Fizz was invented by a chemist
In 1767, the chemist Joseph Priestley lived next door to a brewery in Leeds. He noticed the gas bubbling off the fermenting vats and found that water held over them soaked up some of it and became pleasantly fizzy. He published instructions for making it in 1772. The gas is carbon dioxide, and a SODA is fizzy because the gas is dissolved under pressure; open the bottle and the pressure drops, so bubbles escape. Our chemistry page covers gases and reactions.
A few years later, in 1783, a jeweller in Geneva called Johann Jacob Schweppe built a machine to make fizzy WATER in bulk, and moved his business to London in 1792. The Schweppes name is still on bottles today.
Cola began in a pharmacy
In 1886 an Atlanta pharmacist called John Pemberton created a syrup that was mixed with fizzy water and sold as a health drink at the soda fountain for five cents a glass. His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, named it Coca-Cola, after two of its ingredients, the coca leaf and the kola nut, and wrote the name in the curly script still used on the logo. In 1893 another pharmacist, Caleb Bradham in North Carolina, created Brad's Drink, which he later renamed Pepsi-Cola. COLA has been a worldwide drink ever since.
TONIC water was a medicine too. It contains quinine, from the bark of the cinchona tree, which was used against malaria, and British officials in India mixed it with other drinks to make it taste better. Quinine glows blue under ultraviolet light, so a glass of tonic lights up under the lamps in some clubs.
Same word, different drink
Several drink names change their meaning across the Atlantic. In Britain, LEMONADE is usually a clear, fizzy drink, while in America it is still lemon juice, sugar and water. British CIDER is made from fermented apples and contains alcohol, but in America cider usually means cloudy, unfiltered apple JUICE. SQUASH, a concentrated fruit drink watered down in the glass, is a British habit that Americans rarely meet.
PUNCH probably takes its name from a word for five in Hindi, after an early recipe with five ingredients. A fruit NECTAR is thicker than juice because it keeps the pulp, and borrows the name of the drink of the Greek gods.
A broken machine and a rubbery pancake
In the late 1950s, the soda fountain at Omar Knedlik's ice-cream shop in Kansas broke down, so he put bottles of soda in the freezer instead. Customers loved the half-frozen drinks, and Knedlik built a machine to make them, using parts from a car's air conditioning. It became the Icee, and the chain of shops called 7-Eleven began selling it as the Slurpee in the 1960s; the SLUSHIE has been a summer favourite ever since.
KOMBUCHA is sweet tea fermented by a jelly-like disc of bacteria and yeast that floats on top like a rubbery pancake. The Greek FRAPPE, iced instant coffee shaken into a foam, was invented at a trade fair in Thessaloniki in 1957 by a salesman who had no hot water. MILK is heated briefly to kill germs, a process named after the French scientist Louis Pasteur. The hot drinks in the grid, from TEA and COFFEE to the LATTE, ESPRESSO, CAPPUCCINO, MOCHA and COCOA, have their own page.