic press. On arriving in New York he opened a soda fountain on Gold Street and assembled a fountain of his own design that produced carbon dioxide by applying sulfuric acid to marble—a process that had replaced the use of bicarbonate of soda. (Even so, people kept calling the resulting beverage “soda.”) Unlike many fountain owners, however, Matthews had big ambitions. After getting his own fountain up and running, he started buying his competitors. He swallowed Usher’s old business, snapped up businesses with valuable patents for soda fountain equipment, and began designing, manufacturing, and building fountains to sell to others. Matthews became one of the kingpins of the soda business, and like his competitors, his company began producing ever more exotic fountain apparatus. Among them was the $2,976 Frost King. The Frost King knew nothing of subtlety. Aimed at upmarket stores in large cities, it boasted glass nozzles, bronze fittings, gas illumination, sixty jewel stones embedded in its frame, and carvings of medieval fantasies in its polished marble exterior.
Matthews’s rivals also pulled out all the stops. The equally successful James Tufts of Medford, Massachusetts, was just as prone to grandiose designs. He moved beyond the white Italian marble used in the early fountains and introduced marble of attractive red, velvet black, chocolate laced with white frosting, and—most expensive of all—the majestic swirls of Mexican onyx. But his most excessive creation came in 1876 when he unveiled the ultimate in soda fountain excess at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia: the Arctic Soda Water Apparatus. This monster fountain stood thirty-three feet high, weighed thirty tons, and measured twelve feet in diameter. It could dispense twenty-eight types of water and store seventy-six different flavoring syrups and was capped off with hanging ferns, a chandelier, and a device for spraying perfume into the air. This lavish beast ended up at Coney Island after the exposition. In 1886 it was moved to the premises of the Famous Clothing Company, a department store in St. Louis. Shoppers came from miles around to get a glimpse of Tufts’s most outrageous creation. Its fame, however, was short-lived. In November 1891 a fire tore through the department store, destroying both the Famous Clothing Company and its spectacular soda fountain.
Other developments in fountain design were more practical. Gustavus Dows of Lowell, Massachusetts, launched his fountain-making enterprise in the late 1850s after becoming fed up with the tiring and hand-numbing task of shaving ice for the drinks served at his older brother’s soda fountain. He built a fountain that housed a crank-operated ice shaver as well as tanks for storing flavoring syrups. He named his creation the Ice Cream Soda Apparatus and sold it to fountains throughout the United States for $225 each. Despite its name, Dows’s fountain had nothing to do with ice cream soda as we know it today. The reference was a nod to the pre-Civil War practice of mixing sweet cream into soda water.
The modern-day ice cream soda, or float, came a few years later. There are numerous stories about the origin of ice cream soda, but the most convincing claim is that of Robert McCay Green, a small-time fountain manufacturer who introduced it during an 1874 exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Worried that the lavish creations of bigger rivals such as Dows and Matthews would overshadow his more modest fountain designs, he started looking for a way to stand out from the crowd. Green thought about how people would often drink a soda while eating ice cream, and he decided to combine the two by serving sodas with a dollop of ice cream dunked into the fizz. When the exhibition opened he handed out flyers with a call to action: “Something new! Green’s Ice Cream Soda, try it and tell your friends.”
The first day was a disaster. Green sold just eight dollars of ice cream soda. Undaunted, Green returned the next day with a new ploy. He went around the exhibition offering teenagers a free ice cream soda if they came to
his fountain at a set time. When the time came a throng of young men and women gathered around his fountain. The youthful crowd caught the interest of others, and then the teens to whom he gave the free ice cream sodas began telling others of this unusual but tasty fusion of food and drink. By the end of the exhibition Green was raking in $200 a day. After the exhibition, news of this new recipe spread far and wide. People began asking their local soda fountains to make it for them. Fountain owners, by and large, weren’t too pleased about this. It took longer to make than a standard soda drink, and even worse, it took longer for people to consume it. This meant that customers hogged precious seating space for even longer—especially important at a time when ordering a drink and taking it away to gulp down on the streets was socially unacceptable. As irritating as the ice cream soda was for store owners, it was too popular with the public to ignore, so the reluctant fountain owners served it. Green’s creation would also provide the inspiration for the sundae, which—the story goes—was invented in Evanston, Illinois, during 1890 after the pious town council banned the serving of ice cream soda on Sundays. Unwilling to be bossed around by these city fathers, one druggist got around the rules by serving ice cream covered in soda syrup that he only served on Sundays. Word of his Sunday treat spread to Chicago before being adopted by fountains throughout the nation.
While the fountains thrived, bottled soda struggled to make similar inroads. Although the War of 1812 derailed Silliman’s ambitions, it ultimately helped America’s glass industry by prompting the imposition of import tariffs on foreign goods in 1824. This tax amounted to just over a penny a bottle, but that was enough to eliminate Europe’s price advantage and make the business of glass making a more profitable venture. And as America’s glass industry gathered momentum, bottled soda became a more common sight.
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