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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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. 

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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”.