For
some reason I had a bottle of soda
out on the counter right next to a
box of baking soda. That's all
it took for me to wonder just exactly
what the "soda" in
"soda-pop" meant. To make a
short story extremely long?
Today,
carbonated water, soda water and
mineral water all pretty much refer
to the same thing. However, their
literal definitions are completely
different and unique. People had been
drinking mineral water for years
believing that the bubbly
effervescence caused by free carbon
dioxide led to good health. Until
1767, people could only get this
water from natural springs. But in
that year, Joseph Priestly left a
bowl of water sitting a vat of
fermenting beer in Leeds, England.
The carbonation released form the
fermentation process became trapped
in the water above, which Priestly
noticed, then drank. This led him to
write the 1772 paper entitled ?Impregnating Water with
Fixed Air?.
His discovery would properly be
called carbonated water and not soda
water just yet. While his discovery
utilized the release of carbon
dioxide through fermentation,
Priestly later used chalk to create
his carbonation. By dripping
sulphuric acid onto chalk (calcium
carbonate), CO2 was released which
then "impregnated" the
water.
Almost
thirty years after Priestly's
paper debuted, it seems as if people
began using sodium derivative instead
of calcium carbonate, since the term
"soda water" first occurred
around 1798. It should be noted that
at that time, Sodium Carbonate was
simply called soda, since the word
"sodium" had not been
coined yet, as sodium had not yet
been isolated. While sodium had never
been isolated, sodium compounds were
well known for their healing and
baking qualities since time of
antiquity. Thus when Sir Humphrey
Davy isolated the element for the
first time in 1807, he named it
"Sodium" as it was the
elemental part of what people had
been calling "soda" for
years.
Davy
used the electrolysis of sodium
hydroxide (NaOH, also known as soda
ash) to isolate the element. Soda
water, then, is water impregnated
with carbon dioxide released from the
breakdown of a soda. Thus, the water
impregnated with carbon dioxide from
soda, was called "soda
water". Five years after
Davy's discovery,
"pop" was invented,
originally a mixture of soda-water
and ginger-beer, whose cork went
"pop" when it was drawn.
1873 marked the first recorded use of
the term soda-pop, which was
eventually shortened to just plain
"soda". And late at night,
if you slowly open the door of your
refrigerator you can sometimes catch
a bottle of soda and a box of baking
soda hanging out together sharing a
laugh and a story about their distant
relations.
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