Well, among so many other good things we enjoy, it all happened right here in the Athens of the West, 18th century Philadelphia.

“Impregnating water with fixed air,” is how Joseph Priestley described it when he created carbonated water in 1767.

Preistley, an insufficiently celebrated genius of the Enlightenment was born a Yorkshireman and died in Northumberland, Pennsylvania in 1804. He was a scientific pen pal and colleague of Benjamin Franklin, provided spiritual reconciliation for Thomas Jefferson and corresponded with John Adams among other luminaries of the Enlightenment including his rival Antoine Lavoisier. The polymath founder of Unitarianism, a practicing if dissenting Minister, (which caused untold problems) and amateur scientist was recently the subject of Steven Johnson’s book, The Invention of Air.

Priestly identified graphite as a good electrical conductor, and saw that the sap from the gummy tree was good for removing errant pencil marks from paper – eureka, the eraser! He laid the groundwork for the elucidation of photosynthesis and by extension — ecological studies. Before Priestley came along there was only carbon dioxide and hydrogen. After Preistley; nitric oxide, hydrogen chloride, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), carbon monoxide, and "dephlogisticated air", or as we know it — oxygen. Priestly, as the book title suggests “Invented” (or at least “discovered”) air! For our purposes his most important invention of all was carbonated water.

Based on Preistley’s discovery, Johan Jacob Schweppe, a German born Swiss watchmaker (what else?) developed a process to manufacture quantities of carbonated water. He founded Schweppe’s in Geneva in 1783, moving it to London in 1792, and you know the rest. Shweppervescence.

Soda water, club soda, seltzer, pop, sprudelwasser, spritz, call it what you will, has been an American favorite almost since its inception when it was introduced in Philadelphia in 1807 by the Father of American Surgery, Dr. Philip Syng Physick. Two years later, after a failed attempt, Englishman Joseph Hawkins was granted the first U.S. patent to bottle soda water and opened a bottling plant on Chestnut Street. Like so many new arrivals on the food and beverage scene it was touted for its health giving properties.

It was in hands of a Frenchman, Eugene Roussel, that bottled soda water became a craze. In 1838, Roussel opened a perfume shop on Chestnut Street where he bottled and served mineral waters. He is credited with producing the first flavored soda waters, most likely using fruit syrups.

So popular did soda pop become that by 1842, Henry Seybert had reopened the Dyottville Glass Works, in the Kensington section of Philadelphia to make enough bottles to supply Roussel’s demands. Just a year later, William Hess, Peter Hall, E. McIntires, Dr. F.W. Hartley, David Bently and Sons had all gone into competition with the Frenchman.

In one week, in the same year, three Philadelphia area natives opened soda water businesses in New York. People could not get enough of the sparkle. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Charles Hires made a sensation with his new carbonated drink that he called, “the Greatest Health-Giving Beverage in the World," and in keeping with the time “the National Temperance Drink". Root Beer never looked back.

The point in time, however, upon which the history of sweetened carbonated beverages turned into an icon surely has to be 1888. This was the year in which Asa Candler bought the recipe for a headache remedy made with a peppery extract from the Kola nut from an Atlanta, Georgia pharmacist named John Styth Pemberton. He paid the lordly sum of $2,600. Sweet, deeply delicious, well carbonated and with traces of cocaine, from the use of coca leaves in the processing, it was apparently the real thing — he called it Coca Cola.

During this holiday time of year you may be inclined to turn to other more grown-up bubbly, but just remember your first love. The one who taught you how to enjoy the sparkle on your nose, the dancing bubbles on your tongue, the one that put the stars in your eyes that very first time.

Edward Bottone, a food and lifestyle journalist, is Chef/Instructor in the Culinary Arts program at Drexel University and has been a radio talk show host and TV presenter, and is also a food stylist and photographer.

Article photo from spakattacks via Flickr (Creative Commons), "The Cantankerous Cook" photograph from Hulton Archive/Getty Images, "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.