October 3, 2016 • 47 mins
The soda we get instantly mixed at a fast-food joint owes a lot to a rich history going back to the Roman baths, that features drugs, diseases and explosions. Learn all about soda and soda fountains in this surprisingly interesting episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:22):
website apart. Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know Front House,
Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's
Jerry and this is Stuff you Should Know. You're gonna
(00:42):
love it. I think I just said this is remarkably
interesting right before we hit record. Well, you're right, because
I don't know what are you gonna call this thing?
How so sounds were? He trailed off. It's not the
best title. It's a well that's being gone too before.
(01:03):
Oh um, it's really the history of soda kind of yeah,
you know, I just think it's interesting. I never really
thought about it. I didn't either, And and this is
Chuck to me, one of those great examples of how
you can take anything and really tease out all these
different parts to it. Sure, um, and and that just
(01:27):
about everything is more interesting than it appears on the surface. Yeah.
Because soda, as we will learn, affected America in the
world and continues too. Yeah. Basically all American dominance from
the mid nineteenth century on is because of soda. But
(01:47):
you are from Ohio, So do you say pop? Used to? Yeah,
you depopped. I don't even know what I'm saying soda
now And now I say coke? You even say coke?
Win you want to sprite in the South, I want
a green coke? You say, can I have a coke?
What kind? It's probably Yeah, Well we're in Atlanta, you know,
this is the birthplace of coke. It is which we'll
(02:09):
we'll talk about. We'll talk about um. But the the
initial I guess, the thread that we took into this
topic was soda fountains, right, correct. And when you think
about a soda fountain, this is a good example of
what I was saying. When you think about a soda fountain,
you think about like Bobby Socks teenagers, right, Bill Haley
(02:30):
and the comments, Yeah, the fons sure, hair like perfectly
in place. Yeah, the Fons all drunk Penny first, did
he get drunk? No, that's the that was the joke.
Like Happy Days is so squeaky clean. Wouldn't that really
a great episode if like the Fons was hammered, everybody
(02:50):
just tried to avoid him. Yeah, he'll break the jukebox again.
Um he uh yeah, that would be great. Did you
know that? That's what um Laverne and Shirley spun off of. Yeah,
Mork and Mindy. Yeah, that's just bizarre that More Can
Mindy and Jon Lovest well sure, yeah, but More Can
Mindy was set in the seventies. Yeah, very weird eighties.
(03:14):
I thought it was the sevenies, seventies based on the
down vests. It was the seventies, all right, I'm pretty sure.
All right. So regardless when you think it's sort of
fountains to think of the fifties that the seventies, right
in Happy Days wasn't in the fifties that came out
in the seventies. Yeah, man, there was a big revival
(03:36):
the fifties culture in the seventies. Yeah, Like there are Greece,
there always is, um. You know, people tend to reflect
back twenty years or so. Nostalgia. Yeah, with nostalgia, there's
a great things were so much better back then. There's
a great podcast episode, one of the funniest things I've
ever heard my life from the Great Andy Daily that
(04:00):
centered around shan on Uh and they got it. I
can't remember who he did it with, but it was
might have been Matt Besser, No, I can't remember, but
they did these characters and it was all trying out
for Shauna and on drinking egg creams and being a
professional water skier. It was very, very funny. They're just
making it up. Yeah, I mean, I'm not doing it justice,
(04:21):
but just just seek it out. Just type in Andy
Daily shan on Ah and just sit back and get
ready for delighted for an hour. I'll check it out.
But yeah, uh, fifties purity, Bobby socks, good clean fun.
(04:42):
Here's the thing. You're totally wrong if that's your conception
of soda fountains, it's right. By the time the fifties
rolled around, soda fountains were already so far on their
way out that basically, by the fifties, what happened what
would happen to bars in the seventies thanks to the
fern bar, it already happ been to soda fountains. By
the forties and fifties, what was once handcrafted drinks made
(05:06):
from freshly prepared ingredients that were mixed there on the
premises had been replaced by pre mixed stuff and canned
ingredients that were put together by people who didn't give
a darn about you or your family. Uh, the forties
and fifties were not the heyday of the soda fountain.
(05:26):
It's actually much older than that. Yeah, boy, that's a
setup from the old days. It's getting the way back
machine and go back to Europe when everyone was like,
you know what these mineral waters. We've been drinking this
stuff for hundreds of years, and even before that, the
(05:47):
Romans bathed in it. Yeah, it's great for you. You
drink it, you bathe in it, you splash it on
your sister, do you want her to be well? Deliver
right right, It'll cure everything. It's the cure all back
in the days where they thought, like, drink this one thing,
it'll cure up your STD and your headache, your hangover
(06:09):
all at once, all at one time, when really all
it did was carrying up that stomach. That's right, the
dirty little secret. But the idea that, no, they didn't,
they didn't for centuries as a matter of fact. But
the idea that you could drink um like naturally carbonated
mineral water and that it could cure your health, or
(06:30):
at the very least it was delightful. People wanted to
figure out how to how to get that if you
didn't live near a naturally carbonated spring. That's right, which,
by the way, I was researching this. Did you know
pellegrino is not naturally carbonated? Uh? Had No, I don't
know anything about pellegrino. Well, it's a natural mineral water,
but they carbonated there. I didn't realize it wasn't carbonated. Yeah,
(06:52):
that doesn't surprise me. It surprised me. Are you boycotting? No?
I love this stuff. I was just surprised. You mean
it's anything these days, naturally carbonated and bottled. Dude, Now
that you say that, you've just given me a great
opening to mention this book I just read, called The
Dorrito Effect. You have to read it. It's about the
(07:17):
food we eat today and just how incredibly manufactured it is.
But the really refreshing thing about it is that anybody
can read this book. It's basically a political It doesn't
lay this at anybody's feet. It doesn't blame anybody. It
doesn't suggest there's anything nefarius going on. It's just like,
(07:37):
here's here's what here's our food right now. It's really interesting.
Check it out, really approachable, interesting book. They don't even
blame big Derrito. No. I mean they basically trace the
origin of our current food standards back to the invention
of the dorrito, hence the name. But it's a it's
a really great book, definitely worth reading. Uh, I'll check
(08:00):
that out. And people ask us for book rex all
the time, so that's one. Yeah, pay attention you. We
got that for me and I've read it in like
two days. Did read it? She hasn't ready. I grabbed
it first, Oh I got you. Yeah. So she bought
it for the family. Oh yeah, okay, sure that the family.
I thought it was a gift, like I read this
and now I'm going to give it to you. No,
she read about it, got you, thought about me. Mine
(08:22):
bought it and I alright. Uh so mineral water was
very appealing. Uh and and human being said, you know
what they'd be great if we could bottle this junk ourselves,
even though bottling isn't really a thing yet, or at least,
you know, not anything that worked stoneware and a cork. Yeah.
(08:45):
Uh so a seventeen sixty seven is when Um, Joseph
Priestley we've talked about before and oh too, yeah more
than once British chemist he said, you know what, I
figured this out for a minute, some yeast mash and
UM put it in this water, gets you pretty messed up,
and look at it, bubble. It's delightful and everybody's like, whoa,
(09:08):
that's a decent approximation to semi carbonated water. Yeah, not
a bad first step thought. Uh So sixteen years later, uh,
there was a Swiss scientist named Johann Yuko Schwepp. M
hmm yeah, sound familiar. Uh. He said, you know what,
(09:29):
I've actually built a device, this hand crank compression pump,
and um, I can make this stuff, and I'm gonna
found a company called Swepts because that's my name, and
you're gonna be hearing it for centuries. And he actually
he was definitely onto something. What Schwept figured out was
not just this invention that he made. But he also
realized that to carbonate water, which let's talk about carbonating water,
(09:53):
shall we artificially carbonating? Guy should say, to carbonate it,
there's some condition that are most conducive to carbonating water
because C O two molecules and H two old molecules
do not like to get together. Yeah, you'll just throw
it in there and they're like start hugging it out
right and say great, now drink me. Yeah. As a
(10:14):
matter of fact, there their bond angles, I believe, are
totally different, and they're they're at such a such an
angle that like they just do not go together very well.
But Yakov Schwept said, you know what, I wonder if
you use really really cold temperatures, like near freezing water,
that would help. He was correct, correct. Uh. And also
(10:36):
if you put it under pressure, maybe say seven atmospheres, Yeah,
it would it would help. He was correct with that too.
That's right, And that's what you need cold and pressure
and uh, if you get that going, then that gas
dissolves into the liquid and those molecules start to party
and hug it out, and uh, you know that's what.
(10:56):
It's pretty amazing that someone figured that out way back then,
but it's even more amazing that it wasn't like he's like,
I'll just take the CEO to canister and this cold
water and put it together under pressure. This dude had
to make his own CEO too, So he he used
the old surfu sulfuric acid and powdered marble combination, right,
which is, um, we'll talk about it's kind of dangerous
(11:19):
to put together. But this is so to to create
carbonated water, Schwepps had to first create carbon dioxide, so
he had a lot of stuff going on. He was
the first guy to come up with a mechanized version
of creating carbonated water. Pretty amazing, Yeah, but it took many, many,
many more years before it became even close to a
(11:41):
perfected process. Yeah. I mean, as you'll see, it happened.
Many people chipped in over the course of a lot
of time. Um, namely Mr Charles Plinth eight thirteen, he
invented the or I don't know if he invented I
think he might have invented or at least he perfected
the soda siphon, which if you've ever seen an episode
(12:03):
of The Three Stooges, you we've got when you don't
have this. No, I don't have one. You gotta get one.
I got a soda stream. I'm all good, Okay, you
don't need women. Uh. And that means he could either
squirt someone in the face and have a comedy routine,
or he could uh service some carbonated liquid. Yeah, which
(12:26):
is great, but you have to keep refilling that thing
at the source. Yeah, that was the problem. And especially
I mean, like if you're if you're having to make
your own CEO two. It's one thing to just use
as little chargers today, it's it's not much of a problem.
But if you have to make your own CEO two
first before you create this siphon, yeah, you're yeah, that's
a that's a big process. So again, like these guys
(12:48):
are kind of like poking away at the edges of
the problem of coming up with mass produced carbonated water,
big big problems, and they're contributing an add to to
this nutcracker, but no one's actually cracked the nut yet.
It would be eight thirty two when a man named
(13:09):
John Matthews. Yeah he's American, born in England. Best of
both worlds. Uh. He developed a chamber, a lead line
chamber where he could actually mix he could actually generate
that CEO two. So Swepts had already generated the CEO
two before YE got you. Yeah, yeah, I thought Matthews
(13:30):
was the first to do that. No, Okay, Schwepps actually
was creating CEO two. He he didn't have this self
contained apparatus that that Matthews came up with. That was
his his huge innovation. Who Matthews? Yeah yeah, I mean
he mixed it together without water and he created carbonated
water and you could bottle it. But um, bottling wasn't
(13:53):
like a big uh. You couldn't mass bottle it at
this point. No, and what he came up with this
invention that he came up with was um it was
big enough to serve a decent sized clientele. Going from
you know, like the Schwepps era invention where you could
make twenty of these a day, twenty carbonated drinks a day,
(14:14):
all of a sudden, with Matthew's invention, you can make
like a hundreds. Um. But it was it was immobile.
So it was either good for bottling, which at the
time bottling sucked in America. The glass wasn't good enough
to bottle stuff under pressure, or you could make carbonated
drinks there on site, and that's what it led to,
(14:35):
was directly the creation of the soda fountain, the place
where you would go get at soda. Who read for him. Yeah,
so we'll take a little break and we'll come back
with one final gentleman who, although he failed, he had
a big impact on the soda fountain industry. You know
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(16:17):
all right, Benjamin silly Man? Yeah, uh Suliman. I believe
it's probably how he preferred to have it pronounced. Don't
you think he was very serious? He probably was. Uh.
He said, you know what, I may be a failure
in my businesses, but I'm gonna go down in history
(16:38):
is maybe the guy who had the most to do
with the creation of soda in a mass, ubiquate, ubiquitous way. Um.
He was a professor of chemistry at Yale. Go. Uh, geez,
what is her? Right? Are bulldogs? Hois is Georgetown? So
(16:58):
I think it's the bulldogs bulls, gotcha? Uh? The Yale
Hodgmans isn't. Yeah, he's he went to Yale. Oh you
don't say so. Um, he because he was a chemistry
professor Yale didn't make a ton of money. I want
to make a little deal on the side. And his
whole jam was kind of going back to the old days.
(17:20):
This is stuff as medicinal, and I'm really gonna move
all my chips in on the medicine angle, which turned
out to not be the best move. No, And it
wasn't necessarily that he just focused on the medicinal aspect
of it. It was apparently he didn't know how to
create like a fun time establishment. Right. He was Yale
(17:45):
chemistry professor. So he created to um two of the
first basically soda fountains in New York City based on
Matthew's design, which again was a lead chamber where you
put the calcium carbonate and the sulfuric acid together created
C O two. It bubbled up through water to purify it,
(18:05):
and then that purified C two entered a very cold
spring water chamber and bubbled up and created carbonated water. Right, So,
silly man created two of these houses, and he he
set them up at two very elite places in New York,
the City Hotel and uh the tonteen Coffee House. Right um,
(18:29):
And he started serving this stuff, but again he was
serving in his medicine. And the impression I have is
that it was kind of like, uh, please give me
your money. Great, here's your medicine, drink it, please get out.
There is no fraternizing, there's no talking. Some other people
noticed this and said, that's a really great idea. Uh
(18:51):
costs to finally come down enough to where I can
get some investors and we can open our own pump house,
our own soda fountains. But we're gonna throw in some books.
We're gonna like promote people talking, and maybe they'll stick
around in order a second one. Right, Yeah, I don't see.
That's weird though, because the Tonting Coffee House was like
a very social place where people hung out. Well, then
(19:12):
he did something wrong that other people didn't do or
that did better. Well, maybe they were just drinking coffee
because he went under. Well, the whole thing, I mean,
like competitive soda fountains like buried him. But he was
the guy who came up with the idea, so his
he created the legacy. He just wasn't very good at business,
that's right. Hats off to you, silly man. Hats off,
(19:34):
all right. So these other gentlemen opened up more successful
shops then they started popping up. Of course, once it
happens in New York, the next place is going to
be Philly, Baltimore. Yeah, and it was. It was a
legit business. It was a thing. But it was tied
to pharmacies as well. Yeah, which seems weird but not
when you think about it. No. Um. And one of
(19:54):
the big reasons why it was tied to pharmacists because
it took tremendous skill to you properly create carbon dioxide. Um.
They blew up. Yes, yeah, oh yeah, like you could
die at a soda fountains hanging out, Um they blew up.
The sulfuric gacid could leach into the finished product and
you could be served a couple of sulfuric acid not
(20:17):
very good. Um. There were a lot of things that
could go wrong in mixing this. So this is technical,
technical expertise that pharmacists already had, so it made sense
for them to say we got this, which is why
it is. It does become less weird to associate the
soda fountain with the pharmacy, which it would very soon
(20:37):
become basically like like hand in hand with Yeah, you know,
I grew up in Stone Mountain and the old village
of Stone Mountain had a pharmacy straight out of Happy
Days And you know, I wasn't. It was like the
seventies and eighties, and it sounds like the fifties, but
I would like walk down there and get like a
coke float and like they would put it on my
(20:59):
parents tab. Oh yeah, yeah, and this was I mean
it seems like like, yeah, literally Happy Days times, but
it was eighty five. It was five. Yeah, I was
like twelve or thirteen. It's pretty walking down to the
old pharmacy thinking about how cool David Hasselhoff is. Yeah.
(21:20):
Actually I didn't watch night Writer, so I didn't neither.
I wasn't on the Hasslehoff train. Big fan of his music,
but not night Rider. But yeah, they would just jerk
me a soda and uh, I don't even think we
said why they were called soda soda jerks, because that's
the motion that you would make, you jerked the the
tap handle or so did jerkers have seen them called
(21:42):
that as well? Or soda throwers? I saw it too,
like that The reason they were called soda throwers because um,
it took a lot of skill to mix these drinks.
Very like on the level of the bartenders that were
working at the time. In as a matter of fact,
some bartenders, especially during Prohibition, became soda jerks. Yeah, there
was a lot of showmanship involved. Right, it's kind of
like a cool job to have. But we haven't reached
(22:03):
that point yet. We're at about the mid nineteenth century
when it's really starting to get popular and spreading through
through the major cities of the US. Correct, So they're
in pharmacies, like you said, because they had skill at
doing this and it just made sense, and it had
the old the old you know, medicinal tie in, like here,
drink this tonic that I've made for you, this ginger
(22:25):
ale or this root beer. And apparently by this time
everybody knew that carbonated water didn't have any real medicinal properties. Well, yeah,
that was kind of the the joke, not the joke,
but joke was on them. But the so the pharmacists
would say, well, I'll put some real drugs in here,
then let's see what happens. Like it didn't have to
have minerals at this point, right, But people love the fizz, right,
(22:49):
They were crazy for the fitz still do and putting
like herbs and drugs and stuff into a drink was
not an American mid nineteenth entry invention, right. It goes
back really really far. This is folk medicine, and actually
in um Europe there was all sorts of stuff that
(23:09):
we brought over. Like the idea of root beer is
actually way older than Charles hart Hires invention. UM. It
goes back to UH Native America, UM, Indigenous European groups.
Just basically anybody who ever put roots embark and ums
(23:30):
boiled it. And the reason they were making this stuff
was because the water supply was questionable at the time,
so you were basically purifying water by fermenting it, by
brewing it and making an alcoholic drink, and it would
be called small beer, and small beer was beer. It
was a drink like that, like the original root beer,
(23:50):
the original ginger beer. These were small beers and they
were used to basically drink instead of water, and kids
would drink it, everybody would drink it. It usually had
pretty low amounts of alcohol in it. But it's taking
those that same idea of using things like sassafras or
um sasparilla, ginger, yeah, or whatever, and putting it together
(24:13):
with a spark these this new sparkling water that you
could get from a tap at a soda fountain. That
was the big innovation. Remarkable. Yeah, and uh, pharmacists at
the time they were adding some booze like not negligible
amounts like uh, alcoholics would uh if they were broke,
they might go to the pharmacy to get you know
(24:36):
what amounts to like a shot of whiskey and their
little elixir because it wasn't tax like alcohol was, so
they could get a cheaper drink. And I guess that
was more socially acceptable too, because you're going for medicine
rather than going to the bar for leisure. Let me
get my medicine, right exactly. Uh what else? What else?
Drugs like not just alcohol like um, drugs, drugs like brooks,
(25:01):
just go ahead and say it. Drugs, Heroin, yeah, heroin, morphine, opium, uh,
cannabis trick nine. Yeah. And this is pretty Food and
Drug Act of nineteen o six that this was going on.
So if you wanted to pick me up, you would
trot down to the store in the morning to the
pharmacy and you would get your cocaine drink. And I
(25:23):
guess the heroine wasn't to pick me up. That was
a take me down, take me down. You had that
at the end of the day. Um. Yeah, the well
you remember in the Bars episode we talk about bidders
and cocktails. Those were originally like medicinal supposedly you know,
well people still swear about this stuff for like a
tummy ache. Right. I guess I could see bidders giving
(25:43):
you a tummy ache if you had too much. But yeah,
you know you'd be the one to know you like
your bidders, right, I like bidders. I'm not well, you
know me, you don't drink a lot of that stuff,
but just the name itself turns me off. So I
came across um something in here phosphates, right, I'm like,
what is a phosphate is a type of drink that
(26:04):
you could get around this time, mid the late nineteenth
century and even up into into the twentieth century. It
was a very famous type of soda fountain drink like here, son,
have a nice cold phosphate, Yeah, exactly right. And a
phosphate usually was some sort of sweetener, uh, some kind
of usually a fruit maybe like cherry syrup or something
(26:26):
like that. And um, carbonated water, and then the stuff
called acid phosphate and acid phosphate um is this compound
that gives it brings out like the sour notes in
in whatever drink it's in. It gives you a little
bit of a tingle, a little bit of a kick.
It's weird. And I looked, I'm like, is this stuff
(26:47):
still around? Surely enough? It is, so I Am going
to get some and try to figure out what to
do with it. It's gonna be awesome. But the phosphate
that was another thing you would put into. And originally
phosphates were thought to are things like hypertension. So like
all these things that really just kind of came to
form a taste or a flavor, a mouth feel of
(27:08):
what we now see as a soft drink originally started
out as medicine, booze or drugs, right, and then all
of them would be put together and you would go
drink in the morning, say I'm just getting some medicine.
Uh well, and this is a time, of course, like
you know, this article points out where'd you get this?
By the way, this is really good. This is actually
we should have given a shout out already. This is
(27:28):
a Collector's Weekly article Hunter Oatman Stanford, who just has
written some pretty interesting stuff Collector's Weekly. It's like really
bizarre that they put out some of the finest articles
on the internet. Is that bizarre just because you would
think it'd be so niche that like they they would
just be too narrow, But they're actually really good at
(27:51):
taking in the expansiveness of whatever they're talking about the
history of stuff that uh, this is a time, um
they point out in the article in the late eighteen
hundreds when the quote here is cocaine was a wonder
drug when it was first discovered. It was marvelous medicine
that could do you no harm. Right, the early days
of cocaine, when there was like this stuff just makes
(28:13):
you feel great, Right, what's the problem? Yeah, it's great.
It's a bracer, yeah, which was the you know what
people thought all the way up until Like what I
thought was funny was that the the person who was
talking about, um, how much cocaine was usually found, Yeah,
in a drink, uh, hundreds of a Graham And then
(28:37):
the person goes on to say about a tenth of
a line of cocaine, right, yeah, And then they say
or a bump, right, not that I would know. They
also said, I'm joking about the bump part that they
did say a tenth of a line, that's what he's
talking about. Bizarre measurement. It depends on the line, I
guess too, right. I mean, it's a weird thing to quantify.
(28:57):
But I've seen you know, you know what I mean,
like a tent of the line, like a like a hog,
just like you know, a respectable one's a little rail. Uh. Yeah,
I thought that was an odd quote from that guy too. Um.
And here's the thing as far as cocaine being and
we'll talk about Coca Cola coming up to but I
(29:18):
found a lot of varying amounts from negligible to significant. Um.
I found one thing that said it took thirty glasses
to produce an actual dose of the drug. But I've
also seen you know, this guy says it's like a bump.
So like, I don't I don't know who to believe.
And I think the secrets probably died with the people
(29:40):
that that had these recipes back then. Like I don't
know if we can know for sure how much cocaine. Uh.
Coca Cola still officially says that there was no cocaine,
But no do they I think that's their their official stance. Um, well,
everybody else says there was definitely cocaine. And do you
want to take a break then and talk about coca cola?
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(31:26):
we're talking about how you could find everything from heroin
to uh, cannabis to um well, cocaine and drinks, and
most famously you found cocaine as far as everybody apparently,
but Coca Cola says in Coca Cola. Yeah, and and
if you work at Coke or something like that, please
(31:47):
right in and explain to us how everyone else in
the world says that there was cocaine in it. And
apparently if on Earth recipes for Coca Cola that and
involved cocaine. But how is it not in Coca Cola.
We wanna know if that unless they've changed their stance.
But this thing I found that says uh their official
(32:08):
stances that it did not, so we'll see um all right,
So it's eight six, late eighteen hundreds, and there's a
former colonel uh in the Confederate Army Civil War vet
named Doc Pemberton. They called him Doc. His parents didn't
name him Doc. He went on to be a pharmacist,
(32:30):
John Pemberton, And uh, he's trying to find a solution
for Civil War soldiers who were addicted to U narcotics
painkillers because they did pretty lousy battlefield treatment. Sure, well,
they did the best it could. Yeah, well, I was
medicine wasn't far along back then. Uh. And so he
(32:53):
concocted this thing um called Coca cola. That was the
original Coca cola. Is it true? Do you have in
there that it was um originally made with still water
and that no one liked it, and then he with
carbonated water. It seems senseless because water was all arrayed. Ye,
that didn't make any sense. I could see that though
(33:14):
a misstep. Uh. And it was um first sold at
Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia for a nickel. Where's that?
That was downtown? That that was all there was a
Atlanta back then, like Eman Park was a suburb, was
considered a suburb. And for those of you don't know,
Emin Park now is just a neighborhood right off of downtown.
(33:37):
In the suburbs are forty miles outside of uh So.
Dr Pemberton makes this sells it at Jacob's Pharmacy. His partner,
Frank Robinson, was a bookkeeper and partner. He's the one
actually named at Coca Cola. He designed that script that
they still used today. He came up with the first uh,
(33:59):
I guess slow in, which was the pause that refreshes,
And they started giving away coupons for the stuff for
like a free Coca Cola, which got its name because
it contained elements from the coca plant and cola nuts
right from from Nigeria, I believe is where they originated.
So it's like a very on the nose and cocoline.
(34:21):
Coal plants have like tons of caffeine in them. Yeah,
so cocaine and lots of caffeine. So I was doing
the job basically. Uh And in nineteen sixteen they developed
that distinctive contoured bottle, which it took a lot longer
to get that patented. I think like the seventies or
something surprising, but I think that they said. The idea
(34:43):
was they wanted you to be able to tell it
like in the dark if you're groping around. Yeah, the
had a coke bottle in your hand. So Coke wasn't
the only one putting drugs in their drinks, no, of
course not um. Like we said, there are plenty of
other drugs. Seven up very famously had lithium citrate in
it until the I think the fifties or sixties even
(35:04):
maybe Lithium of course is the very famous mood stabilizer
used to treat things like bipolar disorder and depression and
all sorts of stuff. Interesting, So you could drink seven
up up. Ah, So we jumped ahead a little bit,
going back again to the early eighteen hundreds is when
(35:26):
these flavored SODA's really first kind of came on the
scene and they started um a lot of citrus drinks um.
And the theory was that like people used to lemonade
being a refreshing thing well plus also again this was
a medicine. Citrus was used to treat scurvy. Yeah, and
you could get those citric citrus oils pretty easily. So yeah,
(35:47):
there was a lot of like orange and lemony flavor
things early on. Um, what else cherry vanilla for some
of the early flavors. Winter green was a big one.
I don't know about that. I wouldn't want winter green soda.
I don't think grape, nutmeg, pomegranate, cheery. I used to
love the grape drink when I was a kid. Oh yeah,
(36:09):
like uh fana or knee high grape Fago. Fago was
what we had up in OHI. Yeah, we didn't have
a lot of fago. I remember fago great, but um
Fago had a pineapple drink. It was so good. And
then their red pop was really good too. Yeah. I
never got into the reds either. I was kind of
(36:29):
a still lamb an orange guy. I'll drink a fan
of orange like, I'll drink like ten of them a year,
and it's just such a treat delicious, like all tenant.
Once one day I get so sick. You're like, I
don't even want to see this again. My dad, man,
he would drink the knee high peach like it was
going out of style. Yeah, yeah, I never have one
(36:52):
of those. I'm not into the peach that much. Dude.
We just got back from Japan. They got peach down
pat over there. What do you mean growing the trees? No,
the the flavor in the candy or whatever, like, yeah,
because it is. It's very delicate. It's not like punching
you in the face. It's almost like your tongue is
(37:12):
chasing after the taste because it wants a little more
really good. And that should be their motto for whatever
all of it. Uh. They were using generally simple syrups,
very sugary, simple syrups, and um, like you said, they
would mix them up right there. They had cool names.
(37:33):
Who's this guy? DeForest? Sacks had a book called Sax's
New Guide or hence to Soda Water Dispensers. Like all
of the books back then, there was an or in
the title. Ah, he would serve you an opera bouquet
or an almond sponge or swizzle fizz. That's a good one.
They just sound delicious, swizzle fizz. It's amazing how this
(37:55):
relates to our bartending episode. Well, okay, so I'm glad
you brought that up, because if you talked into a
really great hotel bar, say like the Waldorf Historia in
the eighteen eighties or nineties, you would just be like,
oh my god, this place is amazing. Even still the day,
they're pretty great. But they were like brand new marble,
(38:16):
brand new polished wood, grass and mirrors and onyx and
all sorts of just beautiful stuff. Right. And if you,
if you looked a little further along the bar, um,
you would say, all you'd have to do is put
in a row of carbonation taps and you you'd have
yourself a soda fountain. Because um, they were the same
(38:39):
type of establishment. It was just one served alcoholic drinks
and the other one served what are considered soft drinks.
As they got further and further away from medicine, especially
after the nineteen o six act Um, the A, the
Food and Drug Purity act Um, they they they they
took drugs out and replaced it with sugar. And this
(39:00):
was the big American innovation. But at the time, um,
they they bars and the soda fountains competed with one another,
and the best ones looked very similar to one another,
and they would have equally capable bartenders or soda jerks
who could mix up some amazing stuff that would knock
your socks off. Um. And then that made it ready
(39:23):
made to be like the champion of the temperance movement.
So when the temperance movement came along in like the
late nineteenth century and really started to get some traction
all the way up until what nineteen nineteen, the year
before prohibition, That was right, the last good year. People
were Yeah, people were like, soda fountains are the place
(39:45):
to be. Yeah. And there's a there's a lady that
there's this woman that wrote a book called Soda Shop
Salvation named Ray Catherine uh May or i May, and um,
she kind of makes a case for are the good
that came out of prohibition, which was um, pre prohibition
(40:06):
there were it was this bar and saloon culture where
the men went and drank and left their families at
home and left their kids at home. And she argues
that because of prohibition, the soda shops won out, or
at least for a while, and there was a big
boom and all of a sudden, women and children were
going out to eat more as families with her with
her dads, and that there was like more dining out.
(40:30):
There was a big rise in sugar as a whole,
like this when ice cream really started to boom. Um,
maybe part and parcel to the to the uh floats
like soda floats with ice cream, but um, yeah, she
said you know, some good things came out of prohibition.
She said, the USA needed a reset, was how she
(40:52):
put it, just period like the sort of the cultures
that came around because the Prohibition was you know, we
were heading down a dark road, she thinks, with the
saloon and bar culture and leaving the families out of it. So, um, yeah,
I thought it's pretty interesting. Take. Yeah, I remember that
from our Bars episode two that after Prohibition, because the
(41:14):
speakeasy didn't have any rules to follow, it was like
a new thing. Um, women started showing up and they
they've been going to bars ever since. But before that
it was strictly like males. Yea interesting and so even before,
but during and including after um Prohibition, Chuck, the soda
fountain was just immense, Like I think in uh oh,
(41:37):
I can't remember. Somewhere in the nineteenth century, the mid
nineteenth century, New York City had like six hundreds something
soda fountains, and just New York City, right, there were
thousands and thousands of them around the United States. In
ninety nine, there was something like sixty thousand pharmacies in
the United States of them had a soda fountain. Amazing.
(41:59):
There was one in um in New York called the
Pennsylvania Drug Company. It was at penn Station they sold.
The name says it all. They sold. On a good day,
they would sell drinks to nine thousand customers. They made
two hundred fifty grand a year selling soda soft drinks UM,
which is like three and a half million dollars in
sales in two thousand and fifteen money. And then all
(42:22):
of a sudden starts to dry up. Like we said,
by the fourties of fifties, they have become quaint. By
the seventies they were down to I think a third
of pharmacy has had a soda fountain still now today,
I mean, good luck finding them. There's just a handful
around going to CBS and hey, jerk Minnesota and they'll
(42:42):
throw you out of there. Um, there's like kind of
a revival going on now, but uh, it's just there.
They just virtually disappeared. And what's interesting is they've actually
tracked what killed the soda fountain and there's a few
a few factors that were pretty interesting. Yeah of him. Uh,
And we've talked about car culture and the culture of
(43:03):
the expressways and highways and the suburbs and how America grew, um,
shunning public transportation in favor of cars and highways, and
that was one of the big things. You know, people
the little downtown Stone Mountain pharmacy wasn't as popular because
people didn't live anywhere near there anymore. Right, I mean
some people did, of course, but uh, people were flying
(43:25):
the coope basically, Yeah, spending time out on the open road. Um,
you didn't really have that. You didn't want to spend
as much time like hanging around the soda fountain. Maybe
you just wanted some refreshment to go right to drive
through culture yeah. Um. And then probably the bottle cap
was the thing that really killed the soda fountain. Yeah,
(43:46):
because now you could enjoy it at home, yeah, or
you could buy it on the road and just take
it with you. Um. Yeah. That the bottle cap probably
more than anything, killed the soda fountain. I read a
thing too that said Coca Cola invented the six pack,
Is that right? Yeah, at one point they started selling them,
you know, in six packs, and I became like the
number that's really surprising. Yeah, or they, at least they
(44:08):
like to claim they take credit for that. No, cocaine
came up with the six. I don't know what the
truth is anymore. Have you ever been to the World
of Coke? Oh? Sure, I haven't been to the new
one though, I haven't been at all. You've never been
to the World of Coke. No, it's one of those
things in your hometown that you ignore. Have you been
to the the Center for Human Rights, the Civil the
(44:31):
Human Rights Museum. That's amazing. Where the MLK Center. No, No,
this is newer. Okay, it's just a couple of years old,
but it's down It's like the aquarium. World of Coke,
the Human Rights Museum. No, I haven't seen that. You
gotta check it out. It's a it's a downer, but
in all the time to death. But I'm not going
to the World of Coke. Yeah, it's like New Yorkers.
(44:51):
They don't go to the Guggenheimer Central Park. It's just
one of those hometown things you ignore. Kidding, of course,
So you got anything else? I got nothing else. If
you want to know more about soda fountains and soda
pop and all that kind of stuff, you can search
(45:12):
the internet for it. You can type those words into
how stuff works dot Com on the search bar. And
also we want to give a shout out to again
Collectors Weekly, the Art of Drink, and today I found
out all three of which we used as some source
material too. Yeah, along with our own how supp works
article how soda fountains work. So thanks to you all
(45:33):
for making great stuff. And as I said that it's
time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this we Change
the Life. Hey, guys, want to say thanks for all
the great shows. Let you know that you had a
big impact on my life. Some time ago during a
listener feedback I'm sorry Facebook Q and A, a young
listener asked advice on career paths, and you said that
(45:56):
you should do what they love trust me. And that's
not like the most innovative advice ever, but that's what
we said. At the time. I was being made redundant
from a career in buying, but new it wasn't what
I loved. I took your advice. I got some experience
volunteering at school, having always learned to love and share ideas,
(46:16):
and that's start a whole new career path. Uh. Now
I've just finished my teaching qualification UM, which was really
tough as a mature student raising my own kids, and
next week start my first job as a class teacher
at Y six Primary. Um, I think this is the
end of elementary school for you guys. Ages tend to
(46:37):
eleven kids. I hope I can engage and inspire children
in my class of what you do with your listeners.
So I wanted to say, cheers. You can use us
in the classroom. That's one good way. Yeah, and that
is from Catherine a k A. Mrs young Thanks a lot,
Mrs young Man is very awesome. Congratulations, way to go. Yeah,
and she was gutted to not see us in the UK.
(46:58):
Good we got it a lot of Brits. I think
it's hilarious a popular term. They all said the same thing.
They were good interesting, Well thanks Mrs young again, nicely done. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can tweet to us at s y s K podcast
or Joshua Clark. You can hang out with us on
Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Facebook dot com
(47:21):
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(00:22):
website apart. Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know Front House,
Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's
Jerry and this is Stuff you Should Know. You're gonna
(00:42):
love it. I think I just said this is remarkably
interesting right before we hit record. Well, you're right, because
I don't know what are you gonna call this thing?
How so sounds were? He trailed off. It's not the
best title. It's a well that's being gone too before.
(01:03):
Oh um, it's really the history of soda kind of yeah,
you know, I just think it's interesting. I never really
thought about it. I didn't either, And and this is
Chuck to me, one of those great examples of how
you can take anything and really tease out all these
different parts to it. Sure, um, and and that just
(01:27):
about everything is more interesting than it appears on the surface. Yeah.
Because soda, as we will learn, affected America in the
world and continues too. Yeah. Basically all American dominance from
the mid nineteenth century on is because of soda. But
(01:47):
you are from Ohio, So do you say pop? Used to? Yeah,
you depopped. I don't even know what I'm saying soda
now And now I say coke? You even say coke?
Win you want to sprite in the South, I want
a green coke? You say, can I have a coke?
What kind? It's probably Yeah, Well we're in Atlanta, you know,
this is the birthplace of coke. It is which we'll
(02:09):
we'll talk about. We'll talk about um. But the the
initial I guess, the thread that we took into this
topic was soda fountains, right, correct. And when you think
about a soda fountain, this is a good example of
what I was saying. When you think about a soda fountain,
you think about like Bobby Socks teenagers, right, Bill Haley
(02:30):
and the comments, Yeah, the fons sure, hair like perfectly
in place. Yeah, the Fons all drunk Penny first, did
he get drunk? No, that's the that was the joke.
Like Happy Days is so squeaky clean. Wouldn't that really
a great episode if like the Fons was hammered, everybody
(02:50):
just tried to avoid him. Yeah, he'll break the jukebox again.
Um he uh yeah, that would be great. Did you
know that? That's what um Laverne and Shirley spun off of. Yeah,
Mork and Mindy. Yeah, that's just bizarre that More Can
Mindy and Jon Lovest well sure, yeah, but More Can
Mindy was set in the seventies. Yeah, very weird eighties.
(03:14):
I thought it was the sevenies, seventies based on the
down vests. It was the seventies, all right, I'm pretty sure.
All right. So regardless when you think it's sort of
fountains to think of the fifties that the seventies, right
in Happy Days wasn't in the fifties that came out
in the seventies. Yeah, man, there was a big revival
(03:36):
the fifties culture in the seventies. Yeah, Like there are Greece,
there always is, um. You know, people tend to reflect
back twenty years or so. Nostalgia. Yeah, with nostalgia, there's
a great things were so much better back then. There's
a great podcast episode, one of the funniest things I've
ever heard my life from the Great Andy Daily that
(04:00):
centered around shan on Uh and they got it. I
can't remember who he did it with, but it was
might have been Matt Besser, No, I can't remember, but
they did these characters and it was all trying out
for Shauna and on drinking egg creams and being a
professional water skier. It was very, very funny. They're just
making it up. Yeah, I mean, I'm not doing it justice,
(04:21):
but just just seek it out. Just type in Andy
Daily shan on Ah and just sit back and get
ready for delighted for an hour. I'll check it out.
But yeah, uh, fifties purity, Bobby socks, good clean fun.
(04:42):
Here's the thing. You're totally wrong if that's your conception
of soda fountains, it's right. By the time the fifties
rolled around, soda fountains were already so far on their
way out that basically, by the fifties, what happened what
would happen to bars in the seventies thanks to the
fern bar, it already happ been to soda fountains. By
the forties and fifties, what was once handcrafted drinks made
(05:06):
from freshly prepared ingredients that were mixed there on the
premises had been replaced by pre mixed stuff and canned
ingredients that were put together by people who didn't give
a darn about you or your family. Uh, the forties
and fifties were not the heyday of the soda fountain.
(05:26):
It's actually much older than that. Yeah, boy, that's a
setup from the old days. It's getting the way back
machine and go back to Europe when everyone was like,
you know what these mineral waters. We've been drinking this
stuff for hundreds of years, and even before that, the
(05:47):
Romans bathed in it. Yeah, it's great for you. You
drink it, you bathe in it, you splash it on
your sister, do you want her to be well? Deliver
right right, It'll cure everything. It's the cure all back
in the days where they thought, like, drink this one thing,
it'll cure up your STD and your headache, your hangover
(06:09):
all at once, all at one time, when really all
it did was carrying up that stomach. That's right, the
dirty little secret. But the idea that, no, they didn't,
they didn't for centuries as a matter of fact. But
the idea that you could drink um like naturally carbonated
mineral water and that it could cure your health, or
(06:30):
at the very least it was delightful. People wanted to
figure out how to how to get that if you
didn't live near a naturally carbonated spring. That's right, which,
by the way, I was researching this. Did you know
pellegrino is not naturally carbonated? Uh? Had No, I don't
know anything about pellegrino. Well, it's a natural mineral water,
but they carbonated there. I didn't realize it wasn't carbonated. Yeah,
(06:52):
that doesn't surprise me. It surprised me. Are you boycotting? No?
I love this stuff. I was just surprised. You mean
it's anything these days, naturally carbonated and bottled. Dude, Now
that you say that, you've just given me a great
opening to mention this book I just read, called The
Dorrito Effect. You have to read it. It's about the
(07:17):
food we eat today and just how incredibly manufactured it is.
But the really refreshing thing about it is that anybody
can read this book. It's basically a political It doesn't
lay this at anybody's feet. It doesn't blame anybody. It
doesn't suggest there's anything nefarius going on. It's just like,
(07:37):
here's here's what here's our food right now. It's really interesting.
Check it out, really approachable, interesting book. They don't even
blame big Derrito. No. I mean they basically trace the
origin of our current food standards back to the invention
of the dorrito, hence the name. But it's a it's
a really great book, definitely worth reading. Uh, I'll check
(08:00):
that out. And people ask us for book rex all
the time, so that's one. Yeah, pay attention you. We
got that for me and I've read it in like
two days. Did read it? She hasn't ready. I grabbed
it first, Oh I got you. Yeah. So she bought
it for the family. Oh yeah, okay, sure that the family.
I thought it was a gift, like I read this
and now I'm going to give it to you. No,
she read about it, got you, thought about me. Mine
(08:22):
bought it and I alright. Uh so mineral water was
very appealing. Uh and and human being said, you know
what they'd be great if we could bottle this junk ourselves,
even though bottling isn't really a thing yet, or at least,
you know, not anything that worked stoneware and a cork. Yeah.
(08:45):
Uh so a seventeen sixty seven is when Um, Joseph
Priestley we've talked about before and oh too, yeah more
than once British chemist he said, you know what, I
figured this out for a minute, some yeast mash and
UM put it in this water, gets you pretty messed up,
and look at it, bubble. It's delightful and everybody's like, whoa,
(09:08):
that's a decent approximation to semi carbonated water. Yeah, not
a bad first step thought. Uh So sixteen years later, uh,
there was a Swiss scientist named Johann Yuko Schwepp. M
hmm yeah, sound familiar. Uh. He said, you know what,
(09:29):
I've actually built a device, this hand crank compression pump,
and um, I can make this stuff, and I'm gonna
found a company called Swepts because that's my name, and
you're gonna be hearing it for centuries. And he actually
he was definitely onto something. What Schwept figured out was
not just this invention that he made. But he also
realized that to carbonate water, which let's talk about carbonating water,
(09:53):
shall we artificially carbonating? Guy should say, to carbonate it,
there's some condition that are most conducive to carbonating water
because C O two molecules and H two old molecules
do not like to get together. Yeah, you'll just throw
it in there and they're like start hugging it out
right and say great, now drink me. Yeah. As a
(10:14):
matter of fact, there their bond angles, I believe, are
totally different, and they're they're at such a such an
angle that like they just do not go together very well.
But Yakov Schwept said, you know what, I wonder if
you use really really cold temperatures, like near freezing water,
that would help. He was correct, correct. Uh. And also
(10:36):
if you put it under pressure, maybe say seven atmospheres, Yeah,
it would it would help. He was correct with that too.
That's right, And that's what you need cold and pressure
and uh, if you get that going, then that gas
dissolves into the liquid and those molecules start to party
and hug it out, and uh, you know that's what.
(10:56):
It's pretty amazing that someone figured that out way back then,
but it's even more amazing that it wasn't like he's like,
I'll just take the CEO to canister and this cold
water and put it together under pressure. This dude had
to make his own CEO too, So he he used
the old surfu sulfuric acid and powdered marble combination, right,
which is, um, we'll talk about it's kind of dangerous
(11:19):
to put together. But this is so to to create
carbonated water, Schwepps had to first create carbon dioxide, so
he had a lot of stuff going on. He was
the first guy to come up with a mechanized version
of creating carbonated water. Pretty amazing, Yeah, but it took many, many,
many more years before it became even close to a
(11:41):
perfected process. Yeah. I mean, as you'll see, it happened.
Many people chipped in over the course of a lot
of time. Um, namely Mr Charles Plinth eight thirteen, he
invented the or I don't know if he invented I
think he might have invented or at least he perfected
the soda siphon, which if you've ever seen an episode
(12:03):
of The Three Stooges, you we've got when you don't
have this. No, I don't have one. You gotta get one.
I got a soda stream. I'm all good, Okay, you
don't need women. Uh. And that means he could either
squirt someone in the face and have a comedy routine,
or he could uh service some carbonated liquid. Yeah, which
(12:26):
is great, but you have to keep refilling that thing
at the source. Yeah, that was the problem. And especially
I mean, like if you're if you're having to make
your own CEO two. It's one thing to just use
as little chargers today, it's it's not much of a problem.
But if you have to make your own CEO two
first before you create this siphon, yeah, you're yeah, that's
a that's a big process. So again, like these guys
(12:48):
are kind of like poking away at the edges of
the problem of coming up with mass produced carbonated water,
big big problems, and they're contributing an add to to
this nutcracker, but no one's actually cracked the nut yet.
It would be eight thirty two when a man named
(13:09):
John Matthews. Yeah he's American, born in England. Best of
both worlds. Uh. He developed a chamber, a lead line
chamber where he could actually mix he could actually generate
that CEO two. So Swepts had already generated the CEO
two before YE got you. Yeah, yeah, I thought Matthews
(13:30):
was the first to do that. No, Okay, Schwepps actually
was creating CEO two. He he didn't have this self
contained apparatus that that Matthews came up with. That was
his his huge innovation. Who Matthews? Yeah yeah, I mean
he mixed it together without water and he created carbonated
water and you could bottle it. But um, bottling wasn't
(13:53):
like a big uh. You couldn't mass bottle it at
this point. No, and what he came up with this
invention that he came up with was um it was
big enough to serve a decent sized clientele. Going from
you know, like the Schwepps era invention where you could
make twenty of these a day, twenty carbonated drinks a day,
(14:14):
all of a sudden, with Matthew's invention, you can make
like a hundreds. Um. But it was it was immobile.
So it was either good for bottling, which at the
time bottling sucked in America. The glass wasn't good enough
to bottle stuff under pressure, or you could make carbonated
drinks there on site, and that's what it led to,
(14:35):
was directly the creation of the soda fountain, the place
where you would go get at soda. Who read for him. Yeah,
so we'll take a little break and we'll come back
with one final gentleman who, although he failed, he had
a big impact on the soda fountain industry. You know
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(16:17):
all right, Benjamin silly Man? Yeah, uh Suliman. I believe
it's probably how he preferred to have it pronounced. Don't
you think he was very serious? He probably was. Uh.
He said, you know what, I may be a failure
in my businesses, but I'm gonna go down in history
(16:38):
is maybe the guy who had the most to do
with the creation of soda in a mass, ubiquate, ubiquitous way. Um.
He was a professor of chemistry at Yale. Go. Uh, geez,
what is her? Right? Are bulldogs? Hois is Georgetown? So
(16:58):
I think it's the bulldogs bulls, gotcha? Uh? The Yale
Hodgmans isn't. Yeah, he's he went to Yale. Oh you
don't say so. Um, he because he was a chemistry
professor Yale didn't make a ton of money. I want
to make a little deal on the side. And his
whole jam was kind of going back to the old days.
(17:20):
This is stuff as medicinal, and I'm really gonna move
all my chips in on the medicine angle, which turned
out to not be the best move. No, And it
wasn't necessarily that he just focused on the medicinal aspect
of it. It was apparently he didn't know how to
create like a fun time establishment. Right. He was Yale
(17:45):
chemistry professor. So he created to um two of the
first basically soda fountains in New York City based on
Matthew's design, which again was a lead chamber where you
put the calcium carbonate and the sulfuric acid together created
C O two. It bubbled up through water to purify it,
(18:05):
and then that purified C two entered a very cold
spring water chamber and bubbled up and created carbonated water. Right, So,
silly man created two of these houses, and he he
set them up at two very elite places in New York,
the City Hotel and uh the tonteen Coffee House. Right um,
(18:29):
And he started serving this stuff, but again he was
serving in his medicine. And the impression I have is
that it was kind of like, uh, please give me
your money. Great, here's your medicine, drink it, please get out.
There is no fraternizing, there's no talking. Some other people
noticed this and said, that's a really great idea. Uh
(18:51):
costs to finally come down enough to where I can
get some investors and we can open our own pump house,
our own soda fountains. But we're gonna throw in some books.
We're gonna like promote people talking, and maybe they'll stick
around in order a second one. Right, Yeah, I don't see.
That's weird though, because the Tonting Coffee House was like
a very social place where people hung out. Well, then
(19:12):
he did something wrong that other people didn't do or
that did better. Well, maybe they were just drinking coffee
because he went under. Well, the whole thing, I mean,
like competitive soda fountains like buried him. But he was
the guy who came up with the idea, so his
he created the legacy. He just wasn't very good at business,
that's right. Hats off to you, silly man. Hats off,
(19:34):
all right. So these other gentlemen opened up more successful
shops then they started popping up. Of course, once it
happens in New York, the next place is going to
be Philly, Baltimore. Yeah, and it was. It was a
legit business. It was a thing. But it was tied
to pharmacies as well. Yeah, which seems weird but not
when you think about it. No. Um. And one of
(19:54):
the big reasons why it was tied to pharmacists because
it took tremendous skill to you properly create carbon dioxide. Um.
They blew up. Yes, yeah, oh yeah, like you could
die at a soda fountains hanging out, Um they blew up.
The sulfuric gacid could leach into the finished product and
you could be served a couple of sulfuric acid not
(20:17):
very good. Um. There were a lot of things that
could go wrong in mixing this. So this is technical,
technical expertise that pharmacists already had, so it made sense
for them to say we got this, which is why
it is. It does become less weird to associate the
soda fountain with the pharmacy, which it would very soon
(20:37):
become basically like like hand in hand with Yeah, you know,
I grew up in Stone Mountain and the old village
of Stone Mountain had a pharmacy straight out of Happy
Days And you know, I wasn't. It was like the
seventies and eighties, and it sounds like the fifties, but
I would like walk down there and get like a
coke float and like they would put it on my
(20:59):
parents tab. Oh yeah, yeah, and this was I mean
it seems like like, yeah, literally Happy Days times, but
it was eighty five. It was five. Yeah, I was
like twelve or thirteen. It's pretty walking down to the
old pharmacy thinking about how cool David Hasselhoff is. Yeah.
(21:20):
Actually I didn't watch night Writer, so I didn't neither.
I wasn't on the Hasslehoff train. Big fan of his music,
but not night Rider. But yeah, they would just jerk
me a soda and uh, I don't even think we
said why they were called soda soda jerks, because that's
the motion that you would make, you jerked the the
tap handle or so did jerkers have seen them called
(21:42):
that as well? Or soda throwers? I saw it too,
like that The reason they were called soda throwers because um,
it took a lot of skill to mix these drinks.
Very like on the level of the bartenders that were
working at the time. In as a matter of fact,
some bartenders, especially during Prohibition, became soda jerks. Yeah, there
was a lot of showmanship involved. Right, it's kind of
like a cool job to have. But we haven't reached
(22:03):
that point yet. We're at about the mid nineteenth century
when it's really starting to get popular and spreading through
through the major cities of the US. Correct, So they're
in pharmacies, like you said, because they had skill at
doing this and it just made sense, and it had
the old the old you know, medicinal tie in, like here,
drink this tonic that I've made for you, this ginger
(22:25):
ale or this root beer. And apparently by this time
everybody knew that carbonated water didn't have any real medicinal properties. Well, yeah,
that was kind of the the joke, not the joke,
but joke was on them. But the so the pharmacists
would say, well, I'll put some real drugs in here,
then let's see what happens. Like it didn't have to
have minerals at this point, right, But people love the fizz, right,
(22:49):
They were crazy for the fitz still do and putting
like herbs and drugs and stuff into a drink was
not an American mid nineteenth entry invention, right. It goes
back really really far. This is folk medicine, and actually
in um Europe there was all sorts of stuff that
(23:09):
we brought over. Like the idea of root beer is
actually way older than Charles hart Hires invention. UM. It
goes back to UH Native America, UM, Indigenous European groups.
Just basically anybody who ever put roots embark and ums
(23:30):
boiled it. And the reason they were making this stuff
was because the water supply was questionable at the time,
so you were basically purifying water by fermenting it, by
brewing it and making an alcoholic drink, and it would
be called small beer, and small beer was beer. It
was a drink like that, like the original root beer,
(23:50):
the original ginger beer. These were small beers and they
were used to basically drink instead of water, and kids
would drink it, everybody would drink it. It usually had
pretty low amounts of alcohol in it. But it's taking
those that same idea of using things like sassafras or
um sasparilla, ginger, yeah, or whatever, and putting it together
(24:13):
with a spark these this new sparkling water that you
could get from a tap at a soda fountain. That
was the big innovation. Remarkable. Yeah, and uh, pharmacists at
the time they were adding some booze like not negligible
amounts like uh, alcoholics would uh if they were broke,
they might go to the pharmacy to get you know
(24:36):
what amounts to like a shot of whiskey and their
little elixir because it wasn't tax like alcohol was, so
they could get a cheaper drink. And I guess that
was more socially acceptable too, because you're going for medicine
rather than going to the bar for leisure. Let me
get my medicine, right exactly. Uh what else? What else?
Drugs like not just alcohol like um, drugs, drugs like brooks,
(25:01):
just go ahead and say it. Drugs, Heroin, yeah, heroin, morphine, opium, uh,
cannabis trick nine. Yeah. And this is pretty Food and
Drug Act of nineteen o six that this was going on.
So if you wanted to pick me up, you would
trot down to the store in the morning to the
pharmacy and you would get your cocaine drink. And I
(25:23):
guess the heroine wasn't to pick me up. That was
a take me down, take me down. You had that
at the end of the day. Um. Yeah, the well
you remember in the Bars episode we talk about bidders
and cocktails. Those were originally like medicinal supposedly you know,
well people still swear about this stuff for like a
tummy ache. Right. I guess I could see bidders giving
(25:43):
you a tummy ache if you had too much. But yeah,
you know you'd be the one to know you like
your bidders, right, I like bidders. I'm not well, you
know me, you don't drink a lot of that stuff,
but just the name itself turns me off. So I
came across um something in here phosphates, right, I'm like,
what is a phosphate is a type of drink that
(26:04):
you could get around this time, mid the late nineteenth
century and even up into into the twentieth century. It
was a very famous type of soda fountain drink like here, son,
have a nice cold phosphate, Yeah, exactly right. And a
phosphate usually was some sort of sweetener, uh, some kind
of usually a fruit maybe like cherry syrup or something
(26:26):
like that. And um, carbonated water, and then the stuff
called acid phosphate and acid phosphate um is this compound
that gives it brings out like the sour notes in
in whatever drink it's in. It gives you a little
bit of a tingle, a little bit of a kick.
It's weird. And I looked, I'm like, is this stuff
(26:47):
still around? Surely enough? It is, so I Am going
to get some and try to figure out what to
do with it. It's gonna be awesome. But the phosphate
that was another thing you would put into. And originally
phosphates were thought to are things like hypertension. So like
all these things that really just kind of came to
form a taste or a flavor, a mouth feel of
(27:08):
what we now see as a soft drink originally started
out as medicine, booze or drugs, right, and then all
of them would be put together and you would go
drink in the morning, say I'm just getting some medicine.
Uh well, and this is a time, of course, like
you know, this article points out where'd you get this?
By the way, this is really good. This is actually
we should have given a shout out already. This is
(27:28):
a Collector's Weekly article Hunter Oatman Stanford, who just has
written some pretty interesting stuff Collector's Weekly. It's like really
bizarre that they put out some of the finest articles
on the internet. Is that bizarre just because you would
think it'd be so niche that like they they would
just be too narrow, But they're actually really good at
(27:51):
taking in the expansiveness of whatever they're talking about the
history of stuff that uh, this is a time, um
they point out in the article in the late eighteen
hundreds when the quote here is cocaine was a wonder
drug when it was first discovered. It was marvelous medicine
that could do you no harm. Right, the early days
of cocaine, when there was like this stuff just makes
(28:13):
you feel great, Right, what's the problem? Yeah, it's great.
It's a bracer, yeah, which was the you know what
people thought all the way up until Like what I
thought was funny was that the the person who was
talking about, um, how much cocaine was usually found, Yeah,
in a drink, uh, hundreds of a Graham And then
(28:37):
the person goes on to say about a tenth of
a line of cocaine, right, yeah, And then they say
or a bump, right, not that I would know. They
also said, I'm joking about the bump part that they
did say a tenth of a line, that's what he's
talking about. Bizarre measurement. It depends on the line, I
guess too, right. I mean, it's a weird thing to quantify.
(28:57):
But I've seen you know, you know what I mean,
like a tent of the line, like a like a hog,
just like you know, a respectable one's a little rail. Uh. Yeah,
I thought that was an odd quote from that guy too. Um.
And here's the thing as far as cocaine being and
we'll talk about Coca Cola coming up to but I
(29:18):
found a lot of varying amounts from negligible to significant. Um.
I found one thing that said it took thirty glasses
to produce an actual dose of the drug. But I've
also seen you know, this guy says it's like a bump.
So like, I don't I don't know who to believe.
And I think the secrets probably died with the people
(29:40):
that that had these recipes back then. Like I don't
know if we can know for sure how much cocaine. Uh.
Coca Cola still officially says that there was no cocaine,
But no do they I think that's their their official stance. Um, well,
everybody else says there was definitely cocaine. And do you
want to take a break then and talk about coca cola?
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(31:26):
we're talking about how you could find everything from heroin
to uh, cannabis to um well, cocaine and drinks, and
most famously you found cocaine as far as everybody apparently,
but Coca Cola says in Coca Cola. Yeah, and and
if you work at Coke or something like that, please
(31:47):
right in and explain to us how everyone else in
the world says that there was cocaine in it. And
apparently if on Earth recipes for Coca Cola that and
involved cocaine. But how is it not in Coca Cola.
We wanna know if that unless they've changed their stance.
But this thing I found that says uh their official
(32:08):
stances that it did not, so we'll see um all right,
So it's eight six, late eighteen hundreds, and there's a
former colonel uh in the Confederate Army Civil War vet
named Doc Pemberton. They called him Doc. His parents didn't
name him Doc. He went on to be a pharmacist,
(32:30):
John Pemberton, And uh, he's trying to find a solution
for Civil War soldiers who were addicted to U narcotics
painkillers because they did pretty lousy battlefield treatment. Sure, well,
they did the best it could. Yeah, well, I was
medicine wasn't far along back then. Uh. And so he
(32:53):
concocted this thing um called Coca cola. That was the
original Coca cola. Is it true? Do you have in
there that it was um originally made with still water
and that no one liked it, and then he with
carbonated water. It seems senseless because water was all arrayed. Ye,
that didn't make any sense. I could see that though
(33:14):
a misstep. Uh. And it was um first sold at
Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia for a nickel. Where's that?
That was downtown? That that was all there was a
Atlanta back then, like Eman Park was a suburb, was
considered a suburb. And for those of you don't know,
Emin Park now is just a neighborhood right off of downtown.
(33:37):
In the suburbs are forty miles outside of uh So.
Dr Pemberton makes this sells it at Jacob's Pharmacy. His partner,
Frank Robinson, was a bookkeeper and partner. He's the one
actually named at Coca Cola. He designed that script that
they still used today. He came up with the first uh,
(33:59):
I guess slow in, which was the pause that refreshes,
And they started giving away coupons for the stuff for
like a free Coca Cola, which got its name because
it contained elements from the coca plant and cola nuts
right from from Nigeria, I believe is where they originated.
So it's like a very on the nose and cocoline.
(34:21):
Coal plants have like tons of caffeine in them. Yeah,
so cocaine and lots of caffeine. So I was doing
the job basically. Uh And in nineteen sixteen they developed
that distinctive contoured bottle, which it took a lot longer
to get that patented. I think like the seventies or
something surprising, but I think that they said. The idea
(34:43):
was they wanted you to be able to tell it
like in the dark if you're groping around. Yeah, the
had a coke bottle in your hand. So Coke wasn't
the only one putting drugs in their drinks, no, of
course not um. Like we said, there are plenty of
other drugs. Seven up very famously had lithium citrate in
it until the I think the fifties or sixties even
(35:04):
maybe Lithium of course is the very famous mood stabilizer
used to treat things like bipolar disorder and depression and
all sorts of stuff. Interesting, So you could drink seven
up up. Ah, So we jumped ahead a little bit,
going back again to the early eighteen hundreds is when
(35:26):
these flavored SODA's really first kind of came on the
scene and they started um a lot of citrus drinks um.
And the theory was that like people used to lemonade
being a refreshing thing well plus also again this was
a medicine. Citrus was used to treat scurvy. Yeah, and
you could get those citric citrus oils pretty easily. So yeah,
(35:47):
there was a lot of like orange and lemony flavor
things early on. Um, what else cherry vanilla for some
of the early flavors. Winter green was a big one.
I don't know about that. I wouldn't want winter green soda.
I don't think grape, nutmeg, pomegranate, cheery. I used to
love the grape drink when I was a kid. Oh yeah,
(36:09):
like uh fana or knee high grape Fago. Fago was
what we had up in OHI. Yeah, we didn't have
a lot of fago. I remember fago great, but um
Fago had a pineapple drink. It was so good. And
then their red pop was really good too. Yeah. I
never got into the reds either. I was kind of
(36:29):
a still lamb an orange guy. I'll drink a fan
of orange like, I'll drink like ten of them a year,
and it's just such a treat delicious, like all tenant.
Once one day I get so sick. You're like, I
don't even want to see this again. My dad, man,
he would drink the knee high peach like it was
going out of style. Yeah, yeah, I never have one
(36:52):
of those. I'm not into the peach that much. Dude.
We just got back from Japan. They got peach down
pat over there. What do you mean growing the trees? No,
the the flavor in the candy or whatever, like, yeah,
because it is. It's very delicate. It's not like punching
you in the face. It's almost like your tongue is
(37:12):
chasing after the taste because it wants a little more
really good. And that should be their motto for whatever
all of it. Uh. They were using generally simple syrups,
very sugary, simple syrups, and um, like you said, they
would mix them up right there. They had cool names.
(37:33):
Who's this guy? DeForest? Sacks had a book called Sax's
New Guide or hence to Soda Water Dispensers. Like all
of the books back then, there was an or in
the title. Ah, he would serve you an opera bouquet
or an almond sponge or swizzle fizz. That's a good one.
They just sound delicious, swizzle fizz. It's amazing how this
(37:55):
relates to our bartending episode. Well, okay, so I'm glad
you brought that up, because if you talked into a
really great hotel bar, say like the Waldorf Historia in
the eighteen eighties or nineties, you would just be like,
oh my god, this place is amazing. Even still the day,
they're pretty great. But they were like brand new marble,
(38:16):
brand new polished wood, grass and mirrors and onyx and
all sorts of just beautiful stuff. Right. And if you,
if you looked a little further along the bar, um,
you would say, all you'd have to do is put
in a row of carbonation taps and you you'd have
yourself a soda fountain. Because um, they were the same
(38:39):
type of establishment. It was just one served alcoholic drinks
and the other one served what are considered soft drinks.
As they got further and further away from medicine, especially
after the nineteen o six act Um, the A, the
Food and Drug Purity act Um, they they they they
took drugs out and replaced it with sugar. And this
(39:00):
was the big American innovation. But at the time, um,
they they bars and the soda fountains competed with one another,
and the best ones looked very similar to one another,
and they would have equally capable bartenders or soda jerks
who could mix up some amazing stuff that would knock
your socks off. Um. And then that made it ready
(39:23):
made to be like the champion of the temperance movement.
So when the temperance movement came along in like the
late nineteenth century and really started to get some traction
all the way up until what nineteen nineteen, the year
before prohibition, That was right, the last good year. People
were Yeah, people were like, soda fountains are the place
(39:45):
to be. Yeah. And there's a there's a lady that
there's this woman that wrote a book called Soda Shop
Salvation named Ray Catherine uh May or i May, and um,
she kind of makes a case for are the good
that came out of prohibition, which was um, pre prohibition
(40:06):
there were it was this bar and saloon culture where
the men went and drank and left their families at
home and left their kids at home. And she argues
that because of prohibition, the soda shops won out, or
at least for a while, and there was a big
boom and all of a sudden, women and children were
going out to eat more as families with her with
her dads, and that there was like more dining out.
(40:30):
There was a big rise in sugar as a whole,
like this when ice cream really started to boom. Um,
maybe part and parcel to the to the uh floats
like soda floats with ice cream, but um, yeah, she
said you know, some good things came out of prohibition.
She said, the USA needed a reset, was how she
(40:52):
put it, just period like the sort of the cultures
that came around because the Prohibition was you know, we
were heading down a dark road, she thinks, with the
saloon and bar culture and leaving the families out of it. So, um, yeah,
I thought it's pretty interesting. Take. Yeah, I remember that
from our Bars episode two that after Prohibition, because the
(41:14):
speakeasy didn't have any rules to follow, it was like
a new thing. Um, women started showing up and they
they've been going to bars ever since. But before that
it was strictly like males. Yea interesting and so even before,
but during and including after um Prohibition, Chuck, the soda
fountain was just immense, Like I think in uh oh,
(41:37):
I can't remember. Somewhere in the nineteenth century, the mid
nineteenth century, New York City had like six hundreds something
soda fountains, and just New York City, right, there were
thousands and thousands of them around the United States. In
ninety nine, there was something like sixty thousand pharmacies in
the United States of them had a soda fountain. Amazing.
(41:59):
There was one in um in New York called the
Pennsylvania Drug Company. It was at penn Station they sold.
The name says it all. They sold. On a good day,
they would sell drinks to nine thousand customers. They made
two hundred fifty grand a year selling soda soft drinks UM,
which is like three and a half million dollars in
sales in two thousand and fifteen money. And then all
(42:22):
of a sudden starts to dry up. Like we said,
by the fourties of fifties, they have become quaint. By
the seventies they were down to I think a third
of pharmacy has had a soda fountain still now today,
I mean, good luck finding them. There's just a handful
around going to CBS and hey, jerk Minnesota and they'll
(42:42):
throw you out of there. Um, there's like kind of
a revival going on now, but uh, it's just there.
They just virtually disappeared. And what's interesting is they've actually
tracked what killed the soda fountain and there's a few
a few factors that were pretty interesting. Yeah of him. Uh,
And we've talked about car culture and the culture of
(43:03):
the expressways and highways and the suburbs and how America grew, um,
shunning public transportation in favor of cars and highways, and
that was one of the big things. You know, people
the little downtown Stone Mountain pharmacy wasn't as popular because
people didn't live anywhere near there anymore. Right, I mean
some people did, of course, but uh, people were flying
(43:25):
the coope basically, Yeah, spending time out on the open road. Um,
you didn't really have that. You didn't want to spend
as much time like hanging around the soda fountain. Maybe
you just wanted some refreshment to go right to drive
through culture yeah. Um. And then probably the bottle cap
was the thing that really killed the soda fountain. Yeah,
(43:46):
because now you could enjoy it at home, yeah, or
you could buy it on the road and just take
it with you. Um. Yeah. That the bottle cap probably
more than anything, killed the soda fountain. I read a
thing too that said Coca Cola invented the six pack,
Is that right? Yeah, at one point they started selling them,
you know, in six packs, and I became like the
number that's really surprising. Yeah, or they, at least they
(44:08):
like to claim they take credit for that. No, cocaine
came up with the six. I don't know what the
truth is anymore. Have you ever been to the World
of Coke? Oh? Sure, I haven't been to the new
one though, I haven't been at all. You've never been
to the World of Coke. No, it's one of those
things in your hometown that you ignore. Have you been
to the the Center for Human Rights, the Civil the
(44:31):
Human Rights Museum. That's amazing. Where the MLK Center. No, No,
this is newer. Okay, it's just a couple of years old,
but it's down It's like the aquarium. World of Coke,
the Human Rights Museum. No, I haven't seen that. You
gotta check it out. It's a it's a downer, but
in all the time to death. But I'm not going
to the World of Coke. Yeah, it's like New Yorkers.
(44:51):
They don't go to the Guggenheimer Central Park. It's just
one of those hometown things you ignore. Kidding, of course,
So you got anything else? I got nothing else. If
you want to know more about soda fountains and soda
pop and all that kind of stuff, you can search
(45:12):
the internet for it. You can type those words into
how stuff works dot Com on the search bar. And
also we want to give a shout out to again
Collectors Weekly, the Art of Drink, and today I found
out all three of which we used as some source
material too. Yeah, along with our own how supp works
article how soda fountains work. So thanks to you all
(45:33):
for making great stuff. And as I said that it's
time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this we Change
the Life. Hey, guys, want to say thanks for all
the great shows. Let you know that you had a
big impact on my life. Some time ago during a
listener feedback I'm sorry Facebook Q and A, a young
listener asked advice on career paths, and you said that
(45:56):
you should do what they love trust me. And that's
not like the most innovative advice ever, but that's what
we said. At the time. I was being made redundant
from a career in buying, but new it wasn't what
I loved. I took your advice. I got some experience
volunteering at school, having always learned to love and share ideas,
(46:16):
and that's start a whole new career path. Uh. Now
I've just finished my teaching qualification UM, which was really
tough as a mature student raising my own kids, and
next week start my first job as a class teacher
at Y six Primary. Um, I think this is the
end of elementary school for you guys. Ages tend to
(46:37):
eleven kids. I hope I can engage and inspire children
in my class of what you do with your listeners.
So I wanted to say, cheers. You can use us
in the classroom. That's one good way. Yeah, and that
is from Catherine a k A. Mrs young Thanks a lot,
Mrs young Man is very awesome. Congratulations, way to go. Yeah,
and she was gutted to not see us in the UK.
(46:58):
Good we got it a lot of Brits. I think
it's hilarious a popular term. They all said the same thing.
They were good interesting, Well thanks Mrs young again, nicely done. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can tweet to us at s y s K podcast
or Joshua Clark. You can hang out with us on
Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Facebook dot com
(47:21):
slash stuff you should know. You can hang out with
us on Instagram, and you can send us an email
to Stuff Podcasts at how stuff Works dot com and
has always joined us our at home on the Web
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is It How stuff Works?
Dot com
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