My father took a great interest in trying to keep bottles of soda from going flat. He died when I was 16. One afternoon, after I had come home from school, my aunt and the woman who had been my nurse from birth to about 8 years old appeared at our Park Ave apartment.
“We have some not so good news. “ my Aunt said.
I don’t remember what she said next, but the fact conveyed was that my father had had a cerebral hemorrhage while playing bridge on a transatlantic passenger liner.
“Just like Roosevelt” I thought. I knew that my name, Franklin, was after FDR.
Up to that point in my life, I had never confronted my father directly in any way. I never remember it occurring to me to go against him. It was not that I was fearful of doing it, it just never appeared as a possibility. Now, I would never get that chance.
Seltzer was sold in quart bottles and invariably the last half of the soda was undrinkably flat. A series of different stoppers appeared on the bottles in the refrigerator, each one deemed a failure. He was on the wrong track.
After floundering around, at 30 years old, I discovered my love for Physics. Here, at last, was the closest thing I had found to Truth. The “Laws of Physics”. Newton’s deductions of the Law of Gravity. Einstein, discovering that time, time itself, could be slowed down by motion. However, small, I had be part of this science.
As part of my training, I had to maintain a large vacuum system. At Brandeis, in those days, pieces of apparatus which had outlived their usefulness as research tools, could be donated to the student laboratories. One of these was a Stern Gerlach apparatus. In this device a beam of atoms, was split into distinct spots, rather than the continuous smear predicted by Classical Physics. The students were able to directly observe the effect of Quantum Mechanics!
But the device was old, the seals would constantly leak, and most of our time was spent in chasing down and fixing these leaks. After experience with these seals I realized that my father soda bottles did NOT leak, not enough to make the soda go flat. I knew that rubber and glass made an excellent seal at there pressure levels of an ordinary soda bottle.
The bottles themselves are telling you the secret. ‘Pffft’ goes the bottle when you remove the top. I purchased a set of 6 oz glass bottles with rubber gasket held down by a spring. After chilling a quart bottle of seltzer, I opened it and decanted it into my small bottles.
Each bottle retained its fiz quite well.
On a bright Spring day, I walked across the stage, to be presented my Ph. D., by the tall powerful looking woman who was then the President of the University. I thought
“Dad, I solved the flat soda problem”.