Eli Miller's Seltzer Delivery Service

"In Ben Katchor’s graphic novel The Jew of New York, an 1830s seltzer aficionado named Francis Oriole concocts a business plan of tremendous, kooky grandeur: he dreams of carbonating Lake Erie and piping fresh soda water to New York City. Seltzer must have seemed like a miraculous remedy in 1830, and still a relatively novel one—Joseph Priestly, who is credited with stumbling on the happy accident of carbonated water, made his findings known in the 1770s. In Oriole’s plan, seltzer would run—or spritz, I suppose—from every tap, and no one would suffer from indigestion. (Many of the book’s characters appreciate a good burp, which Katchor refers to by its wonderfully onomatopoeic Yiddish name: greptz...)