http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a980529b.html
didnt it also have lithium in it?
And wasnt it also marketed during the depression, which was why having lithium made it so popular?
7-up was, indeed, marketed as “the lithiated soda”. I’ve seen reproductions of the ads. In fact, about 15 years ago I saw reproductions of those ads for sale. They probably still are. But I don’t think they knew about the psychoactive properties of lithium salts back then. I have no idea why people would’ve wanted to put lithium in soda. But then again, back then some people deliberately ingested radium and thorium salts in drinks (“radithor”).
I wasn’t wholly conviced that “lithiated” necessarily referred to the element lithium, so I did a quick dictionary search:-
Lithate \Lith"ate, n. (Old Med. Chem.) A salt of lithic or uric acid; a urate. [Obs.] [Written also lithiate.]
Related words (like lithic) are about evenly split between the element and the Greek root lithos, stone. Referring, in this instance, to bladder and kidney stones, and medicine for same. Perhaps the original advertising was aimed at claiming the stuff had some medicinal value? Since the target market wasn’t frivolous enough to buy a fizzy drink just because they liked the taste?
Just an idea.
Not too many years ago (to me, at least) there were a number of “Radon Mines” in western Montana. I never partook, but apparently the idea was to go into the mine and bask in the “healhtful” radon in order to cure what ails you. I leave it to the reader to decide whether this was local custom or local scam. (I lean toward the former view–as Cecil said in More of the Straight Dope: “Things could get pretty weird in Montana at times.”)
Steve Wright’s post is very interesting. Lithic acid is just an old name for uric acid (C[sub]5[/sub]H[sub]4[/sub]N[sub]4[/sub]O[sub]2[/sub]), and it has nothing to do with lithium, except that they’re both named after stones. Lithium is a constituent of geological stones, and lithic acid is a constituent of urinary stones (calculi). Uric acid is flavorless and odorless, but it is derived from animal urine or bird excrement.
The really confusing part is that “lithiated” and “lithic” can refer either to compounds made from uric acid (in old-fashioned usage) or to compounds containing lithium (in more modern usage). I can’t say for sure which sense applies to the original recipe for 7-up, but the excellent Lithium Toxicity - A Review says that 7-up did indeed contain lithium.
There does exist at least one compound that may be called “lithiated” in both senses of the word: a lithium salt of uric acid, lithium urate (LiHC[sub]5[/sub]H[sub]2[/sub]N[sub]4[/sub]O[sub]3[/sub]). But I doubt very much it was ever an ingredient in 7-up.
My brother-in-law has an old urn made of pitchblende, which was sold for use in the home to make “healthy radium water”. (He’s had it checked; it’s not particularly radioactive.)
As far as the “lithiated” in 7-up goes, it does indeed refer to lithium salts, not uric acid. I recall that from my reading, but darned if I can think of a cite.
As for the radon mines, check out http://www.roadsideamerica.com . They recently spotlighted those mines, which are apparently patronized by the Amish (!) as a “natural” cure. Doesn’t sound good to me.
For “Radithor”, read the book “Radium Girls”. One guy who took the stuff died of the effects in a truly disgusting fashion. So did a lot of women who ingested the same stuff inadvertently as part of their jobs back in the 1920s. Actually, the scariest part of the book “Radium Girls” is that the use of the radium compounds did NOT stop in the 1920s (as I had been lead to believe), but ciontinued through the second world war (WWII airplane dials were painted with radium paint to make them glow) and on into the 1950s and even later.
Uranyl salts were used in glassmaking, because it gave the glass a fluorescent yellow color. You used to be able to see examples of this in the Corning Glass Museum. In optics, Corning Glass (and others) manufactured uranyl glass optical filters.