The success story of Schweppes began more than years ago in Switzerland. In , Reinhart Morscher broke new ground with his advertising graphics for this exclusive British beverage. The graphic artist born on 11 February would have turned 80 yesterday. Felix Graf was a curator at the National Museum Zurich until Now he works as a freelance publicist.
But who would associate this exclusive refreshing drink from England with Switzerland? Around , Johann Jakob Schweppe, a jeweller from Geneva of German origin, began experimenting with adding carbonic acid to water. In , together with the Geneva pharmacist Henri-Albert Gosse, he founded a soda water factory.
A brochure from the same year touts artificial mineral water as a table beverage for the first time. During the turmoil of revolution, Schweppe emigrated to London and established a new company in English industrialists continued to develop the soda water and in gave it the name Schweppes. A brief history of Schweppes. The discovery of Schweppes made him so happy that he began to import this tonic water in little crates.
As demand soared for this exclusive English beverage, a friend of Gauer, the owner of the Weissenburg mineral spring in the Simmental valley, set about successfully producing Schweppes in Switzerland. In charge of graphics at the studio was Reinhart Morscher from Bludenz in Vorarlberg who now lived in his adopted home cities of Basel and Berne. Morscher triumphed with his first Schweppes poster. He experimented with black and red crayons on Schweppes labels, concealed lettering and reassembled sequences of letters and words from label fragments, thereby creating a graphical language which communicated through concealment, concentration of colour and empty space.
The jury of the Federal Department of Home Affairs also decorated the poster as one of the best Swiss posters of the year Reinhart Morscher. Consumer poster for Schweppes. Offset printing. Photo: Swiss National Museum. A series of sketches for photographic magazine adverts are particularly interesting. The sketches drawn in felt-tip pen, which was still a novelty back then, reveal Morscher to be a master at combining word and image.
