The Fizzy Lifting Drinks

What it is

A carbonated beverage with the property of making the drinker float upward as if filled with lighter-than-air gas. In the 1971 film (not the novel), Charlie and his grandfather sneak away from the tour group to drink them and nearly suffocate in the ceiling fans; they escape by belching (releasing the carbonation) and floating gently back down. In the film, this episode is the cause of their disqualification from the factory tour.

Real-world basis

The fantasy of a beverage that makes you float is one of the most persistent desires in food-imagination, and the fizzy lifting drinks represent the most logically coherent expression of it. Carbon dioxide is, of course, denser than air — it is why carbonated beverages make you feel heavy rather than light — but Dahl is proposing a carbonation that operates by opposite physical principles. The closest real-world analogy is helium-infused cocktails, a molecular gastronomy technique in which drinks are infused with helium under pressure, producing a beverage that delivers an altered voice (helium raises the vocal pitch) and a peculiar sensation in the throat. This is not the same as floating, but it is the most direct physical approximation.

Cultural legacy

The fizzy lifting drinks contributed to a broader cultural conversation about carbonation and its possibilities. The molecular gastronomy tradition's interest in foam, spherification, and gasification of beverages — central to the work of Ferran Adrià at El Bulli and Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck — is a direct descendant, in terms of culinary imagination, of the kind of thinking Dahl was doing when he proposed a drink that makes you float. The question "what else could carbonation do?" is one that the serious food science world has been exploring for decades.

---