Stuff You Should Know - The Amazing History of Soda

Episode Date: October 3, 2016

The soda we get instantly mixed at a fast-food joint owes a lot to a rich history going back to the Roman baths, that features drugs, diseases and explosions. Learn all about soda and soda fountains in this surprisingly interesting episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 soda sounds?

He trailed off. It's not the best title. Well. It's a well that's been gone to before. Oh, sure. It's really the history of soda. Kind of, yeah. You know? Yeah.

I just think it's interesting. I never really thought about it. I didn't either, 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. And that just about everything is more interesting

than it appears on the surface. Yeah, because soda, as we will learn, affected America and the world, and continues to. Yeah. Basically, all American dominance from the mid-19th century on is because of soda. But you are from Ohio, so do you say pop?

Used to. Yeah. You de-popped. I don't even know what I'm saying soda now, and now I say Coke. Yeah, I do too. You even say Coke when you want a sprite. Yeah.

In the South. I want a green Coke. You say, can I have a Coke? What kind? Sprite. Well, we're in Atlanta, you know? This is the birthplace of Coke. It is, which we'll talk about.

We'll talk about, but the initial, I guess, 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 Bobby Sox teenagers, right?

Bill Haley in the comments. Yeah. The Fonz. Sure, hair perfectly in place. Yeah, the Fonz all drunk. Penny Loeffers, did he get drunk? No, that was the joke. Like, happy days are so squeaky clean,

wouldn't that be a great episode if like the Fonz was hammered and like wanted to get on his motorcycle? Oh yeah. Everybody just tried to avoid him. Yeah. He'll break the jukebox again. He, yeah, that would be great.

Did you know that that's what Laverne and Shirley spun off of? Yeah. The Mork and Mindy. Yeah, that's just bizarre. Yeah. That Mork and Mindy. And Joni Lepstracci.

Well, sure. Yeah. But Mork and Mindy was set in the 70s. Yeah, very weird. Oh, 80s. I thought it was the 70s. Was it 70s? Based on the down vests, it was the 70s.

All right. I'm pretty sure. All right. So, regardless, when you think of Soda Fountains, you think of the 50s. Yes. Not the 70s. Right.

And happy days wasn't in the 50s. That came out in the 70s. Yeah, man. It was a big revival of the 50s culture in the 70s. Sean and I. Yeah, like there are. Greece? There always is, you know, people tend to reflect back

20 years or so. Nostalgia. Yeah, with nostalgia. There's a great. Oh, I think 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 Daly that centered around Sean Anna.

And they got it. I can't remember who he did it with, but it was, it might have been Matt Besser. No, I can't remember. But they did these characters and it was all about trying out for Sean Anna and drinking egg creams and being a professional water skier.

It was very, very funny. They were just making it up? Yeah, I mean, I'm not doing it justice, but just, just seek it out. Just type in Andy Daly, Sean Anna, and just sit back and get ready for being delighted for an hour. That's awesome.

I'll check it out. I'll check it out. But yeah, fifties, purity, bobby socks, good clean fun. Here's the thing, you're totally wrong if that's your conception of soda fountains. That's right. By the time the fifties rolled around, soda fountains were already so far on their way out.

Yeah. That basically by the fifties, what would happen to bars in the seventies thanks to the fern bar, it already happened to soda fountains by the forties and fifties. That's right. It was once handcrafted drinks made from freshly prepared ingredients

that were mixed there on the premises. Yeah, by soda jerk. Right, had been replaced by premixed stuff and canned ingredients that were put together by people who didn't give a darn about you or your family. That's right. 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, because you want her to be well, deliver 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. And really, all it did was cure an upset stomach. That's right. That was the dirty little secret. But the idea that they didn't know that though. No, they didn't for centuries, as a matter of fact. But the idea that you could drink 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 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? 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 the stuff. I was just surprised.

You mean, is 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 Dorito Effect. Oh yeah. You have to read it. Yeah, good.

It's about the food we eat today and just how incredibly manufactured it is. Oh yeah. But the really refreshing thing about it is that anybody can read this book. It's basically apolitical. It doesn't lay this at anybody's feet. It doesn't blame anybody.

It doesn't suggest there's anything nefarious going on. It's just like, here's our food right now. It's really interesting. I'll check it out. Really approachable, interesting book. They don't even blame Big Dorito? No. I mean, they basically trace the origin

of our current food standards back to the invention of the Dorito, hence the name. But it's a really great book, definitely worth reading. I'll check that out. And people ask us for book recs all the time, so. That's one. Yeah, pay attention. Yumi got that for me and I read it in like two days.

Did she read it? She hasn't read it yet. I grabbed it first. Oh, I got you. So she bought it for the family. Oh yeah. Okay, sure. Always for 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. Gotcha. Thought about me. Mine. Bought it. And I was like, give me that.

All right, so mineral water, it was very appealing. And human beings said, you know what? They'd be great if we could bottle this junk ourselves. Right. Even though bottling isn't really a thing yet, or at least not anything that worked. No, it was like stoneware and a cork. Yeah.

Does not give recarbonation. Like a breathable cork. So 1767 is when Joseph Priestly, we've talked about before. And oh too. Yeah, more than once. A British chemist, he said, you know what? I figured this out, fermented some yeast, mash, and put it in this water.

Get you pretty messed up. Yeah, 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 though. Nice going Priestly. So 16 years later, there was a Swiss scientist

named Johann Jakob Schwepp. Yeah. Sound familiar? Mm-hmm. He said, you know what, I actually built a device, this hand crank compression pump, and I can make this stuff. And I'm gonna found a company called Schwepp's,

because that's my name. Right. And you're gonna be hearing it for centuries. Yeah. And he actually, he was definitely onto something. What Schwepp 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?

Sure. Artificially carbonating, I should say. To carbonate it, there's some conditions that are most conducive to carbonating water, because CO2 molecules and H2O molecules do not like to get together. Yeah, you don't 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, their bond angles, I believe, are totally different. Yeah. They're at such an angle that they just do not go together very well.

But Jakob Schwepp said, you know what? I wonder if you use really, really cold temperatures, like near freezing water, that would help. He was correct. Correct. And also if you put it under pressure, maybe say seven atmospheres, it would help. He was correct with that too.

That's right. And that's what you need, cold and pressure. And if you get that going, then that gas dissolves into the liquid. And those molecules start to party and hug it out. And 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 CO2 canister and this cold water and put it together under pressure. This dude had to make his own CO2. Sure. So he used the old sulfuric acid and powdered marble combination. That old trick. Right.

Which we'll talk about is kind of dangerous to put together. But so to create carbonated water, Schwepp's 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. Yeah. 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. Namely, Mr. Charles Plinth, in 1813, 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. We've got one. You don't have one of those? No, I don't have one. You've got to get one. I've got a soda stream.

I'm all good. Oh, OK. Yeah, you don't need one then. 1813, and that means he could either squirt someone in the face and have a conny routine, or he could serve you some carbonated liquid, which is great. But you had to keep refilling that thing at the source. Yeah, that was the problem.

And especially, I mean, if you're having to make your own CO2, it's one thing to just use those little chargers today. It's not much of a problem. But if you have to make your own CO2 first before you create the siphon, that's a big process. Sure. So again, these guys are kind of poking away

at the edges of the problem of coming up with mass-produced carbonated water. That big, big problem. Right. And they're contributing and adding to this nutcracker, but no one's actually cracked the nut yet. It would be 1832 when a man named John Matthews. Yeah.

He's American, born in England. Best of both worlds. He developed a chamber, a lead line chamber, where he could actually generate that CO2. So Schweppes had already generated the CO2 before? Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah.

I thought Matthews was the first to do that. No. OK. Schweppes actually was creating CO2. Gotcha. He didn't have this self-contained apparatus that Matthews came up with. That was 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 bottling wasn't like a big, you couldn't mass-bottle it at this point. No, what he came up with, this invention that he came up with, was it was big enough

to serve a decent-sized clientele, going from the Schweppes era invention, where you could make 20 of these a day, 20 carbonated drinks a day, all of a sudden with Matthews invention, you can make like hundreds. Yeah. But 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. Yeah. 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 a soda. Hooray for him.

Yeah. So we'll take a little break, and we'll come back with one final gentleman, who, although he failed, he had a big impact on the soda fountain industry. Yeah. Who said you should know? You know how when you get something done with just the click of a mouse, and you get to put it off

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So don't wait. Go to Stamps.com before you do anything else. Click on the microphone at the top of the home page and type in STUFF. Let Stamps.com enter STUFF. All right, Benjamin Silliman. Silliman, I believe, is probably how he preferred it. Have it pronounced, don't you think?

He was very serious. He probably was. He said, you know what, I may be a failure in my businesses, but I'm going to go down in history as maybe the guy who had the most to do with the creation of soda in a mass ubiquitous way. Right. He was a professor of chemistry at Yale.

Go, jeez, what is he? Hoyas, right? Or bulldogs. Hoyas is Georgetown. So I think it's the bulldogs. It's the old bulldogs. Gotcha. The Yale Hodgman's.

That's your mascot now. He's a Yale, isn't he? Yeah, he went to Yale. You don't say. So because he was a chemistry professor at Yale, he didn't make a ton of money. Wanted to make a little dough on the side. And his whole jam was kind of going back to the old days.

This stuff is medicinal. I'm really going to 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 a Yale chemistry professor.

So he created 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 CO2. It bubbled up through water to purify it. And then that purified CO2 entered a very cold spring water chamber and bubbled up and created carbonated water, right? That's making me thirsty.

So Silly Man created two of these houses. And he set them up at two very elite places in New York, the City Hotel and the Tontine Coffee House. Right there on Wall Street. Right. And he started serving this stuff. But again, he was serving it as medicine. And the impression I have is that it was kind of like,

please give me your money. Great. Here's your medicine. Drink it. Please get out. There is no fraternizing. There is no talking. Some other people noticed this and said,

that's a really great idea. Costs have finally come down enough to where I can get some investors and we can open our own pump house, our own soda fountain. But we're going to throw in some books. We're going to promote people talking. And maybe they'll stick around and order a second one. Yeah, I don't see it.

That's weird, though, because the Tontine Coffee House was 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, like competitive. Yeah.

Soda fountains, like, buried him. But he was the guy who came up with the idea. So 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 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. And one of the big reasons why it was tied to pharmacies is because it took tremendous skill to properly create carbon dioxide. Yeah.

They blew up. Yes. Yeah, oh yeah. Like, you could die at a soda fountain just hanging out. They blew up. The sulfuric acid could leach into the finished product, and you could be served a cup of sulfuric acid. Not very good.

There were a lot of things that could go wrong in mixing this. So this is a technical expertise that pharmacists already had. So it made sense for them to say, we got this, which is why it does become less weird to associate the soda fountain with the pharmacy, which it would very soon become basically like hand in hand with. Yeah.

I grew up in Stone Mountain, and the old village of Stone Mountain had a pharmacy straight out of happy days. And it was like the 70s and 80s, and it sounds like the 50s. But I would walk down there and get a Coke float, and they would put it on my parents' tab. Oh yeah? Yeah. And this was, I mean, it seems like literally happy days

times. Sure. But it was 85. It was 85. Yeah, that was like 12 or 13. It's pretty great. Walking down to the old pharmacy. Thinking about how cool David Hasselhoff is.

Yeah, actually, I didn't watch Night Rider. I didn't either. I wasn't on the Hasselhoff train. Big fan of his music, but not Night Rider. But yeah, they would just jerk me a soda. And I don't even think we said why they were called soda jerks, because that's the motion that you would make. Yeah, you jerk the tap handle.

Yeah. Or soda jerkers, I've seen them call that as well. Or soda throwers, I saw it too. Oh, I like that. The reason they were called soda throwers is because it took a lot of skill to mix these drinks. Like on the level of the bartenders that were working at the time.

And 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. Yeah, but we haven't reached that point yet. We're at about the mid-19th century, when it's really starting to get popular, and it's spreading 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 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 joke, or not the joke, but joke was on them. So the pharmacists would say, well, I'll put some real drugs in here then. Let's see what happens. Yeah, like it didn't have to have minerals at this point.

Right, but people love the fizz. Right. They were crazy for the fizz. Still do. Right. And putting herbs and drugs and stuff into a drink was not an American mid-19th century invention, right? It goes back really, really far.

This is folk medicine. And actually in Europe, there was all sorts of stuff that we brought over, like the idea of root beer. It's actually way older than Charles Hire's invention. It goes back to Native America, indigenous European groups, just basically anybody who ever put roots, and bark, and boiled it up, 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 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 taking that same idea of using things like sassafras, or ginger, or whatever, and putting it together with this new sparkling water that you could get from a tap at a soda fountain, that was the big innovation. Remarkable.

And pharmacists at the time, they were adding some booze, like negligible amounts. Like alcoholics, if they were broke, they might go to the pharmacy to get what amounts to a shot of whiskey in their little elixir, because it wasn't taxed like alcohol was. So they could get a cheaper drink. And I guess it was more socially acceptable, too,

because you were going for medicine rather than going to the bar for leisure. Let me get my medicine. Right, exactly. What else? Drugs, not just alcohol. Drugs, drugs. Yeah, like drugs.

Just go ahead and say it. Drugs, heroin. Yeah, heroin, morphine, opium, cannabis, strychnine. Yeah, and this is pre-food and drug act of 1906 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 heroin wasn't going to pick me up. That was a take me down. Take me down. You had that at the end of the day. Yeah, you remember in the bars episode, we talked about bitters and cocktails. Those were originally medicinal supposedly, too. Well, people still swear about it, stuff,

for like a tummy ache, right? I guess. I could see bitters giving you a tummy ache if you had too much, but you know. You'd be the one to know. You like your bitters, right? I like bitters, yeah. I'm not, well, you know me, I don't drink a lot of that stuff,

but just the name itself turns me off. So I came across something in here, phosphates, right? I'm like, what is a phosphate? There's a type of drink that you could get around this time mid to late 19th century. And even up into the 20th century, there 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, some kind of, usually a fruit, maybe like cherry syrup or something like that. And carbonated water, and then this stuff called acid phosphate. And acid phosphate is this compound that gives,

it brings out like the sour notes 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 phosphate, that was another thing you would put in too. And originally, phosphates were thought to cure 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. And then all of them would be put together

and you would go drink in the morning and say, I'm just getting some medicine. Well, and this is a time of course, like 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 Collectors Weekly article.

Yeah, an addition to our own. By Hunter Oatman Stanford, who just has written some pretty interesting stuff. Collectors Weekly, it's like really bizarre that they put out some of the finest articles on the internet. Why is that bizarre? Just because you would think it'd be so niche that it'd just be too narrow,

but they're actually really good at taking in the expansiveness of whatever they're talking about. Yeah, the history of stuff, I bet. This is a time, they point out in the article in the late 1800s 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. What's the problem? Yeah, it's great. It's a bracer. Yeah, which was what people thought all the way up until like 1990s. What I thought was funny was that the person who was talking about how much cocaine

was usually found in a drink, a hundredth of a gram, and then the person goes on to say about a tenth of a line. Of cocaine. Right, and then they say, or a bump. Right, not that I would know. They also said. I'm joking about the bump part,

but they did say a tenth of a line. Yeah, I mean, that's what he's talking about. That's a very bizarre measurement. It depends on the line, I guess, too, right? Sure. I mean, it's a weird thing to quantify. Right. But I've seen-

You know, I mean, like a tenth of a line, like a normal line, no, like a hog. Just like, you know, a respectable one. Just a little rail. Yeah, I thought that was an odd quote from that guy, too. And here's the thing, as far as cocaine being, and we'll talk about Coca-Cola coming up, too, but I found a lot of varying amounts

from negligible to significant. I found one thing that said it took 30 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 know who to believe. And I think the secrets probably died with the people that had these recipes back then. Right.

Like, I don't know if we can know for sure how much cocaine. Coca-Cola still officially says that there was no cocaine, but- No, do they? I think that's their official stance. Oh, well, everybody else says there was definitely cocaine in it. You want to take a break then and talk about Coca-Cola?

Yeah. All right. I'll be right back. Josh, whether you're wearing suits, sweatpants, or a Canadian tuxedo, you're going to spend 24 hours a day just about in your underwear. That's right.

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or even just a single pair. Either way, you'll get 20% off your first order when you go to meundies.com slash stuff. That's right. That's meundies.com slash stuf for 20% off your first order. So, Chuck, we were talking about how you could find everything from heroin to cannabis to cocaine and drinks.

And most famously, you found cocaine, as far as everybody apparently but Coca-Cola says, in Coca-Cola. Yeah. And if you work at Coke or something like that, please write 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

and involved cocaine, but how is it not in Coca-Cola? I want to know if that's the case. I didn't want to know. That is straight. Unless they've changed their stance, but this thing I found that says their official stance is that it did not. OK.

So we'll see. All right, so it's 1886, late 1800s. And there's a former colonel 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 he's trying to find a solution for Civil War soldiers

who were addicted to narcotics, painkillers. Right. Because they did pretty lousy battlefield treatment. Sure. Well, they did the best they could. Yeah, well, it wasn't good enough. Medicine wasn't far along back then. Right.

And so he concocted this thing called Coca-Cola. That was the original Coca-Cola. Is it true? Do you have in there that it was originally made with still water and that no one liked it? And then he tried it with carbonated water? This seems senseless. Because carbonated water was all erased at the time.

Yeah, that's what I was about to say. That didn't make any sense. I could see that, though, a misstep, perhaps. Maybe. And it was first sold at Jacobs Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, for a nickel. Where is that? That was downtown.

OK. That was all there was of Atlanta back then. Sure. Like, Inman Park was a suburb. Right. It was considered a suburb. And for those of you who don't know, Inman Park now is just a neighborhood right off of downtown.

And the suburbs are 40 miles outside of Atlanta. Like everywhere else. 40 miles in a four-hour car ride. So Doc Pemberton makes this, sells it at Jacobs Pharmacy. His partner, Frank Robinson, was a bookkeeper and partner. He's the one actually named it Coca-Cola. He designed that script that they still use today. Oh, wow.

He came up with the first, I guess, slogan, 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 cocoa plant, and cola nuts. Right, from Nigeria, I believe, as well. Where they originate.

So it's like a very on-the-nose. And Coca-Cola, cola plants have like tons of caffeine in them. Yeah, so cocaine and lots of caffeine. Right. So it was doing the job, basically. Yeah. And in 1916, they developed that distinctive contoured bottle, which it took a lot longer to get that patented,

I think, like the 70s or something. Oh, really? Surprising. Wow. But I think they said the idea was they wanted you to be able to tell it, like, in the dark. Yeah. It was groping around.

Yeah, if you had a Coke bottle in your hand. So Coke wasn't the only one putting drugs in their drinks? No, of course not. Like we said, there were plenty of other drugs. Seven up, very famously, had lithium citrate in it. Oh, yeah? Until the, I think, the 50s or 60s, 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. So we jumped ahead a little bit. Going back again to the early 1800s is when these flavored sodas really first kind of came on the scene.

And they started a lot of citrus drinks. And the theory was that, like, people were 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 citrus oils pretty easily. Right.

So yeah, there was a lot of, like, orange and lemony flavored things early on. What else? Cherry, vanilla were some of the early flavors. Wintergreen was a big one? I don't know about that. I wouldn't want wintergreen soda, I don't think. Grape, nutmeg, pomegranate, cherry.

I used to love the grape drink when I was a kid. Oh, yeah? Like, fanna or knee-high grapes. Sure. Fago, Fago was what we had up in Ohio. Yeah, we didn't have a lot of Fago. I don't remember Fago grape, but Fago had a pineapple drink. Oh, my gosh.

Is it good? 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 still am an orange guy. I'll drink a fanna orange. Like, I'll drink, like, 10 of them a year. Yeah.

And it's just such a treat. Nice. Delicious. Like, all 10 at once, one day a year? I do, when I get so sick. You're like, oh, I don't ever want to see this again. My dad, oh man, he would drink the knee-high peach, like it was going out of style.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. I'm going to 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 flavor in the candy or whatever like that.

Yeah, because 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. Oh, wow. It's really good. And that should be their motto for whatever, all of it. Right.

They were using generally simple syrups, very sugary simple syrups. And like you said, they would mix them up right there. They had cool names. Who's this guy? DeForest Sacks had a book called Sacks's New Guide, or hence, DeSoto Water Dispensers, like all the books back then.

Right. There was an or in the title. 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, OK, so I'm glad you brought that up because if you walked into a really great hotel bar, say like the Waldorf Astoria in the 1880s or 90s, you would just be like, oh my god, this place is amazing. Even still today, they're pretty great. But they were like brand new marble, brand new polished wood, and brass, and mirrors, and onyx, and all sorts of just beautiful stuff, right?

Yeah, gorgeous. And if you looked a little further along the bar, you would say all you'd have to do is put in a row of carbonation taps and you'd have yourself a soda fountain. Because 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 1906 act, the Food and Drug Purity Act, they took drugs out and replaced it with sugar. And this was the big American innovation. But at the time, the 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. And then that made it really made to be like the champion of the Temperance Movement. So when the Temperance Movement came along in the late 19th century and really started to get some traction all the way up until what, 1919? The year before prohibition.

That was 1920, right? The last good year. People were like, soda fountains are the place to be. Yeah, there's a lady that was this woman that wrote a book called Soda Shop Salvation named Ray Catherine Aigme, or Aimee, and she kind of makes a case for the good that came out of prohibition, which was pre-prohibition. There 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 their dads. And there was more dining out.

There was a big rise in sugar as a whole. Like this is when ice cream really started to boom. Maybe part and parcel to the floats, like soda floats with ice cream. But yeah, she said some good things came out of prohibition. She said the USA needed a reset was how she put it. I'm drinking. Just period.

The sort of the cultures that came around because of prohibition was we were heading down a dark road, she thinks, with the saloon and bar culture and leaving the families out of it. So yeah, I thought it was a pretty interesting take. Yeah, I remember that from our bars episode, too, that after prohibition, because the speakeas, he didn't have any rules to follow, it was like a new thing.

Women started showing up and they've been going to bars ever since. But before that, it was strictly like males. Yeah, interesting. And so even before, but during and including after prohibition, Chuck, the soda fountain was just immense. Huge. I think in, oh, I can't remember.

Somewhere in the 19th century, the mid-19th century, New York City had like 600 something soda fountains in it. Just New York City, right? There were thousands and thousands of them around the United States. In 1929, there was something like 60,000 pharmacies in the United States.

75% of them had a soda fountain. Amazing. There was one 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 9,000 customers.

Wow. They made $250,000 a year selling soda soft drinks, which is like $3.5 million in sales in 2015 money. And then all of a sudden, it starts to dry up. Like we said, by the 40s and 50s, they'd become quaint. By the 70s, they were down to, I think, a third of pharmacies had a soda fountain still. Now today, I mean, good luck finding them.

There's just a handful around. Going to CVS and ask for a jerk me a soda and see what they'll throw you out of there. There's kind of a revival going on now. But it's just they just virtually disappeared. And what's interesting is they've actually tracked what killed the soda fountain. And there's a few factors that were pretty interesting.

Yeah, one of them, and we've talked about car culture and the culture of the expressways and highways and the suburbs and how America grew, 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 people were flying the coop, basically. Yeah, spending time out on the open road. Yep. You didn't really have them. You didn't want to spend as much time like hanging around a soda fountain.

Maybe you just wanted some refreshment to go. Right, the drive-through culture. Yeah, 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. Yeah, 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 in six packs and it became like the number. That's really surprising. Yeah, or at least they like to claim,

they take credit for that. No cocaine came up with the six pack. 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 Center for Human Rights, the Human Rights Museum? That's amazing. Where, the MLK Center? No. No. This is newer.

Oh, okay. It's just a couple of years old, but it's down, it's like the aquarium, the World of Coke, the Human Rights Museum. No, I haven't seen that. You gotta check it out. It's a downer, but in all the best ways. Oh, I'll go to that,

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. What? It's just one of those hometown things you ignore. Yeah. 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 HowStuffWorks.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 HowStuffWorks article, how all 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 going to call this, We Changed a 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&A, a young listener asked advice on career paths, and he said that you should do what they love. Trust me, that's not 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 knew it wasn't what I loved. I took your advice, got some experience volunteering at school, having always learned to love and share ideas, and that started a whole new career path. Now I've just finished my teaching qualification, which was really tough as a mature student raising my own kids.

And next week, start my first job as a class teacher at Y6 Primary. Nice. I think this is the end of elementary school for you guys, ages 10 to 11, kids. I hope I can engage and inspire children in my class the way 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, AKA Mrs. Young. Thanks a lot, Mrs. Young. That is very awesome. Congratulations. Way to go.

Yeah, and she was gutted to not see us in the UK. We gutted a lot of Brits. Yeah, I think it's hilarious. That's a popular term. They all said the same thing. They were gutted. Interesting. Yeah.

Well, thanks, Mrs. Young. Again, nicely done. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast or Josh O'Clarke. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can hang out with us on Instagram

and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.