Have You Ever Wondered Who Invented Soda Tablets...?

Well I just found out. And it's so much cooler than I ever thought it would be.

Have you ever wondered what Bluetooth and Incrediballs have in common?

Okay, fine, that might be a bit niche.

But the person who made it possible to track your suitcase around the world also came up with the first soft drink tablet.
It sucked (apparently), but it was the first step in an 80 year R&D timeline (which really makes our current delays seem like nothing, right?).

That person was Hedy Lamarr - ‘the world’s most beautiful woman’.

Hedy (real name Hedwig - yes my mind went straight to the owl too) was an Austrian actress across the 1930s, 40s and 50s. She is particularly famous for being the first woman to er, express enjoyment, in a movie and eventually ended up escaping her arms dealer husband by fleeing the country - ending up in America.

A lot of people know of her for her movie credits, but less is known of her talent for inventing the coolest stuff.

She came up with a bunch of things that solved problems, like a glow-in-the-dark dog collar and better traffic lights.

In the early years of WW2, Hedy attended arms deals with her first husband (to incentivise the buyers apparently), and that was where she learned that missile tracking systems were easily jammed.

She spoke about it with a composer friend of hers and they came up with the idea of ‘frequency hopping’ - where the transmitter & receiver of a signal could quickly bounce between frequencies to prevent the signal being jammed. They filed a patent in 1942 and approached the US Navy with their invention to aid the fight against Nazi Germany, but ultimately the Navy didn’t deem it practical.

It wasn’t until a couple of decades later than the idea was picked back up for various purposes within the military, before making it’s way into the mainstream commercial sphere and making things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and mobile phones possible.

World-changing tech for sure, but she did something way more important afterwards…

She invented the soda tablet.

In the early 1940s she tinkered about with a dissolvable tablet that could be dropped into water and make a cola flavoured drink.

She did so because she was always looking at the world around her and wondering how she could improve it. A tablet made a lot of sense for military supply chains and travel in general because everything was packaged in glass and very heavy. This was well before plastic bottles were around, in fact Coca Cola only started using those in the 1980s.

Unfortunately they didn’t go down very well. Hedy herself said it ‘tasted like Alka-Seltzer’ which isn’t a ringing endorsement. The chemistry wasn’t developed yet, the sweeteners didn’t exist, and I have no doubt the options available for flavours were… limited.

Now technically she didn’t invent the idea of an effervescent tablet, as Alka-Seltzer was launched in 1931 (it’s an effervescent antacid), but she did position it as an everyday drink, not as a medicine.

A decade later as chemistry improved, a brand called ‘Fizzies’ launched a soft drink tablet. The brand had a pretty up and down life: it was discontinued in the early seventies, then relaunched in the mid 1990s, before being discontinued again just a few months later. They were again relaunched in the late 2000s, and finally discontinued in 2016. I choose not to take that as an omen.

Let’s hope it’s third time lucky…

Women’s contributions to science and technology throughout history are often forgotten, but Hedy should be known for so much more than being the ‘world’s most beautiful woman’.

It’s taken 80 years so far to launch a truly delicious soft drink tablet (yes, they are a bit different to the water flavouring ones out there), but we’re getting pretty close now…