August 16, 2023 • 37 mins
The desire to replicate natural effervescence led a lot of people to try to figure out how to carbonate water. But Jacob Schweppe was able to achieve brand recognition and establish a company that has endured despite early setbacks.
Research:
- Burros, Marian. “Carbonated Water: More Than a Matter of Taste.” New York Times. April 27, 1983. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/27/garden/carbonated-water-more-than-a-matter-of-taste.html
- Donovan, Tristan. “Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World.” Chicago Review Press. 2013.
- Simmons, Douglas A. “Schweppes: The First 200 Years.” Acropolis Books. 1983.
- “Joseph Priestley.” Science History Institute Museum and Library. https://www.chemheritage.org/education/scientific-biographies/joseph-priestley/
- Laskow, Sarah. “The Great Soda-water Shake Up.” The Atlantic. Oct. 1, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-great-soda-water-shake-up/380932/
- McCloughlin, Thomas. “Lost and Found: The Nooth Aparatus.” Volume 45, Issues 1–2. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2021.100763
- McEvoy, John G.. "Joseph Priestley". Encyclopedia Britannica, 9 Mar. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Priestley
- Priestley, Joseph. “Directions for impregnating water with fixed air : in order to communicate to it the peculiar spirit and virtues of Pyrmont water, and other mineral waters of a similar nature.” London : Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72, in St. Paul's Church-Yard. 1772. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/b30364978/page/10/mode/2up
- Schwarcz, Joe, PhD. “The Origins of Soda Water.” McGill Office for Science and Society. May 15, 2018. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/origins-soda-water
- Sharp, Ari. “Schweppes Sold for $1.2 bn.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 26, 2008. https://www.smh.com.au/business/schweppes-sold-for-12bn-20081225-7558.html
- Zuck, D.”Dr. Nooth and His Apparatus.” British Journal of Anaesthesia. 1978. Vol. 50. https://www.bjanaesthesia.org/article/S0007-0912(17)45198-1/pdf
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I live for bubbles.
I know you do. Anyone who has spent more than
(00:21):
twelve minutes with me has seen me with the carbonated
beverage of some kind in my hand YEP, those are
the rules for me. I have been a This is
not an endorsement, but I sure have you know, paid
a lot of their bills. I'm sure I've been a
diet coke drinker literally since I was nine. I know
that's unhealthy and your parents would blanch, but that's just
(00:42):
what happened. But lately I have, at my doctor's suggestion,
trying to ease off of the colas, and I'm drinking
more sparkling water to substitute because I do like bubbles
a whole lot. And that's a work in progress. But
it did start to make me wonder when and how
we started adding bubbles to drinks, because I'm not the
person I know that's addicted to the bubbles. So today
(01:03):
we're going to talk about that, which means it is
largely an episode about Yakam Schweppe and some other dudes,
because everybody wanted to replicate natural effor vescence, particularly in
the eighteenth century, there was a lot of excitement in
the scientific community about whether or not they could do it.
So we also have a note on names, because, as
I mentioned, the guy we're talking about most today is
(01:25):
Yakam Schweppe. There's no S on the end of that name.
The company today that you would recognize is Schwepes with
an S and there's no apostrophe. We'll talk a little
bit about that transition, although it's not super well documented
when it became one versus the other. But just so
you're not confused about why sometimes we might make an
(01:47):
S sound and sometimes not. So first, we're just gonna
level set a little bit about how different kinds of
bubbly water are classified, because they're gonna come up throughout
the episode. I think some folks use some of these
terms almost interchangeably. Oh they do, and I will talk
about that. Yes, these are all considered carbonated waters, but
(02:13):
the manner in which they become carbonated and what other
things you might find in them that defines the actual
different types. So there's sparkling water. This is naturally carbonated water.
It comes from a spring or a well in which
gases are introduced into the water. Sodium, magnesium, and calcium
(02:35):
are usually naturally occurring in this water. The amounts can
really vary depending on the source, which is why different
sparkling waters can taste slightly different from one another. Yes,
even if they are unflavored. But we'll talk about flavors.
So Seltzer starts with uncarbonated water. It gets the carbonation
(02:58):
from the manufacturing par process. It can get flavoring, but
it doesn't have that mineral content that sparkling water does.
Club Soda or soda water is also carbonated in processing,
but also has minerals including sodium added. And then there's
tonic water. I don't know if anybody is using tonic
(03:21):
water to generically mean carbonated water. Tonic water is carbonated
in processing. It has quinine and other ingredients added to it,
including sugar or maybe some other sweetener. I see a
lot of like sugar free tonic water, sugar free tonic water.
I think I've seen like an agave sweetened tonic water. Yeah,
(03:41):
and also as a little caveat here, these terms are modern.
They were not all in play when early beverage carbonation
was being developed. But we wanted to include this because
it helps to understand the variations as we talk through
some of it. In most cases we are going to
use the modern definitions just for clarity. Uh. So that's
why we gave you that little rundown. I have thoughts
(04:02):
you might be having them too. We'll talk about them
on Friday. Sure. So to talk about Sheppa first, we
have to talk about Joseph Priestley and a handful of
other men because their work inspired Sheppa's experiments with gases
and water. So. Joseph Priestley was born in Yorkshire, England
in seventeen thirty three. His family worked in the wool
(04:25):
business making fabric. Joseph became a dissenting minister, meaning that
he did not align with the doctrines of the Church
of England. Priestley is a pretty interesting guy. Maybe a
podcast subject in the future. Yeah, he has a lot
of interesting stuff, both from a religious perspective and a
philosophical perspective and scientific uh, because he was also very
(04:49):
interested in science. He believed in the changing nature of
science that it is forever evolving as we learn new
things and apply that knowledge to our scientific thinking. He
wrote books and papers on science. He was a member
of the Royal Society of London, and starting in the
seventeen sixties, Priestly, like a lot of other science minded
people of his day, worked on experiments involving the chemistry
(05:13):
of gases, and one of his early efforts was adding
carbonation to water. So at the time, sparkling water from
natural sources was already popular and it was seen as healthful.
I didn't trace it back to check, but I did
see some people mentioning that this is really like kind
of the origin of that phrasing of take the waters,
(05:33):
which is like, go to somewhere where there is a
natural spring to drink the bubbly water, because it is
naturally good for you. Priestley was among the many scientists
at the time wondering if they could supply bubbly water
by increasing its availability by artificially adding the bubbles. So
Priestley took a position as a minister in Leeds. When
(05:56):
when did that. He lived next to a brewery and
was scientifically curious about the vapors that the brewery gave off.
He eventually came to the determination that what he called
fixed air, which gave beer its bubbles, was the same
thing that made some spring waters bubbly. So today beer
can be made extra bubbly through forced carbonation, that's the
(06:20):
addition of carbon dioxide to the beer while it's in
a sealed container. But in Priestley's time, the bubbles only
came from the fermentation process naturally carbonated water. So what
we would classify today as sparkling water gets its bubbles
from volcanic gases that dissolve into natural water springs. So
the fixed air concept that Priestley was describing had more
(06:43):
to do with the water being infused with air in
a pressurized situation than like the source of the water. Yeah,
it wasn't like he had said, like this one kind
of air is fixed air, although he did figure out
that carbon dioxide was the way to do it. The
first test that Priestley did was really simple. He left
saucers of water out overnight above areas where the brewery
(07:06):
vapors rose up through the air, and then reported that
he found bubbles. He wrote in his findings quote, I
generally found the next morning that the water had acquired
a very sensible and pleasant impregnation. And it was with
peculiar satisfaction that I first drank this water, which I
believe was the first of its kind that had ever
been tasted by man. And from there he started working
(07:29):
on building a mechanism that could more effectively impregnate water
with bubbles. Priestley published a book on the method he
devised to add carbonation to water in seventeen seventy two.
This was titled Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air
in order to communicate to it the peculiar spirit and
virtues of Piermont Water and other mineral waters of a
(07:52):
similar nature. In the beginning of the direction segment of
the book, he opens with quote, if water be only
in contact with figxed air, it will begin to imbibe it.
But the mixture is greatly accelerated by agitation, which is
continually bringing fresh particles of air and water into contact.
All that is necessary, therefore, to make this process expeditious
(08:14):
and effectual, is first to procure a sufficient quantity of
this fixed air, and then to contrive a method by
which the air and water may be strongly agitated in
the same vessel without any danger of admitting the common
air to them. And this is easily done by first
filling any vessel with water and introducing the fixed air
(08:36):
to it while it stands inverted in another vessel of water.
That every part of the process may be as intelligible
as possible, even to those who have no previous knowledge
of the subject. I shall describe it very minutely, subjoining
several remarks and observations relating to varieties in the process,
and other things of a miscellaneous nature. This book is
(09:00):
a pretty fun read, but it is one of those
things where the spellings are a little different and a
lot of the s's are the f so you really
have to be ready for some gymnastics to autocorrect as
you go, But it is a funread. He gives a
pretty basic run through of the process before delving into
the more finessed aspects of the science. As you'll see
(09:23):
in his method, there is some room for error here.
He describes it this way quote, Take a glass vessel
with a pretty narrow neck, and, having filled it with water,
lay a slip of clean paper or thin pasteboard upon it. Then,
if they be pressed close together, the vessel may be
turned upside down. Without danger of admitting any or however
(09:44):
much common air into it. And when it is thus inverted,
it must be placed in another vessel in the form
of a bowl or basin with a little water in it,
so much as to permit the slip of paper or
pasteboard to be withdrawn and the end of the pipe
c to be introduced, so that pipe c he mentions
is essentially like a flexible tube. It was attached at
(10:04):
the other end to an animal bladder, usually a pig bladder,
and that bladder was connected to a bottle that contained
chalk and a small amount of water. And so to
create his fixed air that would be imbibed as Priestley
put it into the water in the first bottle. His
method required the addition of sulfuric acid to that second bottle,
which was then sealed with a cork and shaken, and
(10:27):
that would fill the bladder with gas CO two, and
then the bladder could be compressed to direct the air
into the first bottle. That would also just place some
of the water it initially contained into the bowl it
was sitting in, and then that bottle needed a good
shake to integrate the gas and water. Toda you've made
carbonated water. One of the earliest commercially available carbonated beverages
(10:50):
came out of this work. Very early in the process.
That was a drink that one of Priestley's friends made
called mister Beuley's Julip or mister Beuley's methetic Julip. Richard
Bully was an apothecary in Great Massingham, Norfolk, and introduced
his carbonated water in seventeen sixty seven or seventeen sixty
eight accounts very a little bit. Building on the work
(11:13):
of Bully, another apothecary, Thomas Henry, introduced his own fizzy
beverage using the same apparatus Priestley had developed. His product
was an imitation mineral water that he touted for its
medicinal qualities. Yet it even had like a dosage that
he recommended. We're going to talk about some criticisms of
Priestley's design after we first pause for a sponsor break.
(11:45):
Even though Priestley's design for imparting carbonation worked, that process
and setup that we described wasn't exactly something you could
do on a large scale. There were quite a few
critics of it because, in addition to being unwieldy and involving,
you know, the flipping of a bottle with a piece
of paper to close it. That animal bladder was really
an issue for people. It gave the water, according to critics,
(12:08):
a faint taste of urine. Nobody wants that. One of
those critics was a doctor from Scotland named John Mervyn Nuth,
and this entire idea of carbonating water had gotten really
really popular, and Nuth, like others, was in contact with
Priestley and also Benjamin Franklin. There are a lot of
I would love for someone to do a chart where
(12:29):
they track out all of the letters passing between various
people in the science community at this time and them
all talking about carbonation. But Nuth wanted to figure out
a way to get rid of that bladder section of
the apparatus and make it a little bit cleaner. In
seventeen seventy four he read a paper to the Royal
Society titled the Description of an Apparatus for Impregnating Water
(12:52):
with fixed Air. And this paper talks through his design
and also Nuth's real motivation, which was studying how the
efforvest water might have medicinal benefit. Nuth's apparatus used all
glass components, which had airtight seals connecting them. There were
three chambers stacked one on top of the other. The
(13:12):
bottom vessel was for the chemicals that would react to
create CO two, the middle vessel was for the water
that was being carbonated, and the top vessel was for
the water that was displaced from that middle vessel during
the process. Both Priestley's design and nuths required the water
to be processed multiple times to achieve full carbonation, but
(13:34):
the Nuth apparatus could be separated into the component pieces
for this agitation step. While Priestley had initially bristled Atnth's criticisms,
he really did acknowledge the improvement his device offered over
the initial design. Additionally, one of Priestley's friends, John Worldtier,
further improved the design by pressurizing it, and Nuth's device
(13:56):
was easy enough to use that people could have one
in their homes. A lot of wealthy people purchased them,
hoping to get the benefit of sparkling water without having
to go on holiday for it, or without having it
brought to them by the bottle. And that breaks us
to Johann Yakub Schweppe, who was born in Witzenhausen, Germany,
in seventeen forty so that community was largely agricultural, but
(14:19):
even as a boy, Yakub was believed by his parents
to be cut out for something very different from farming.
According to the official account of the Schwep's Company, which
is quite a fun book written by Douglas Simmons, in
nineteen eighty three, a traveling tinker offered to take Yakub
under his wing as an apprentice, and Yakub's father, Conrad,
agreed to that idea. But the tinker recognized that Yacum's
(14:41):
natural talents for working with his hands exceeded anything he
was going to be called to do as a handyman,
so he suggested two of the Schweppas that Yakub should
instead be sent to apprentice with a silversmith, But the
silversmith also thought that the work he could give Yakub
would be kind of less than the boy was capable of.
The next recommendation was that he apprentice under a jeweler,
(15:03):
and that finally was a pretty great fit. By seventeen
sixty five, Jakub Sweppa was working as a jeweler and
a watchmaker in Geneva, Switzerland. He married two years later
to Eleonora Roget and became a citizen of Geneva the
year after that. He worked under a jeweler named Jean
Luis Dunat and then formed a firm with Dunaut's son
(15:25):
under the name Dunat and Sheppa. Jacub handled most of
the day to day business and do not provided the capital.
Although he and Eleonora had nine children, only one of
them survived to adulthood. That was their daughter, Nicollard, who
went by Collette. Outlived both of her parents and they
were a very very close family. As an adult, already
(15:47):
well into his horology career, Sheppa started reading the writing
of Joseph Priestley and the other men who had been
working on carbonation, because he considered himself like an amateur scientist,
and it's estimated that Sheppa started him his own experiments
with bubbles at least by seventeen eighty, very possibly earlier
than that. He, like so many others, was trying to
(16:08):
build on previous devices to increase effectiveness, ease, and the
quality of the product they produced, and he got pretty
good at it. Although he seems to have kept the
details of his mechanism pretty secret. There are a lot
of times you'll read about throughout his career where it's like, oh,
when he went to this new place, he built boxes
(16:29):
around all of his devices, so even the people that
worked there didn't know what actually made them work unless
they had to know. Uh. So he was smart enough
to be secretive. But what he did do was share
the carbonated water he created, because he was making far
more of it than his household could consume, and he
already had a perfectly fine job and income. First, he
(16:52):
started offering it to doctors as something they could give
to their poor patients who couldn't afford to buy spring water.
That might not have cured anybody of anything, but at
least people had a way to stay hydrated. As he
continued to refine his method of carbonation, he also started
offering water to Geneva's middle and upper classes. He made
(17:13):
a nice living for himself in his watchmaking business, so
he wasn't charging for this water. He was just given
out free carbonated water all the time. That made people
a little wary. It was just odd to have somebody
giving away this product that was in demand. So soon
he started charging for it, and then he realized he
was doing well enough that he could just change careers.
(17:37):
He established Jay Schweppe and Company and started selling carbonated
water full time by the end of seventeen eighty three.
And this is one of those instances in history where
the seemingly unrelated career knowledge that an inventor possessed, in
his case being a jeweler and watchmaker, proved to be
the key to unlocking a problem that others had been
grappling with a little bit. Because he understood so innately
(18:00):
how things like clockwork machinery functioned, he was able to
apply some of that knowledge to create a carbonation device that,
like Priestley and Nuth, used the reaction of chalk and
sulfuric acid to create carbon dioxide. But Seppe's mechanism, which
got the nickname of the Geneva system, or sometimes you'll
see it called the Geneva apparatus, was automated with a
(18:21):
mechanical pump to move air into the water chamber and
an agitator, so there no longer had to be multiple
rounds of manual agitation of the water and CO two mixture.
So instead of taking your thing apart and standing there
shaking it. The pumps and the agitator would do all
of that for you. This was, of course more efficient,
and it also meant that it was a lot easier
(18:42):
to scale his device up to make much more carbonated water,
much faster, with better results than any previous version. By
the seventeen eighties, Yakub's water enterprise had gotten from just
dabbling in experiments with carbonation to being a substantial company.
He was expanding rapidly and he needed to hand over
(19:03):
some of the operation to someone else to manage. This
did not go well. He selected a friend for the job,
who immediately hired an engineer to replicate the Geneva system,
hoping to start his own competing business. But the engineer
who did so made a copy for himself while making
an inferior device for this unscrupulous manager. When all of
(19:27):
this came to light that everybody was essentially trying to
steal his ideas, uh Sweppa made the perhaps surprising but
ultimately kind of wise decision to salvage the situation by
going into business with that engineer who clearly understood how
the device worked. That was a man named Nicholas Paul.
He also went into business as part of this with
(19:49):
other men. They brought other men into the firm, so
Jacques Paul, who was Nicholas's father. They took on another partner,
a pharmacist named Henry Albert Gossa, and they formed a
company called Scheppa, Paul and Gossa. On occasion, if you're
reading up on this, Nicholas Paul is the one who's
credited with adding the compression pump to the Geneva system,
(20:09):
but that seems incorrect based on the timeline of when
Seppa was expanding before they made this deal. That partnership
began in seventeen ninety. The following year, Seppa moved from
Geneva to England, leaving production of carbonated water to his
partners while he tried to expand the market. This was
precipitated in a part by a man named William Belcom,
(20:33):
who was an English doctor living in Geneva. When Seppa
had taken on partners, it was decided that Belcom would
help with the effort to move into the British market
by using his contacts in the medical profession there to
like drum up interest in the product. The company planned
to send samples to various doctors both in England and Paris,
(20:54):
and Seppa would follow and set up a factory. This
seems to have been a time of some tension, a
power struggle among the partners, and the manner in which
the British plan was laid out in paperwork looks like
Seppa was sort of put out a disadvantage, as in,
if Goss and Paul decided it wasn't working, it was
(21:14):
their call and Fppa would not have his living expenses
in London covered anymore if that kind of decision was made,
And we'll see that that becomes an issue coming up.
We're going to see how things went in London. Spoiler alert,
not great initially. We'll talk about it after we hear
from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history
(21:34):
class going. Sheppa left Geneva at the end of seventeen
ninety one and he arrived in London just after the
New Year's seventeen ninety two and started to get their
new factory up and running at one forty one Dreary Lane.
(21:56):
It was kind of a bad neighborhood at the time.
London already had an established mineral water trade and bubbly
water was popular there. It wasn't as though Yakub Schweppe
was arriving to introduce a new concept. In the first
six months were very rough. Yakub additionally just really missed
his family. He suggested to his partners that summer, so
(22:18):
after he had been there five or six months, that
they should either shutter the London factory entirely or be
prepared to weather another seven or eight months of difficulty
before expecting any kind of success. I think, to his
surprise that's speculation, but it seems like he was a
little surprised. They decided to keep going and arrangements were
(22:39):
made for Sheppa's daughter Collette to travel to England so
that he would not be alone. But in the meantime,
sales in Geneva started to falter, and soon they just
wanted Sheppa to come home and fix it. He did
not go home, though he felt as though they were
backing out on the agreement to give the British plan
until the spring to see if it would work. He
(23:00):
wrote and basically said he'd be happy to sever tie
and run the entire company himself. As all of this
was playing out, France declared war on Britain. And on
February first, seventeen ninety three, in response to Britain expelling
the French ambassador. When King Louis the sixteenth was executed
on January twenty first, this puts Sveppa in an odd
(23:22):
and precarious position because all foreigners who had arrived in
Britain in the preceding year were ordered to leave. Technically,
he had been there a few weeks longer than the
cutoff would have been, but he was still worried. He
wrote a letter to the British government explaining that he
had been working very hard to establish a factory and
(23:42):
that he thought it would ultimately benefit the country for
him to be there, so he stayed. Yeah. He also
had a number of people that he knew write letters
on his behalf that were kind of like, no, no,
he's this is a good thing. During this tenth time,
Sveppa definitely seemed to be operating under the impression that
the company was now his alone and that his partners
(24:05):
had completely backed out. But in Geneva, they still believed
that they were involved, and this caused disagreements, which escalated
to a point where Sweppa hired an attorney friend of
his to just settle the situation cut it all apart,
and it ended up in a scenario where Sweppa let
his partners have the Geneva operation and he stayed in
(24:27):
London operating once again under the name Jay Sweppa and Company.
Now this sounds, given how things had been going, like
a bad decision, but his decision was ultimately the right one.
Paul and Gossa really did not understand the business the
way Sheppa did, and the Geneva factory soon went under
As Paul and Gossa bickered and decided that they would
(24:47):
just go their separate ways. They each kind of made
an effort to get into doing their own bubbling water companies.
That did not work out, and conversely, things started rapidly
picking up in Britain. Collette was still just a teenager
at this point and was helping her father run everything.
Sppa couldn't afford to pay a full staff. He was
(25:10):
a jack of all trades, handling the invoicing and accounts
management as well as the overall management of the operation.
He also trained Collette how to do everything in case
something happened to him. This was a smaller operation than
he had left behind in Geneva, but it was still
a lot. He also decided to move to a different
part of London and relocated everything first to King Street, Holborn,
(25:34):
and then again to eleven Margaret Street, Westminster. Things may
have sputtered out had it not been for the fact
that Erasmus Darwin made a recommendation of using Speppa's Seltzer
water to treat bladderstones in his seventeen ninety six book Zunomia.
Their prominent doctors started recommending it and soon Spepa saw
(25:56):
a significant uptick in business. At this point he also
started running advertisements. So prior to this, doctor Belcom, who
had been their advisor in the British market, had told
them that running ads there without doctor endorsements in Britain
was just going to give him a really bad reputation.
So once he had those endorsements, he started listing out
(26:18):
his offerings in advertisements to readers. Three ascidilist soda waters ascidilists,
Rochelle saltwater, Seltzer water, spawwater, Puremont water. You're wondering what
Piermont water is. It is just named after a spring
called Piermont, which is where a lot of sparkling water
came from. Even though he had endorsements from the leading
physicians of the day, he still had to pay a
(26:40):
patent medicine tax on these products. But also what was
going on that's interesting is in the next few years
the term soda water actually came into existence, so then
he was also selling that. But though Speppa was finally
achieving his goal in the carbonated water business in Britain,
he was getting tired. He had not seen his wife
(27:01):
Eleonora since he left Geneva, and she died in seventeen
ninety six. While they had still not been able to
see one another because of the ongoing conflict in Europe.
As the eighteenth century came to a close, Yakub Schweppe
wanted to spend time with his daughter away from work,
so in May of seventeen ninety eight, he sold the
(27:21):
controlling interest in the company to three businessmen from the
island of Jersey, which is part of the Channel Islands.
Those men were FC. Lauzun, HW. Lauzun and RCG. Brohere.
An eighth of the company was still owned by Yakob,
and an eighth was put in Collette's name. Yakub and
(27:42):
Collette remained in their residence attached to the Margaret Street factory,
and the company was still Schweppe in Company. In this instance,
unlike the situation with the Geneva factory, Sweppa and his
daughter trained the new owners on how to run the
business successfully. They also had a provision in the agreement
that outlined the sale of the company that in seventeen
(28:04):
ninety nine, half the interest that Jacob and Collette still
had would be handed over to another man, Stephen Demul,
and then they would step away from the business entirely
and move back to Geneva. Collette married several years later
in eighteen oh six, to Henri Luis Maunoir, and the
couple lived in Geneva, so they stayed close to Yacub.
(28:24):
Yacub and Collette both went to Germany in eighteen fourteen
so Sweppa could visit his childhood home. Once back in Geneva,
he led a very active life. He was still close
with his daughter, He tended his beloved peach trees, he
visited with friends, and he continued to study various scientific
ideas as his whims desired. He died at the age
(28:45):
of eighty and Collette was his sole inheritor. After Yakub
Swppe sold his interest in the company, the new owners
of J. Shwppe and Company expanded into the US market,
and this was actually a pretty easy sell. In North America,
there was a very real desire in the early eighteen
hundreds to replicate the culture of Europe on many people's parts,
(29:07):
and Sheppa had the benefit of popularity in Europe to
use as marketing directly to that desire. Yeah, it's like,
this is the most popular sparkling beverage in London. Don't
you want to buy it? Yeah? As demand for carbonated
water grew in North America, h Sheppa which I don't
know when they started pronouncing it with the more American
(29:28):
pronunciation of Schwep. But this company soon learned how difficult
it could be to transport carbonated water long distances. You've
ever shaken up a bottle of anything carbonated, you understand this.
This problem was solved by some degree by simply building
more factories in more places. The business grew again in
(29:49):
eighteen thirty one when Schwep's Indian Tonic Water was introduced
to capitalize on the continually growing health goods market. We've
mentioned before in the show that kwineai has been used
to treat malaria for a long time, and because there's
quinine in tonic water and there was in the new
Schwep's tonic water, it was quickly adopted by the British
(30:10):
Empire to be shipped to all of the places the
British Empire was colonizing where malaria was an issue. So
this was a huge, huge contract. It's a huge contract. Also,
the amount of quinine in tonic water not necessarily enough
to help with the malaria. They didn't know that. They
just ranted more of it. The note the company had
(30:31):
been sold in eighteen twenty four. In eighteen thirty four
it was bought again, this time by John Kemp Welch
and William Evel. It appears that this is when the
name started to shift away from Schwepp and Company to
Schweps with the apostrophe. That apostrophe was eventually dropped two
years later in eighteen thirty six. The J. Schweppe and
(30:52):
Company name was still used on the document that established
that the company was the official purveyor of soda water
to the Royal family. That's a status that was reiterated
by Queen Victoria the following year when she took the throne.
This essentially cemented its success because everybody wanted to drink
what the queen drank. This was also selected as the
(31:13):
official drink of the eighteen fifty one Great Expo that
took place in Paxton's Crystal Palace. Talked about that on
the show before. You can still find a stylized image
of the fountain from that expo on the Schwep's logo. Today,
some product cans have a more detailed illustration of the
fountain as the background. Yeah, that's still a huge part
(31:36):
of their visual graphic identity. The popularity of carbonated waters eventually,
of course, led to the addition of flavored syrups to
create new sodas and then Cola's, and they can all
trace their roots back to the eighteenth century inventions of
a handful of innovators. Today, ownership of Schweps is a
lot more complicated than any partnership that Yakub Schweppe could
(31:59):
have ever conceived. The brand overall is held by Sunaury
Holdings Limited subsidiary known as Schwep's International Limited. Several different companies,
including Coca Cola, own the brand in various territories. The
company's offerings now include a variety of flavors of ginger ale,
(32:20):
a lot of sparkling water flavors, club soda and tonic water,
and now the isle of carbonated beverages at most US
grocery stores rivals the size of entire groceries in various
other countries. I have a question, Yeah, are the whole
lot of sparkling water flavors sparkling water or seltzer. We're
(32:40):
gonna talk about that behind the scenes, all right, all right,
good to now, Because I too was like rabbit hole,
rabbit hole. I went down a rabbit hole this morning.
Even though you had written the thing out and sent
it to me, I was like, really, and I just
I got very fixated on what was what? Yes, me too.
I found myself reading many things and being like, that's incorrect,
(33:05):
you're misnaming it. But right now I will talk about
fun listener Mailah and this is from our listener Foster
and who wrote to us about very old animals. Foster writes,
a Greetings Tracy V and Holly. My wife and I
have been listening for many years now, and I've written
(33:25):
a few times. I write you today to express our
surprise that you didn't mention the greenland shark in your
recent episode Very Old Animals. We postulated perhaps the historical
stories surrounding the other animals you covered were just more
interesting than anything related to greenland sharks, but we also
agreed that your excellent research skills could surely find some
historical curiosity about a creature that's believed to be capable
(33:47):
of living over five hundred years. I was just reading
up to refresh my memory, and while I knew we
believed that they don't reach sexual maturity until one hundred
years old, I did not recall knowing they had a
gestation period of eight to eighteen years. Can you imagine if,
on the off chance you were unaware of this very
long lived creature. I hope you enjoy learning about it,
and if, as we suspect, you couldn't find any interesting
(34:08):
historical stories about it, we'd love to hear about that
as well, perhaps on the episodes behind the scenes. Regardless,
the true reason for writing you is, of course, to
share photos of our two new cats, Sonjay, who's two
point five years old and an orange tabby, and Georgie,
a year and a half year old tortoise shell. After
having lost our previous cat, Madeline to old age last year.
(34:29):
Our new cat friends both came from the local shelter
where my wife has been volunteering on the cat side
every Sunday for the last five years. She finally got
to take cats home. I'm sure you can understand for her,
all the litterbox cleaning, cat bathes and pill popping is
easy compared to not being able to take home at
least one cat a week. Yes, I fully understand this.
As you'll see from the photos. Sanjay likes to sleep
(34:50):
like a passed out drunkard and Georgie loves to climb.
Georgie loves showing off how she can climb our ladder,
even leaning nearly vertical against a wall. They both look
forward to going outside on her This is every night
after dinner, especially Sanjay, who is slowly getting close to
walking around the block much like a cautious dog. Thanks
so much for your podcast. Keep living your best lives.
Cheers Foster. Okay, these cats are so stink and cute
(35:12):
and I one hundred percent understand this problem. And also
thank you to your wife for volunteering to take care
of kiddies, and it is so hard not to just
shove one in your pocket and run. You exactly nailed it.
Why we didn't talk about the Greenland shark. There aren't
a lot of interesting stories other than this is very
(35:33):
old and cool, which is great. And I think we
did say that in the behind the scenes, I think,
can we? I don't think so. I've I think we
mentioned sharks, but not specifically Greenlyn sharks. Okay, somehow I
thought we specifically mentioned this and the behind the scenes.
Maybe now I don't remember, but yeah, so that's that's
why you're exactly right. I find them fascinating. I love
(35:56):
sharks and I was lucky enough to work with sharks
some when I was volunteering at the aquarium, which was
just wild and interesting. And they're an animal that we
as much as we know about them, we don't know
much about them because, like in terms of behavioral clues,
they don't always tell us what's going on with them
(36:18):
in ways that we understand. So there's still a lot
of work being done on figuring out like how sharks
present things like illnesses or just like stress. So it's
pretty fascinating. Shark physiology is fascinating. I love sharks, but
as you said, because we don't have that level of
like interactivity with sharks very often, we don't have a
(36:40):
lot of good stories about their behavior. So that's the
scoop with sharks. But if you want to write to
us and send us kiddie pictures or talk about your
favorite veri old animal, please do You can do that
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
find us on social media as Missed in History, and
if you have not subscribed to the podcast, you can
do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen
(37:01):
to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I live for bubbles.
I know you do. Anyone who has spent more than
(00:21):
twelve minutes with me has seen me with the carbonated
beverage of some kind in my hand YEP, those are
the rules for me. I have been a This is
not an endorsement, but I sure have you know, paid
a lot of their bills. I'm sure I've been a
diet coke drinker literally since I was nine. I know
that's unhealthy and your parents would blanch, but that's just
(00:42):
what happened. But lately I have, at my doctor's suggestion,
trying to ease off of the colas, and I'm drinking
more sparkling water to substitute because I do like bubbles
a whole lot. And that's a work in progress. But
it did start to make me wonder when and how
we started adding bubbles to drinks, because I'm not the
person I know that's addicted to the bubbles. So today
(01:03):
we're going to talk about that, which means it is
largely an episode about Yakam Schweppe and some other dudes,
because everybody wanted to replicate natural effor vescence, particularly in
the eighteenth century, there was a lot of excitement in
the scientific community about whether or not they could do it.
So we also have a note on names, because, as
I mentioned, the guy we're talking about most today is
(01:25):
Yakam Schweppe. There's no S on the end of that name.
The company today that you would recognize is Schwepes with
an S and there's no apostrophe. We'll talk a little
bit about that transition, although it's not super well documented
when it became one versus the other. But just so
you're not confused about why sometimes we might make an
(01:47):
S sound and sometimes not. So first, we're just gonna
level set a little bit about how different kinds of
bubbly water are classified, because they're gonna come up throughout
the episode. I think some folks use some of these
terms almost interchangeably. Oh they do, and I will talk
about that. Yes, these are all considered carbonated waters, but
(02:13):
the manner in which they become carbonated and what other
things you might find in them that defines the actual
different types. So there's sparkling water. This is naturally carbonated water.
It comes from a spring or a well in which
gases are introduced into the water. Sodium, magnesium, and calcium
(02:35):
are usually naturally occurring in this water. The amounts can
really vary depending on the source, which is why different
sparkling waters can taste slightly different from one another. Yes,
even if they are unflavored. But we'll talk about flavors.
So Seltzer starts with uncarbonated water. It gets the carbonation
(02:58):
from the manufacturing par process. It can get flavoring, but
it doesn't have that mineral content that sparkling water does.
Club Soda or soda water is also carbonated in processing,
but also has minerals including sodium added. And then there's
tonic water. I don't know if anybody is using tonic
(03:21):
water to generically mean carbonated water. Tonic water is carbonated
in processing. It has quinine and other ingredients added to it,
including sugar or maybe some other sweetener. I see a
lot of like sugar free tonic water, sugar free tonic water.
I think I've seen like an agave sweetened tonic water. Yeah,
(03:41):
and also as a little caveat here, these terms are modern.
They were not all in play when early beverage carbonation
was being developed. But we wanted to include this because
it helps to understand the variations as we talk through
some of it. In most cases we are going to
use the modern definitions just for clarity. Uh. So that's
why we gave you that little rundown. I have thoughts
(04:02):
you might be having them too. We'll talk about them
on Friday. Sure. So to talk about Sheppa first, we
have to talk about Joseph Priestley and a handful of
other men because their work inspired Sheppa's experiments with gases
and water. So. Joseph Priestley was born in Yorkshire, England
in seventeen thirty three. His family worked in the wool
(04:25):
business making fabric. Joseph became a dissenting minister, meaning that
he did not align with the doctrines of the Church
of England. Priestley is a pretty interesting guy. Maybe a
podcast subject in the future. Yeah, he has a lot
of interesting stuff, both from a religious perspective and a
philosophical perspective and scientific uh, because he was also very
(04:49):
interested in science. He believed in the changing nature of
science that it is forever evolving as we learn new
things and apply that knowledge to our scientific thinking. He
wrote books and papers on science. He was a member
of the Royal Society of London, and starting in the
seventeen sixties, Priestly, like a lot of other science minded
people of his day, worked on experiments involving the chemistry
(05:13):
of gases, and one of his early efforts was adding
carbonation to water. So at the time, sparkling water from
natural sources was already popular and it was seen as healthful.
I didn't trace it back to check, but I did
see some people mentioning that this is really like kind
of the origin of that phrasing of take the waters,
(05:33):
which is like, go to somewhere where there is a
natural spring to drink the bubbly water, because it is
naturally good for you. Priestley was among the many scientists
at the time wondering if they could supply bubbly water
by increasing its availability by artificially adding the bubbles. So
Priestley took a position as a minister in Leeds. When
(05:56):
when did that. He lived next to a brewery and
was scientifically curious about the vapors that the brewery gave off.
He eventually came to the determination that what he called
fixed air, which gave beer its bubbles, was the same
thing that made some spring waters bubbly. So today beer
can be made extra bubbly through forced carbonation, that's the
(06:20):
addition of carbon dioxide to the beer while it's in
a sealed container. But in Priestley's time, the bubbles only
came from the fermentation process naturally carbonated water. So what
we would classify today as sparkling water gets its bubbles
from volcanic gases that dissolve into natural water springs. So
the fixed air concept that Priestley was describing had more
(06:43):
to do with the water being infused with air in
a pressurized situation than like the source of the water. Yeah,
it wasn't like he had said, like this one kind
of air is fixed air, although he did figure out
that carbon dioxide was the way to do it. The
first test that Priestley did was really simple. He left
saucers of water out overnight above areas where the brewery
(07:06):
vapors rose up through the air, and then reported that
he found bubbles. He wrote in his findings quote, I
generally found the next morning that the water had acquired
a very sensible and pleasant impregnation. And it was with
peculiar satisfaction that I first drank this water, which I
believe was the first of its kind that had ever
been tasted by man. And from there he started working
(07:29):
on building a mechanism that could more effectively impregnate water
with bubbles. Priestley published a book on the method he
devised to add carbonation to water in seventeen seventy two.
This was titled Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air
in order to communicate to it the peculiar spirit and
virtues of Piermont Water and other mineral waters of a
(07:52):
similar nature. In the beginning of the direction segment of
the book, he opens with quote, if water be only
in contact with figxed air, it will begin to imbibe it.
But the mixture is greatly accelerated by agitation, which is
continually bringing fresh particles of air and water into contact.
All that is necessary, therefore, to make this process expeditious
(08:14):
and effectual, is first to procure a sufficient quantity of
this fixed air, and then to contrive a method by
which the air and water may be strongly agitated in
the same vessel without any danger of admitting the common
air to them. And this is easily done by first
filling any vessel with water and introducing the fixed air
(08:36):
to it while it stands inverted in another vessel of water.
That every part of the process may be as intelligible
as possible, even to those who have no previous knowledge
of the subject. I shall describe it very minutely, subjoining
several remarks and observations relating to varieties in the process,
and other things of a miscellaneous nature. This book is
(09:00):
a pretty fun read, but it is one of those
things where the spellings are a little different and a
lot of the s's are the f so you really
have to be ready for some gymnastics to autocorrect as
you go, But it is a funread. He gives a
pretty basic run through of the process before delving into
the more finessed aspects of the science. As you'll see
(09:23):
in his method, there is some room for error here.
He describes it this way quote, Take a glass vessel
with a pretty narrow neck, and, having filled it with water,
lay a slip of clean paper or thin pasteboard upon it. Then,
if they be pressed close together, the vessel may be
turned upside down. Without danger of admitting any or however
(09:44):
much common air into it. And when it is thus inverted,
it must be placed in another vessel in the form
of a bowl or basin with a little water in it,
so much as to permit the slip of paper or
pasteboard to be withdrawn and the end of the pipe
c to be introduced, so that pipe c he mentions
is essentially like a flexible tube. It was attached at
(10:04):
the other end to an animal bladder, usually a pig bladder,
and that bladder was connected to a bottle that contained
chalk and a small amount of water. And so to
create his fixed air that would be imbibed as Priestley
put it into the water in the first bottle. His
method required the addition of sulfuric acid to that second bottle,
which was then sealed with a cork and shaken, and
(10:27):
that would fill the bladder with gas CO two, and
then the bladder could be compressed to direct the air
into the first bottle. That would also just place some
of the water it initially contained into the bowl it
was sitting in, and then that bottle needed a good
shake to integrate the gas and water. Toda you've made
carbonated water. One of the earliest commercially available carbonated beverages
(10:50):
came out of this work. Very early in the process.
That was a drink that one of Priestley's friends made
called mister Beuley's Julip or mister Beuley's methetic Julip. Richard
Bully was an apothecary in Great Massingham, Norfolk, and introduced
his carbonated water in seventeen sixty seven or seventeen sixty
eight accounts very a little bit. Building on the work
(11:13):
of Bully, another apothecary, Thomas Henry, introduced his own fizzy
beverage using the same apparatus Priestley had developed. His product
was an imitation mineral water that he touted for its
medicinal qualities. Yet it even had like a dosage that
he recommended. We're going to talk about some criticisms of
Priestley's design after we first pause for a sponsor break.
(11:45):
Even though Priestley's design for imparting carbonation worked, that process
and setup that we described wasn't exactly something you could
do on a large scale. There were quite a few
critics of it because, in addition to being unwieldy and involving,
you know, the flipping of a bottle with a piece
of paper to close it. That animal bladder was really
an issue for people. It gave the water, according to critics,
(12:08):
a faint taste of urine. Nobody wants that. One of
those critics was a doctor from Scotland named John Mervyn Nuth,
and this entire idea of carbonating water had gotten really
really popular, and Nuth, like others, was in contact with
Priestley and also Benjamin Franklin. There are a lot of
I would love for someone to do a chart where
(12:29):
they track out all of the letters passing between various
people in the science community at this time and them
all talking about carbonation. But Nuth wanted to figure out
a way to get rid of that bladder section of
the apparatus and make it a little bit cleaner. In
seventeen seventy four he read a paper to the Royal
Society titled the Description of an Apparatus for Impregnating Water
(12:52):
with fixed Air. And this paper talks through his design
and also Nuth's real motivation, which was studying how the
efforvest water might have medicinal benefit. Nuth's apparatus used all
glass components, which had airtight seals connecting them. There were
three chambers stacked one on top of the other. The
(13:12):
bottom vessel was for the chemicals that would react to
create CO two, the middle vessel was for the water
that was being carbonated, and the top vessel was for
the water that was displaced from that middle vessel during
the process. Both Priestley's design and nuths required the water
to be processed multiple times to achieve full carbonation, but
(13:34):
the Nuth apparatus could be separated into the component pieces
for this agitation step. While Priestley had initially bristled Atnth's criticisms,
he really did acknowledge the improvement his device offered over
the initial design. Additionally, one of Priestley's friends, John Worldtier,
further improved the design by pressurizing it, and Nuth's device
(13:56):
was easy enough to use that people could have one
in their homes. A lot of wealthy people purchased them,
hoping to get the benefit of sparkling water without having
to go on holiday for it, or without having it
brought to them by the bottle. And that breaks us
to Johann Yakub Schweppe, who was born in Witzenhausen, Germany,
in seventeen forty so that community was largely agricultural, but
(14:19):
even as a boy, Yakub was believed by his parents
to be cut out for something very different from farming.
According to the official account of the Schwep's Company, which
is quite a fun book written by Douglas Simmons, in
nineteen eighty three, a traveling tinker offered to take Yakub
under his wing as an apprentice, and Yakub's father, Conrad,
agreed to that idea. But the tinker recognized that Yacum's
(14:41):
natural talents for working with his hands exceeded anything he
was going to be called to do as a handyman,
so he suggested two of the Schweppas that Yakub should
instead be sent to apprentice with a silversmith, But the
silversmith also thought that the work he could give Yakub
would be kind of less than the boy was capable of.
The next recommendation was that he apprentice under a jeweler,
(15:03):
and that finally was a pretty great fit. By seventeen
sixty five, Jakub Sweppa was working as a jeweler and
a watchmaker in Geneva, Switzerland. He married two years later
to Eleonora Roget and became a citizen of Geneva the
year after that. He worked under a jeweler named Jean
Luis Dunat and then formed a firm with Dunaut's son
(15:25):
under the name Dunat and Sheppa. Jacub handled most of
the day to day business and do not provided the capital.
Although he and Eleonora had nine children, only one of
them survived to adulthood. That was their daughter, Nicollard, who
went by Collette. Outlived both of her parents and they
were a very very close family. As an adult, already
(15:47):
well into his horology career, Sheppa started reading the writing
of Joseph Priestley and the other men who had been
working on carbonation, because he considered himself like an amateur scientist,
and it's estimated that Sheppa started him his own experiments
with bubbles at least by seventeen eighty, very possibly earlier
than that. He, like so many others, was trying to
(16:08):
build on previous devices to increase effectiveness, ease, and the
quality of the product they produced, and he got pretty
good at it. Although he seems to have kept the
details of his mechanism pretty secret. There are a lot
of times you'll read about throughout his career where it's like, oh,
when he went to this new place, he built boxes
(16:29):
around all of his devices, so even the people that
worked there didn't know what actually made them work unless
they had to know. Uh. So he was smart enough
to be secretive. But what he did do was share
the carbonated water he created, because he was making far
more of it than his household could consume, and he
already had a perfectly fine job and income. First, he
(16:52):
started offering it to doctors as something they could give
to their poor patients who couldn't afford to buy spring water.
That might not have cured anybody of anything, but at
least people had a way to stay hydrated. As he
continued to refine his method of carbonation, he also started
offering water to Geneva's middle and upper classes. He made
(17:13):
a nice living for himself in his watchmaking business, so
he wasn't charging for this water. He was just given
out free carbonated water all the time. That made people
a little wary. It was just odd to have somebody
giving away this product that was in demand. So soon
he started charging for it, and then he realized he
was doing well enough that he could just change careers.
(17:37):
He established Jay Schweppe and Company and started selling carbonated
water full time by the end of seventeen eighty three.
And this is one of those instances in history where
the seemingly unrelated career knowledge that an inventor possessed, in
his case being a jeweler and watchmaker, proved to be
the key to unlocking a problem that others had been
grappling with a little bit. Because he understood so innately
(18:00):
how things like clockwork machinery functioned, he was able to
apply some of that knowledge to create a carbonation device that,
like Priestley and Nuth, used the reaction of chalk and
sulfuric acid to create carbon dioxide. But Seppe's mechanism, which
got the nickname of the Geneva system, or sometimes you'll
see it called the Geneva apparatus, was automated with a
(18:21):
mechanical pump to move air into the water chamber and
an agitator, so there no longer had to be multiple
rounds of manual agitation of the water and CO two mixture.
So instead of taking your thing apart and standing there
shaking it. The pumps and the agitator would do all
of that for you. This was, of course more efficient,
and it also meant that it was a lot easier
(18:42):
to scale his device up to make much more carbonated water,
much faster, with better results than any previous version. By
the seventeen eighties, Yakub's water enterprise had gotten from just
dabbling in experiments with carbonation to being a substantial company.
He was expanding rapidly and he needed to hand over
(19:03):
some of the operation to someone else to manage. This
did not go well. He selected a friend for the job,
who immediately hired an engineer to replicate the Geneva system,
hoping to start his own competing business. But the engineer
who did so made a copy for himself while making
an inferior device for this unscrupulous manager. When all of
(19:27):
this came to light that everybody was essentially trying to
steal his ideas, uh Sweppa made the perhaps surprising but
ultimately kind of wise decision to salvage the situation by
going into business with that engineer who clearly understood how
the device worked. That was a man named Nicholas Paul.
He also went into business as part of this with
(19:49):
other men. They brought other men into the firm, so
Jacques Paul, who was Nicholas's father. They took on another partner,
a pharmacist named Henry Albert Gossa, and they formed a
company called Scheppa, Paul and Gossa. On occasion, if you're
reading up on this, Nicholas Paul is the one who's
credited with adding the compression pump to the Geneva system,
(20:09):
but that seems incorrect based on the timeline of when
Seppa was expanding before they made this deal. That partnership
began in seventeen ninety. The following year, Seppa moved from
Geneva to England, leaving production of carbonated water to his
partners while he tried to expand the market. This was
precipitated in a part by a man named William Belcom,
(20:33):
who was an English doctor living in Geneva. When Seppa
had taken on partners, it was decided that Belcom would
help with the effort to move into the British market
by using his contacts in the medical profession there to
like drum up interest in the product. The company planned
to send samples to various doctors both in England and Paris,
(20:54):
and Seppa would follow and set up a factory. This
seems to have been a time of some tension, a
power struggle among the partners, and the manner in which
the British plan was laid out in paperwork looks like
Seppa was sort of put out a disadvantage, as in,
if Goss and Paul decided it wasn't working, it was
(21:14):
their call and Fppa would not have his living expenses
in London covered anymore if that kind of decision was made,
And we'll see that that becomes an issue coming up.
We're going to see how things went in London. Spoiler alert,
not great initially. We'll talk about it after we hear
from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history
(21:34):
class going. Sheppa left Geneva at the end of seventeen
ninety one and he arrived in London just after the
New Year's seventeen ninety two and started to get their
new factory up and running at one forty one Dreary Lane.
(21:56):
It was kind of a bad neighborhood at the time.
London already had an established mineral water trade and bubbly
water was popular there. It wasn't as though Yakub Schweppe
was arriving to introduce a new concept. In the first
six months were very rough. Yakub additionally just really missed
his family. He suggested to his partners that summer, so
(22:18):
after he had been there five or six months, that
they should either shutter the London factory entirely or be
prepared to weather another seven or eight months of difficulty
before expecting any kind of success. I think, to his
surprise that's speculation, but it seems like he was a
little surprised. They decided to keep going and arrangements were
(22:39):
made for Sheppa's daughter Collette to travel to England so
that he would not be alone. But in the meantime,
sales in Geneva started to falter, and soon they just
wanted Sheppa to come home and fix it. He did
not go home, though he felt as though they were
backing out on the agreement to give the British plan
until the spring to see if it would work. He
(23:00):
wrote and basically said he'd be happy to sever tie
and run the entire company himself. As all of this
was playing out, France declared war on Britain. And on
February first, seventeen ninety three, in response to Britain expelling
the French ambassador. When King Louis the sixteenth was executed
on January twenty first, this puts Sveppa in an odd
(23:22):
and precarious position because all foreigners who had arrived in
Britain in the preceding year were ordered to leave. Technically,
he had been there a few weeks longer than the
cutoff would have been, but he was still worried. He
wrote a letter to the British government explaining that he
had been working very hard to establish a factory and
(23:42):
that he thought it would ultimately benefit the country for
him to be there, so he stayed. Yeah. He also
had a number of people that he knew write letters
on his behalf that were kind of like, no, no,
he's this is a good thing. During this tenth time,
Sveppa definitely seemed to be operating under the impression that
the company was now his alone and that his partners
(24:05):
had completely backed out. But in Geneva, they still believed
that they were involved, and this caused disagreements, which escalated
to a point where Sweppa hired an attorney friend of
his to just settle the situation cut it all apart,
and it ended up in a scenario where Sweppa let
his partners have the Geneva operation and he stayed in
(24:27):
London operating once again under the name Jay Sweppa and Company.
Now this sounds, given how things had been going, like
a bad decision, but his decision was ultimately the right one.
Paul and Gossa really did not understand the business the
way Sheppa did, and the Geneva factory soon went under
As Paul and Gossa bickered and decided that they would
(24:47):
just go their separate ways. They each kind of made
an effort to get into doing their own bubbling water companies.
That did not work out, and conversely, things started rapidly
picking up in Britain. Collette was still just a teenager
at this point and was helping her father run everything.
Sppa couldn't afford to pay a full staff. He was
(25:10):
a jack of all trades, handling the invoicing and accounts
management as well as the overall management of the operation.
He also trained Collette how to do everything in case
something happened to him. This was a smaller operation than
he had left behind in Geneva, but it was still
a lot. He also decided to move to a different
part of London and relocated everything first to King Street, Holborn,
(25:34):
and then again to eleven Margaret Street, Westminster. Things may
have sputtered out had it not been for the fact
that Erasmus Darwin made a recommendation of using Speppa's Seltzer
water to treat bladderstones in his seventeen ninety six book Zunomia.
Their prominent doctors started recommending it and soon Spepa saw
(25:56):
a significant uptick in business. At this point he also
started running advertisements. So prior to this, doctor Belcom, who
had been their advisor in the British market, had told
them that running ads there without doctor endorsements in Britain
was just going to give him a really bad reputation.
So once he had those endorsements, he started listing out
(26:18):
his offerings in advertisements to readers. Three ascidilist soda waters ascidilists,
Rochelle saltwater, Seltzer water, spawwater, Puremont water. You're wondering what
Piermont water is. It is just named after a spring
called Piermont, which is where a lot of sparkling water
came from. Even though he had endorsements from the leading
physicians of the day, he still had to pay a
(26:40):
patent medicine tax on these products. But also what was
going on that's interesting is in the next few years
the term soda water actually came into existence, so then
he was also selling that. But though Speppa was finally
achieving his goal in the carbonated water business in Britain,
he was getting tired. He had not seen his wife
(27:01):
Eleonora since he left Geneva, and she died in seventeen
ninety six. While they had still not been able to
see one another because of the ongoing conflict in Europe.
As the eighteenth century came to a close, Yakub Schweppe
wanted to spend time with his daughter away from work,
so in May of seventeen ninety eight, he sold the
(27:21):
controlling interest in the company to three businessmen from the
island of Jersey, which is part of the Channel Islands.
Those men were FC. Lauzun, HW. Lauzun and RCG. Brohere.
An eighth of the company was still owned by Yakob,
and an eighth was put in Collette's name. Yakub and
(27:42):
Collette remained in their residence attached to the Margaret Street factory,
and the company was still Schweppe in Company. In this instance,
unlike the situation with the Geneva factory, Sweppa and his
daughter trained the new owners on how to run the
business successfully. They also had a provision in the agreement
that outlined the sale of the company that in seventeen
(28:04):
ninety nine, half the interest that Jacob and Collette still
had would be handed over to another man, Stephen Demul,
and then they would step away from the business entirely
and move back to Geneva. Collette married several years later
in eighteen oh six, to Henri Luis Maunoir, and the
couple lived in Geneva, so they stayed close to Yacub.
(28:24):
Yacub and Collette both went to Germany in eighteen fourteen
so Sweppa could visit his childhood home. Once back in Geneva,
he led a very active life. He was still close
with his daughter, He tended his beloved peach trees, he
visited with friends, and he continued to study various scientific
ideas as his whims desired. He died at the age
(28:45):
of eighty and Collette was his sole inheritor. After Yakub
Swppe sold his interest in the company, the new owners
of J. Shwppe and Company expanded into the US market,
and this was actually a pretty easy sell. In North America,
there was a very real desire in the early eighteen
hundreds to replicate the culture of Europe on many people's parts,
(29:07):
and Sheppa had the benefit of popularity in Europe to
use as marketing directly to that desire. Yeah, it's like,
this is the most popular sparkling beverage in London. Don't
you want to buy it? Yeah? As demand for carbonated
water grew in North America, h Sheppa which I don't
know when they started pronouncing it with the more American
(29:28):
pronunciation of Schwep. But this company soon learned how difficult
it could be to transport carbonated water long distances. You've
ever shaken up a bottle of anything carbonated, you understand this.
This problem was solved by some degree by simply building
more factories in more places. The business grew again in
(29:49):
eighteen thirty one when Schwep's Indian Tonic Water was introduced
to capitalize on the continually growing health goods market. We've
mentioned before in the show that kwineai has been used
to treat malaria for a long time, and because there's
quinine in tonic water and there was in the new
Schwep's tonic water, it was quickly adopted by the British
(30:10):
Empire to be shipped to all of the places the
British Empire was colonizing where malaria was an issue. So
this was a huge, huge contract. It's a huge contract. Also,
the amount of quinine in tonic water not necessarily enough
to help with the malaria. They didn't know that. They
just ranted more of it. The note the company had
(30:31):
been sold in eighteen twenty four. In eighteen thirty four
it was bought again, this time by John Kemp Welch
and William Evel. It appears that this is when the
name started to shift away from Schwepp and Company to
Schweps with the apostrophe. That apostrophe was eventually dropped two
years later in eighteen thirty six. The J. Schweppe and
(30:52):
Company name was still used on the document that established
that the company was the official purveyor of soda water
to the Royal family. That's a status that was reiterated
by Queen Victoria the following year when she took the throne.
This essentially cemented its success because everybody wanted to drink
what the queen drank. This was also selected as the
(31:13):
official drink of the eighteen fifty one Great Expo that
took place in Paxton's Crystal Palace. Talked about that on
the show before. You can still find a stylized image
of the fountain from that expo on the Schwep's logo. Today,
some product cans have a more detailed illustration of the
fountain as the background. Yeah, that's still a huge part
(31:36):
of their visual graphic identity. The popularity of carbonated waters eventually,
of course, led to the addition of flavored syrups to
create new sodas and then Cola's, and they can all
trace their roots back to the eighteenth century inventions of
a handful of innovators. Today, ownership of Schweps is a
lot more complicated than any partnership that Yakub Schweppe could
(31:59):
have ever conceived. The brand overall is held by Sunaury
Holdings Limited subsidiary known as Schwep's International Limited. Several different companies,
including Coca Cola, own the brand in various territories. The
company's offerings now include a variety of flavors of ginger ale,
(32:20):
a lot of sparkling water flavors, club soda and tonic water,
and now the isle of carbonated beverages at most US
grocery stores rivals the size of entire groceries in various
other countries. I have a question, Yeah, are the whole
lot of sparkling water flavors sparkling water or seltzer. We're
(32:40):
gonna talk about that behind the scenes, all right, all right,
good to now, Because I too was like rabbit hole,
rabbit hole. I went down a rabbit hole this morning.
Even though you had written the thing out and sent
it to me, I was like, really, and I just
I got very fixated on what was what? Yes, me too.
I found myself reading many things and being like, that's incorrect,
(33:05):
you're misnaming it. But right now I will talk about
fun listener Mailah and this is from our listener Foster
and who wrote to us about very old animals. Foster writes,
a Greetings Tracy V and Holly. My wife and I
have been listening for many years now, and I've written
(33:25):
a few times. I write you today to express our
surprise that you didn't mention the greenland shark in your
recent episode Very Old Animals. We postulated perhaps the historical
stories surrounding the other animals you covered were just more
interesting than anything related to greenland sharks, but we also
agreed that your excellent research skills could surely find some
historical curiosity about a creature that's believed to be capable
(33:47):
of living over five hundred years. I was just reading
up to refresh my memory, and while I knew we
believed that they don't reach sexual maturity until one hundred
years old, I did not recall knowing they had a
gestation period of eight to eighteen years. Can you imagine if,
on the off chance you were unaware of this very
long lived creature. I hope you enjoy learning about it,
and if, as we suspect, you couldn't find any interesting
(34:08):
historical stories about it, we'd love to hear about that
as well, perhaps on the episodes behind the scenes. Regardless,
the true reason for writing you is, of course, to
share photos of our two new cats, Sonjay, who's two
point five years old and an orange tabby, and Georgie,
a year and a half year old tortoise shell. After
having lost our previous cat, Madeline to old age last year.
(34:29):
Our new cat friends both came from the local shelter
where my wife has been volunteering on the cat side
every Sunday for the last five years. She finally got
to take cats home. I'm sure you can understand for her,
all the litterbox cleaning, cat bathes and pill popping is
easy compared to not being able to take home at
least one cat a week. Yes, I fully understand this.
As you'll see from the photos. Sanjay likes to sleep
(34:50):
like a passed out drunkard and Georgie loves to climb.
Georgie loves showing off how she can climb our ladder,
even leaning nearly vertical against a wall. They both look
forward to going outside on her This is every night
after dinner, especially Sanjay, who is slowly getting close to
walking around the block much like a cautious dog. Thanks
so much for your podcast. Keep living your best lives.
Cheers Foster. Okay, these cats are so stink and cute
(35:12):
and I one hundred percent understand this problem. And also
thank you to your wife for volunteering to take care
of kiddies, and it is so hard not to just
shove one in your pocket and run. You exactly nailed it.
Why we didn't talk about the Greenland shark. There aren't
a lot of interesting stories other than this is very
(35:33):
old and cool, which is great. And I think we
did say that in the behind the scenes, I think,
can we? I don't think so. I've I think we
mentioned sharks, but not specifically Greenlyn sharks. Okay, somehow I
thought we specifically mentioned this and the behind the scenes.
Maybe now I don't remember, but yeah, so that's that's
why you're exactly right. I find them fascinating. I love
(35:56):
sharks and I was lucky enough to work with sharks
some when I was volunteering at the aquarium, which was
just wild and interesting. And they're an animal that we
as much as we know about them, we don't know
much about them because, like in terms of behavioral clues,
they don't always tell us what's going on with them
(36:18):
in ways that we understand. So there's still a lot
of work being done on figuring out like how sharks
present things like illnesses or just like stress. So it's
pretty fascinating. Shark physiology is fascinating. I love sharks, but
as you said, because we don't have that level of
like interactivity with sharks very often, we don't have a
(36:40):
lot of good stories about their behavior. So that's the
scoop with sharks. But if you want to write to
us and send us kiddie pictures or talk about your
favorite veri old animal, please do You can do that
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
find us on social media as Missed in History, and
if you have not subscribed to the podcast, you can
do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen
(37:01):
to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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