Fizz by Tristan Donovan

after the pious town council banned the serving of ice cream soda on Sundays. Unwilling to be bossed around by these city fathers, one druggist got around the rules by serving ice cream covered in soda syrup that he only served on Sundays. Word of his Sunday treat spread to Chicago before being adopted by fountains throughout the nation.
    While the fountains thrived, bottled soda struggled to make similar inroads. Although the War of 1812 derailed Silliman’s ambitions, it ultimately helped America’s glass industry by prompting the imposition of import tariffs on foreign goods in 1824. This tax amounted to just over a penny a bottle, but that was enough to eliminate Europe’s price advantage and make the business of glass making a more profitable venture. And as America’s glass industry gathered momentum, bottled soda became a more common sight.
    One of the first people to see the potential in bottled soda was Eugene Roussel. Born in France in 1810, Roussel worked as a perfumer in Paris before moving to the United States in July 1838. He settled in Philadelphia and opened a store at 75 Chestnut Street. Roussel’s emporium sold toiletries imported from France and Britain, ranging from perfumes and fragrant soaps to skin creams and hair dyes. He also sold bottles of lemon-flavored mineral water, an idea inspired by the bottled waters on sale in Paris. Roussel’s flavored water, which came in French-style glass bottles, proved an instant hit with his wealthy clientele. During 1839 he sold 120 to 180 bottles a day and its enduring popularity led him to bring his soda to New York in 1845. Before the end of the 1840s, Roussel had sold his Philadelphia store to focus full-time on his flavored fizz, which by then was even being advertised in the frontier state of Wisconsin.
    Yet while Roussel’s upscale soda business thrived and inspired dozens of competitors, the bottling of carbonated drinks was still dogged by the challenge of how to retain the fizz. Throughout the 1800s people experimented with hundreds of different approaches to sealing bottles. There were the egg-shaped bottles that relied on the liquid engorging the cork, but even then the gas would seep out—and if sealed incorrectly, the cork was liable to shoot out due to the pressure inside the container. Another method involved placing glass-ball stoppers in the neck of the bottle. The bottle would then be sealed by pulling the ball up using a hook embedded within it so that the stopper wedged itself in the neck to create a seal. To open the bottle, drinkers would push down on the hook to force the ball back into the bottle. While this approach kept the fizz, the ball was hard to wash, increasing the risk of the drink becoming contaminated. Another approachwas the swing stopper, which is still used on bottles of Grolsch lager. This method used wire to hold the stopper tightly in place and allowed drinkers to pop open the bottle using a wire lever attached to the neck. It was easier to clean than the ball stopper but more expensive to make.
    It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the sealing problems plaguing bottled soda were finally resolved with the invention of the Crown Cork bottle cap by William Painter in 1892. The edges of these single-use metal caps would be crimped around the neck of bottles by machine to provide an airtight seal. The caps were cheap and the machine-based sealing method meant soda could be bottled faster than by the hand-based methods that preceded it, a point underscored by Painter’s 1898 invention the Crown Soda Machine. This machine condensed the soda bottling process into a single device that was capable of mixing the syrup and water, filling the bottles, and attaching the caps. It streamlined the bottling process and paved the way for the mass production of bottled soda that followed in the twentieth century.
    While soda bottlers struggled with sealing technology, the fountains