If you could peek into the kitchen of any gadget-conscious citizen of late 18th-century Britain, you might spot Dr Nooth’s “Apparatus for impregnating water with fixed air”. In Georgian times, this elegant tower of glassware was as essential to the design-conscious household as a Philippe Starck lemon squeezer is today.
Dr Nooth’s three-tiered apparatus added invigorating fizz to a glass of plain old tap water. Nooth wasn’t the first to invent a water sparkler. His illustrious contemporary Joseph Priestley had cobbled one together two years earlier. But, as Nooth indelicately pointed out, Priestley’s equipment had one particularly off-putting fault – one that gave his fizzy water an unpalatably rank flavour. Angered by Nooth’s unsavoury criticism, Priestly hit back with one of the most bizarre suggestions to emerge from a chemistry lab.
TO STAY healthy in the 18th century, doctors recommended a regular glass of mineral water, particularly the sparkling variety. For infections, for diseases of the gouty or arthritic kind, even for bladder stones, you could do no better. Among the enthusiasts was poet and physician Erasmus Darwin. “A dram of sal soda,” he wrote, “or of salt of tartar dissolved in a pint of water and well saturated with carbonic acid (fixed air) by means of Dr Nooth’s apparatus, and drunk every day or twice a day is the most efficacious internal medicine yet discovered.” Some claim.
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A few mineral waters are naturally carbonated, but most are not. So to investigate the healthful properties of the gassy kind, never mind benefit from them, some way had to be found of making them artificially. Inspired by the quantities of carbon dioxide belching from the brewery next door to his house in Leeds, Joseph Priestley took up the challenge. His first attempts, in which he left shallow vessels of water on top of the fermentation vats, were only moderately successful. But in 1772 he invented a more efficient way of doing the business.
Priestley’s apparatus consisted of an upturned water-filled bottle standing in a basin of water. He created his carbon dioxide in a flask using a mixture of chalk and sulphuric acid. From this flask the gas entered a bladder attached to a tube which opened inside the mouth of the bottle. A quick squeeze of the bladder sent a stream of CO2 bubbling up through the water, carbonating it. Occasional shaking speeded up the process.
The weakness of Priestley’s apparatus lay in the bladder, which came from a pig or a cow and was kept supple by regular oiling. Nooth thought he could improve on this arrangement. And he was right.
Born in 1737, John Nooth studied medicine at Edinburgh, but seems to have been more interested in science than in doctoring. Elected to the Royal Society in March 1774, he presented his paper on the new apparatus the following December.
Nooth began gently enough. It was a shame, he said, that so few experiments had been done to investigate the curative properties of “fixed air”. Might the failure to experiment have something to do with the cumbersome design of Priestley’s apparatus? The good doctor himself could use it well enough, said Nooth, but others may have found that “the conduct of the process required more address than generally falls to the share of those who are unaccustomed to such experiments”.
It was Nooth’s next criticism that caused the trouble. The real flaw in Priestley’s apparatus, said Nooth, was the bladder, which when exposed to “the solvent power of fixed air” imparted an unfortunate taste to the water. “In some trials which I have made with Dr Priestley’s apparatus, it always happened that the water acquired an urinous flavour; and this taste in the water was, in general, so predominant that it could not be swallowed without some degree of reluctance.”
Nooth’s own apparatus was in every way superior. The lowest of the three vessels held the chalk and acid, and also supported the other two. Carbon dioxide exiting through a cork and ivory valve bubbled up through the water-filled middle vessel. The uppermost of the three acted as a reservoir, receiving water displaced by the CO2 in the vessel below.
With a bit of experimentation to find out how much acid and chalk to use, some vigorous shaking of the top two vessels to encourage the CO2 to dissolve, and several repeat performances using the same water, it proved possible to achieve “a very strong impregnation”. And by using a dilute solution of various salts instead of pure water it was even possible to mimic the composition of any naturally effervescent mineral water.
Priestley was mortified. The accusation that there was a whiff of the water closet about his sparkling water had injured his pride. He hit back a year later in a section of his three-volume Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air.
“That Dr Nooth did produce a water that he could not swallow without reluctance… I am far from doubting,” declares Priestley. “But that the urinous flavour came from the bladder, as such, I will venture to say is not possible.”
Growing sterner by the sentence, he points out that “few persons have had to do with bladders, and fixed air confined in bladders, more than myself”. He himself, he insists, never perceived a urinous flavour. Neither had the “many persons of most delicate taste” who had drunk water impregnated by his apparatus over many months. Those persons, he stressed, had included “many ladies”. Point proved.
But Priestley hadn’t finished yet. Nooth, he writes, did not claim that all samples of water produced by the apparatus were urinous to the taste buds, but only some of them. This, he says, “is evidence from his tacit confession that it must have been an accidental thing”.
He has a theory about that too. How had Nooth’s water come to be tainted? It was all the fault of the hired help. He delivers this seemingly groundless suggestion almost as an afterthought. “When the Doctor shall once more produce this urinous flavour … taking care that no careless servant shall have mixed any urine in the water that he calls for, I shall give this new objection to my process a farther examination.”
Careless? Asked to fetch a quantity of clean water, how could a servant accidentally mix urine with it? Perhaps the man mistook his master’s chamber pot for the water pitcher. Perhaps a passer-by in need of relief had taken advantage of whatever vessel the Nooth family used to store its drinking water. Either way, “carelessness” is hardly the word to describe such behaviour.
What Priestley appears to be hinting at is the possibility of malice on the part of the servant. “At present,” he writes, “I am inclined to consider this as an experiment of the servant, rather than of the Doctor himself.” What can he mean? Only one interpretation makes sense: that the servant deliberately urinated into the water on which his master was about to experiment.
What motive the servant might have had, or how Priestley could possibly know of such mischief, is hard to imagine. But having got this accusation off his chest, Priestley concedes that there is something to be said for Nooth’s apparatus. After arguing somewhat defensively that his own equipment is cheaper and less wasteful, he finally throws in the towel. “I have never recommended my own method for the use of a family since I have been acquainted with his.”
By the time the second edition of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air was published, Priestley seems to have recovered his composure. All discussion of the urinous slur has disappeared.
Nooth went on to become a military physician, and served in North America. He eventually returned to England, died in 1828, and has been largely forgotten. Priestley, by contrast, achieved lasting fame – though not, of course, for his ill-conceived gassing equipment.
In the end, neither Priestley nor Nooth were the ones to make a killing from carbonated water. A certain Thomas Henry was the first entrepreneur to make and sell it on a commercial scale. But the real breakthrough came towards the end of the century when a German-born naturalised Swiss man devised a wooden carbonating vessel in which pressurised carbon dioxide was encouraged to dissolve in water with the help of an agitator. His name was Jacob Schweppe. Whatever became of him?