Fizz Read Online Free PDF Page A

There were orangeades, limeades, raspberryades, cherryades, and Persian sherbets, a carbonated twist on the refreshing Persian fruit drink
sharbat.
Another still drink to get with the fizz was tonic water, also known as quinine water. Quinine came from the bark of the
Cinchona
plants, a genus native to the Andes Mountains. The bitter-tasting bark had been widely used by the Quechua people of South America, who would mix it with sweetened water toproduce a drink they believed could prevent shivering in the cold. When European explorers reached the continent they picked up on the Quechua’s interest in the plants, and in the early 1600s, Agostino Salumbrino, a Jesuit brother living in Lima, successfully treated patients suffering from malaria using the Quechuan shivering cure. Quinine would remain a popular antimalaria remedy until well into the twentieth century.
    In 1858, Erasmus Bond, the owner of London soft drink company W. Pitt & Co., developed the first carbonated tonic water. Since Bond envisaged it as a medicinal product to help the British in Africa and India overcome the risk of malaria, he packed his tonic water with so much quinine that even the sweetened water couldn’t hide the vile bitterness of the substance. So the British abroad started using gin to blunt the acrid tonic. The gin did more than bring an alcoholic component to the beverage. At the molecular level, the structure of the essential oils of the juniper berries that give gin its flavor are similar to that of quinine. This chemical similarity causes the molecules to combine to create a more palatable drink that dampens the bitterness of the quinine. This taste-improving combination may have started as a way to help the medicine go down, but gin and tonic went on to become one of Britain’s favorite cocktails. The combination proved so popular that Schweppes launched its own Indian Tonic Water in the 1870s, which rapidly eclipsed Bond’s original in sales.
    By the time Schweppes Indian Tonic Water went on sale, the company was the biggest soft drink company in Britain by far, selling millions of bottles of its waters and flavored drinks every year. In 1884, flush with its success, the company ventured into America and opened a plant in Brooklyn. But the company’s bid for success in the United States was short-lived. In 1892 the company shut down its Brooklyn plant, having discovered that, unlike Europe with its gasogenes, tonic waters, and bottles, Americans preferred to get their fizzy kicks from an altogether different source: the soda fountain.

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Meet Me at the Soda Fountain
    It was night on July 14, 1791, when the mob reached Joseph Priestley’s home in Birmingham, England. By then the furious throng was on a roll, having torched the two meetinghouses of Priestley’s dissident Unitarian Church. Now they wanted the man himself.
    Since his influential experiments with carbonation, Priestley had also discovered oxygen, but his religious ideas had turned the scientist-clergyman into one of the most controversial figures in eighteenth-century Britain. His incendiary 1782 book
An History of the Corruptions of Christianity
caused outrage with its all-out attack on the Anglican Church and questioning of Christ’s divinity. As if that weren’t enough, he wrote another book declaring that he and his followers were “laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion: in consequence of which, that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually that the same foundation can never be built upon again.”
    The analogy instantly reminded readers of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators led by Guy Fawkes tried unsuccessfully to blow up the Houses of Parliament using barrels of gunpowder hidden in the building’s