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Inventors of Soda Water

This knife makes the claim that it is from the inventors of soda water. I set out to

find more about the inventors. It wasn

‘

t long before I learned about The

Reverend Joseph Priestley. He

‘

s this guy who is widely credited with

discovering oxygen in 1774. Yes, it was already around for a long time but he

found some way to make it come out of an experiment of heating mercuric oxide

over liquid mercury. But wait - I dig a little deeper and find a Karl W. Scheele,

Swedish apothecary who, it is written, discovered oxygen two years earlier in

1772. But he didn

‘

t publish anything about his discovery until 1777.

Then I learned that Priestley also discovered hydrochloric acid, nitrous oxide

(laughing gas), carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide. This guy was really on the

ball. And he had done something important earlier - In 1767 he made the first

drinkable manmade glass of soda water. And like a magician in 1768, he stood

over a vat of fermenting beer at his local brewery and poured water from one

glass to another causing it to carbonate. It turns out that the water became

effervescent when it absorbed some carbon dioxide given off in the brewing

process. Later he published his finding in a paper entitled

―

Directions For

Impregnating Water With Fixed Air

‖

. It was and still is the basis for soda and

mineral water production.

Now let

‘

s take a look at the other side of the

―

Inventors of Soda Water

‖

knife: