SYSK Distraction Playlist: The Amazing History of Soda

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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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

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 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. 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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? All right, Josh, whether you're wearing suits, sweatpants, or a Canadian tuxedo, you're gonna spend twenty four hours a day just about in your underwear, that's right. So if you're gonna spend so much time in your underwear, you might as well make it excellent underwear, which means you might

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E anddys dot com slash stuff off your first order. So, Chuck, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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,

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. 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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,

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 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. 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

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