Soon after the advent and rage of flavoring water with natural additives, the water market took a turn, and began to veer away from what seemed to be the original intent - which was to make a healthful drink. Soon, the concept of "soft drinks" was born and by 1861, the term "pop" was pretty widely used. Soft drink additives became less healthful and more synthetic. Fruit extracts were popular additives, but with those extracts came sugar - some natural, and eventually, leaned to the more synthetic. And the king of all colas, Coca Cola - trumped all others with it's extra zest of cocaine, for those who needed a wee "pick me up" in the afternoon.

One day in 1885 in the town of Waco, Texas, a guy by the name of Charles Alderton, who worked as a local pharmacist, invented Dr. Pepper, a drink he mixed himself at the pharmacy soda fountain and that locals referred to as a "Waco." According to inventors.com, Alderton named the drink after a friend of his, a certain Dr. Charles Pepper. By 1891, Alderton was running the Dr. Pepper Company, and by 1904, Dr. Pepper made it's real debut when it was served at the the World's Fair in St. Louis to over 20 million people, and soon after that, the period was dropped after Dr. and the first name dropped and it bears the title it holds to this day, "Dr Pepper," no punctuation. To this day, Dr. Pepper is the oldest soft drink syrup in the U.S.

A simple question about mineral water lead me quickly and stealthily to the history of sodapop and cola, and while I'm interested to know that Dr. Pepper used to be called a "Waco," it's time to return to the original topic of mineral and sparkling waters.

So - who do we thank the most for our bottled water, if we are to thank anyone? Well, we could thank that nameless person back in the seventeenth century who decided to bottle spring water and who set out to market what was, for many years a free commodity? Isn't selling bottled water from a spring a bit like selling the air from a particular part of the alps or somewhere else where ethe air is purer? It seems almost wrong to charge people for something that they need in order to live. Granted, it doesn't have to be bottled, but charging for water seems off somehow, but then, they charge for oil, gas, and etc etc.

According to one good source, the true granddaddy of bottled water is a certain John Mathews, an Englishman who emigrated to America in 1832, and who knew how to make carbonated water that kept the same fizz it had in a natural spring of sparkling water. Mathews spent many years serving his home-made brew to the people of New York, and supplying stores that had soda fountains with his extra-fizzy water. Mathews would later be credited to what would become a huge boom in the soft drink industry, according to sodafountain.com.