# Beverage carbonation > Forcing carbon dioxide into water so that it sparkles when the bottle is opened - Date: 1750 - Era: Industrial age - Domain: [Food & Preservation](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/food/) - Rebuild stage: IV (Science & industry) - Difficulty: 2/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/beverage-carbonation/ Carbonation makes a drink sparkle by dissolving carbon dioxide in it under pressure and closing it in before the gas can escape. When the bottle is opened the pressure falls and the extra gas comes out as bubbles. Gabriel-François Venel described an artificial sparkling water to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1750; Priestley, Nooth and Schweppe then turned the trick into apparatus and a trade. ![Beverage carbonation · Forcing carbon dioxide into water so that it sparkles when the bottle is opened](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.BSnhB8jI_ZvHzQd.webp) ## Legend 1. Lower vessel, where the acid attacks the chalk 2. Glass valve between the lower and middle vessels 3. Middle vessel full of water, where the gas dissolves 4. Upper vessel and its tube, which take the water pushed out by the gas 5. Tap for drawing off the sparkling water ## What it is A carbonated drink is a liquid holding more carbon dioxide than it could keep at ordinary air pressure. The gas is forced into it under pressure, and the bottle or can is closed before it can escape. When the container is opened, the gas starts to leave the liquid as bubbles, which is what makes it sparkle and fizz. Some springs give such water naturally, and waters such as those of Selters in Germany or Spa, in today's Belgium, were drunk for health long before anyone could imitate them. Carbonation does the same thing on purpose. It needs three things: a source of carbon dioxide, a closed vessel in which water and gas are brought together, shaken or pumped, under pressure, and a closure that holds the gas in until the drink is served. The gas has come from many sources. Early experimenters took it from fermenting beer or made it by pouring an acid on chalk or marble. Later factories drew it from cylinders of compressed gas. The principle has not changed since the eighteenth century. ## How it works Water dissolves gases in proportion to the pressure of each gas above it. Ordinary air contains very little carbon dioxide, so ordinary water holds little of it. Above water closed in with pure carbon dioxide at high pressure, far more of it goes into solution. A small part of it reacts with the water to form carbonic acid, which gives sparkling water its sharp taste. Temperature matters as well. Cold water holds more dissolved gas than warm water, so drinks are carbonated cold and keep their sparkle best when cold. Warmed, the same water can no longer hold all its gas. ![A straight glass of sparkling water on a wooden table, with strings of bubbles rising from the bottom and from a raisin lying on the bottom covered with small bubbles, and a few bubbles bursting at the surface](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.Conl4_TA_28Gqyw.webp) _Bubbles are born on scratches, specks and rough surfaces, such as a raisin dropped in the glass._ When a bottle is opened, the pressure above the liquid drops to that of the air, and the water now holds more gas than it can keep. The surplus does not leave all at once. Bubbles need a starting point where a tiny pocket of gas is already trapped: a flaw in the glass, a speck of dust, a fibre or a rough surface, on the wall or floating in the drink. Dissolved gas passes into that pocket, which swells until a bubble breaks free and rises, and the part left behind starts the next one, which is why bubbles climb in strings. Shaking a bottle before opening it mixes small pockets of gas into the liquid, giving the surplus countless places to come out at once, and the drink foams over. Left open, the drink slowly goes flat as the extra gas escapes. Getting the gas in is the reverse problem. Gas dissolves only where it touches the water, so carbonating apparatus enlarge that contact by bubbling the gas through the water, shaking the vessel or pumping gas in under pressure. Nooth's apparatus of 1774 showed the method in glass. Acid poured on chalk in the lower vessel gives off carbon dioxide, which rises through a glass valve into the middle vessel, full of water. The gas collects under its top and pushes an equal volume of water up a tube into the upper vessel; part of it dissolves, and the sparkling water is drawn off at a tap. The valve lets the gas rise but closes when the water presses down on it. ## How to do it Making carbon dioxide in a closed bottle is dangerous: the gas keeps building up until the bottle bursts. Two bottles of sparkling water from a shop show the whole principle without producing any gas. ![Two unlabelled green glass bottles of sparkling water, both open, standing in a large earthenware bowl on a table: the left one, covered with condensation, lets only a few bubbles out at the neck, the right one, dry, is overflowing with foam that runs into the bowl; the two caps lie beside them](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.hYo-EUYf_Z1U5cib.webp) _The cold bottle keeps its gas; the warm one loses it as foam as soon as it is opened._ Put one bottle in the refrigerator for a few hours and leave the other at room temperature. Stand both in a large bowl in the sink. Open the cold one slowly, with the neck pointing away from everyone, and listen to the hiss; few bubbles rise. Do the same with the warm one: it hisses louder and more foam climbs the neck, because warm water cannot hold the gas that cold water keeps. Pour some of the cold water into a clean, smooth glass and watch where the bubbles start: always from the same few points, on the glass or on a speck in the water, never from clear water. Drop in a grain of coarse salt or a raisin. Bubbles at once cover it and rise from it in streams, and a raisin may float up, shed its bubbles at the surface and sink again. Leave the glass for an hour and compare it with a freshly poured one: the first has gone flat. ## History and evolution In 1750 the Montpellier physician and chemist Gabriel-François Venel read two papers on the water of Selters to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Evaporated, it left only common salt and a little lime, and he made an artificial version by adding marine acid, our hydrochloric acid, and soda to pure water, so that the gas was produced in the water itself. He called it "aerated water", thinking the sparkle came from common air held in excess. In 1754 Joseph Black, in Scotland, showed that the gas that acids free from marble and chalk was a distinct substance, which he called "fixed air". ![A large open wooden fermenting vat bound with iron hoops in an eighteenth-century brewery, the beer foaming inside; a board laid across the rim holds a shallow bowl of clear water just above the foam; brick walls and a wooden ladder against the vat](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.5fx4rJsd_1ezuRN.webp) _Priestley first charged water with the gas that collects over fermenting beer._ Joseph Priestley lived in Leeds next to a large brewery and studied the fixed air that gathers above fermenting beer. Water held in that gas took up some of it and acquired a sharp taste. He then produced the gas at home with oil of vitriol, our sulfuric acid, poured on chalk, collected it in a bladder and shook water with it. His pamphlet *Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air* was published in 1772. In Uppsala, the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman made sparkling water from chalk and sulfuric acid in the same years. The physician John Mervin Nooth complained that the bladder gave Priestley's water a taste of urine. His all-glass apparatus, read to the Royal Society in December 1774, kept the water away from leather and bladders, and Nooth's apparatus came into wide use in apothecaries' shops and homes. Johann Jacob Schweppe, in Geneva, turned the method into an industry. By 1783 he used a compression pump of his own design, which he called the Geneva machine, to force carbon dioxide made from chalk and sulfuric acid into a closed vessel of water, where an agitator helped it dissolve. With his engineer Nicolas Paul and with Henri-Albert Gosse he formed a partnership in 1790, and they opened a factory in Drury Lane, in London. Sparkling waters, plain or flavoured, were bottled in such works through the following century. ## Key facts - First artificial sparkling water described: Gabriel-François Venel, Paris, 1750 - Priestley's pamphlet: Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, 1772 - Nooth's glass apparatus: Read to the Royal Society in December 1774 - Schweppe's compression pump: Geneva, 1783 ## Requires - [Glass](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/glass/): Melted sand you can see through (c. 2,500 BCE) - [Distillation](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/distillation/): Separating liquids by boiling and condensing (c. 300) ## Sources - [Venel, Gabriel François (Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, W. A. Smeaton)](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/venel-gabriel-francois), Charles Scribner's Sons, via Encyclopedia.com - [Gabriel-François Venel](https://www.ac-sciences-lettres-montpellier.fr/academie/ressources/recherche/conference/1160), Académie des sciences et lettres de Montpellier - [The Origins of Soda Water (Joe Schwarcz, 2018)](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/node/7091), McGill Office for Science and Society - [Joseph Priestley](https://revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/?p=3385), Revolutionary Players, History West Midlands - [The description of an apparatus for impregnating water with fixed air (J. M. Nooth, Philosophical Transactions 65, 1775)](https://jimclifford.ca/philosophical-transactions-ocr-1665-1869/articles/jstor-106175/), Royal Society, OCR text via jimclifford.ca - [Nooth's apparatus, c. 1775 (object 1927-1198)](https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co1526/nooths-apparatus-c-1775), Science Museum Group - [Nooth's apparatus, Europe, 1774-1831 (object 1982-534)](https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co13768/nooths-apparatus-europe-1774-1831-nooths-apparatus), Science Museum Group - [Schweppes (The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails)](https://spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-830), Oxford University Press, via Spirits & Distilling - [Jacob Schweppe's Apparatus (History of the Soda Fountain)](https://scalar.usc.edu/works/history-of-the-soda-fountain/jacob-schweppes-apparatus), University of Southern California, Scalar - [Henry's Law (Introductory Chemistry, CK-12, 16.06)](https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_Chemistry/Introductory_Chemistry_(CK-12)/16:_Solutions/16.06:_Henry's_Law), LibreTexts - [Modeling nonclassical heterogeneous bubble nucleation from cellulose fibers: application to bubbling in carbonated beverages (Liger-Belair et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 109, 2005)](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16852837/), American Chemical Society, via PubMed - [Unleashing carbon dioxide (activity guide, Eckerd College)](https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/education/outreach/activities/activity-guides/unleashing-carbon-dioxide-eckerd-college.pdf), American Chemical Society Fact-checked on 2026-10-21. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/beverage-carbonation/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.