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NILES -- The owners of Kast Iron Soda Works traveled from Salem to give a "History of Soda Fountains" presentation at the McKinley Birthplace Home last week.
Kast Iron is an old-school style soda bar partnered with America250-Ohio as an official nonalcoholic beverage provider. Lesley Kline, who co-owns Kast Iron with her husband Wil, said they try to embrace the history of soda.
"We are a soda shop, and we also function as an old-timey soda fountain that has been a really fun history ([thing) for us to lean into. Not just with the drinks, but just understanding the history of the soda fountain itself, and knowing where it came from," Lesley Kline said. "We make sodas, we serve them on draft like beer would be on draft and we mix up all those sort of fountain things that are just really fun, and nostalgic."
As part of this, Kast Iron has given previous presentations like the one in Niles, usually in schools, to teach people about the history of soda, and the chemistry that goes into it.
"We have kids come in, classrooms come in, we do a little bit of history, they tend to like science more where we talk about states of matter and solids, liquids, gases, carbonation and things like that," Kline said.
According to Kline's presentation, soda was originally created in 1767 by the English chemist Joseph Priestley. Ironically, it was originally created to be a healthy medical treatment for several ailments.
"He figured out how to carbonate water, and it evolved into hanging bags over beer to pick up their fermentation, and it was causing bubbles and all these crazy things," Kline said.
"This was being touted as a health cure, a remedy of sorts, for all kinds of ailments, for fatigue, for achy joints, for upset stomach and all of these things. So all the way back in 1767, carbonated water was already starting to become something that people were drinking, but with health benefits in mind."
This continued in 1783 when Johann Jacob Schweppe first began mass producing carbonated water, founding the Schweppes company in Geneva, Switzerland, in the process.
Again, this was originally done to be a medical remedy, a far cry from modern soda and its associated health issues from tooth decay to heart disease.