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