Carbonated water was invented while trying to copy natural mineral springs

Fizzy water did not begin in a factory. It began with a clergyman leaning over the fermenting vats of a brewery, trying to bottle the magic of a health spa.

In 1767, the chemist and minister Joseph Priestley took up a post in Leeds, England, in a house next door to a busy brewery. The vats of fermenting beer gave off a thick, invisible layer of what he called “fixed air” — what we now know as carbon dioxide. Priestley noticed the gas pooling above the brew and began experimenting, pouring water back and forth above the vats so it would soak up the gas before it drifted away.

The result was water that sparkled and bit the tongue. His goal was deliberate: famous mineral springs and spa waters were prized as “health-giving,” and Priestley wanted to reproduce that prized effervescence artificially. He even hoped his fizzy water might fight scurvy on long sea voyages — a use that didn’t pan out.

He had found a way to produce on demand what nature made only in beer, champagne, and bubbling springs.

In 1772 he published a pamphlet, Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, and the Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal in 1773. Priestley, characteristically, never profited from the discovery.

That honor, and the fortune, went to Johann Jacob Schweppe, who industrialized the process in the 1780s and founded the company that still bears his name. Priestley’s idle tinkering beside a beer vat is the direct ancestor of every can of soda on Earth.