The World of Caffeine

by Weinberg, Bennett Alan, Bealer, Bonnie K.

  3. Hugh Tait, Clocks and Watches, p. 18.

  4. Perhaps a coincidence? Consider that, as noted above, the sophisticated mechanical clock was first invented and used in China in the Han dynasty in the eighth century, exactly the time at which Lu Yü wrote The Classic of Tea and tea became a dominant force in Chinese culture. And, although not even the practical wheel, much less the mechanical clock, were known to the Maya in pre-Columbian days, these American methylxanthine pioneers are famous for their complex calendric calculations and have been often and justly called the people “obsessed with time.”

  5. In 1657, Saloman Coster, a clockmaker in the employ of Christian Huygens (1629–95), the Dutch polymath and celebrated rival of Newton, was the first to use the revolutionary pendulum mechanism to regulate a clock. The next year Huygens, whose attainments encompassed music, mechanics, astronomy, mathematics, and physics, published the first rigorous treatment of the pendulum mechanism and included detailed plans for constructing the pendulum clock. The reason the advent of this mechanism constituted such a critical advance is well explained in Tait’s meticulously researched and abundantly illustrated Clocks and Watches:

  The pendulum has inherent timekeeping properties because it is restored by gravity. Whereas the foliot and balance will remain in whatever position they may be in when they come to rest, the pendulum will always come to rest in the one position, the point in the arc where the pendulum bob is at its lowest, because of the force of gravity. By successfully applying a clock mechanism to keep the pendulum swinging, to count its swings, and translate them into hours and minutes on the dial, Christian Huygens made possible the production of clocks that were far more consistent timekeepers. Because the pendulum is subject to the physical law of gravity, it, unlike the foliot and balance, is less dependent on variations of force within the clockwork. (p. 51)

  6. Caffeine and the Machine

  I sing the body electric…

  Walt Whitman

  Perhaps the profile of caffeine’s cognitive effects is one reason that its use has expanded so dramatically since the advent of the scientific and industrial age. Caffeine seems to help biological systems, like people, to functionally conform with mechanical or electronic systems, such as industrial machines or computers. Some have a dour view of the resulting congruity. A more balanced view might encompass not only the indignities and inconveniences of finely regulated and cooperative economic lives, but also recognize the tremen dous wealth, an abundance unimaginable in preindustrial, preurban centuries, that has been made possible only by a general ability of people to, in certain limited ways, function together like parts of a great machine. Without caffeine, many of the complex and farreaching achievements of modern civilization could not have been realized. To those who malign the rigors and exigencies of contemporary work life, we commend this comment by Freud: “I find it a constant surprise, that, little as people are capable of existing in isolation, they nonetheless resent and feel as a heavy burden the cooperation and compromises that civilization demands of them.”

  7. Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. 40.

  8. Phillips, Orchard, p. 67, writes that chocolate “is esteemed the most restorative of all aliments, insomuch that one ounce of it is said to nourish as much as a pound of beef,” and tells of a friend who, “during the retreat of Napoleon’s army from the North, he fortunately had a small quantity of little chocolate cakes in his pockets, which preserved the life of himself and a friend for several days, when they could procure no other food whatever, and many of their brother officers perished for want.”

  9. Philip Morrison, review of The Little Ice Age, by Jean M.Grove, Methuen & Co. Ltd., Scientific American, May 1989, p. 142.

  10. Ibid. Records demonstrate that, on either side of the North Atlantic, there was no climatic summer in 1816, resulting in the general destruction of corn and low yields of other crops, and subjecting the populations of Europe to what has been termed “the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world.”

  PART III

  introduction

  1. Although informality and strenuous work are generally associated with coffee, just as ceremony and leisure are generally associated with tea, the Arabs of Cairo, at least, have reversed this pattern. In that city, much after the fashion of the Bedouins, coffee drinking is a complicated social affair, its forms reflecting the status of the host, his guests, political affiliations, offering a formal setting for exchanging information, telling stories, and resolving arguments. However, tea drinking is a much more casual undertaking and, in addition, tea, not coffee, is the stimulant preferred by laborers. As Louis Vaczek and Gail Buckland tell us, speaking of nineteenth-century practices in their book Travellers in Ancient Lands: “This beverage too was brewed so strong that the caffeine and tannin in a thimble-sized glass were enough to jolt one’s system heartily. Boiled black tea, in fact, became the standard drug for heavy laborers, who stopped regularly to ease their exhaustion and hunger with gulps of syrupy, revitalizing black tea” (p. 162).

  CHAPTER 9

  islands of caffeine(1)

  1. Ukers, All about Tea, vol. I, p. 8.

  2. Ibid., p. 9.

  3. Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 293.

  4. The tea ceremony itself can be illuminated for Western readers by comparing it with the dialectical method of Socrates. In the dialectic of Socrates, the goal was similar: to treat of the ordinary aspects of life with the hope of achieving an understanding beyond imagination (eikasia), sense perception (pistis), and even reason (dianoia), to reach an intuitive understanding of the Forms, the illumination of the soul that Plato called noesis. Like the Bodhisattva of Buddhist tradition, who after his enlightenment returns from the Void to lead his fellow creatures on the Path away from suffering, the philosopher of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, after escaping to see the world illuminated by the light of the Good, returns to teach the way of liberation to his still ignorant compatriots. (Plato does not use these four words for the degrees of knowing consistently throughout the Republic. However, this is the scheme he sets up to accompany the Allegory of the Cave.)

  5. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, pp. 272–73.

  6. Ibid., p. 302.

  7. Adapted from translation quoted in Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 65. Rikyu’s valediction was actually two poems, one Japanese and one Chinese, which Okakura has blended together.

  8. Horst Hammitzsch, Zen in the Art of the Tea Ceremony, p. 31.

  9. Ibid., p. 31

  10. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, p. 190.

  11. Ibid., p. 194.

  12. Okakura, Book of Tea, p. xi.

  13. Ibid., p. 2.

  14. Ibid., p. 7.

  15. Ibid., p. 5.

  16. Ibid., p. 7.

  17. Ibid.

  18. A. Watts, Way of Zen, p. 190.

  19. Although several Europeans have prior claims, around 1900 Dr. Sartori Kato, a JapaneseAmerican dentist, is credited with developing an early form of soluble, or instant, coffee.

  20. Boye De Mente, The Whole Japan Book, p. 300.

  21. Harry Rolnick, The Complete Book of Coffee, p. 37.

  22. David Landau, “Specialty Coffee and Japan,” Coffee Talk Magazine, September 1995.

  CHAPTER 10

  island of caffeine (2)

  1. Quoted in Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 31.

  2. Ibid., p. 33.

  3. Ibid., p. 35, quoting Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, vol. 5, p. 26, London, 1627.

  4. Quoted in Jacob, Epic of a Commodity, p. 44.

  5. An example of this judgment is found in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, in which the author describes doctors as men who, frustrated by their incapacity to succeed in any other field of study, took up medicine as a last resort.

  6. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 53.

  7. John Evelyn, Works, note, p. 11. More frequently quoted are Evelyn’s words from an earlier edition: “He was the first I ever saw drink Coffe, which custome came not i
nto England til 30 years after.” Most commentators, following Ukers, explain that Evelyn must have meant “thirteen years” and not “thirty,” because the first coffeehouse in England opened in 1650. However, it is more plausible that Evelyn was referring not to the opening of a single coffeehouse when he speaks of the “custom” of drinking coffee, but instead the time when coffee drinking became a common enjoyment throughout the country.

  8. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 36, quoting Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxiensus, vol. 2, col. 658, London, 1692.

  9. Oliver Lawson Dick, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, p. 1, note viii.

  10. Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses, p. 18.

  11. Ibid., p. 24

  12. “The Trade of News also was scarce set up; for they had only the publick Gazette, till Kirk got a written news letter circulated by one Muddiman. But now the case is much altered; for it is become a custom, after Chapel, to repair to one or other of the Coffee Houses (for there are diverse) where Hours are spent in talking, and less profitable reading of News Papers, of which swarms are continually supplied from London. And the Scholars are so Greedy after News (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it…a vast loss of Time grown out of a pure Novelty; for who can apply close to a subject with his Head full of the Din of a Coffee House?” (Ibid., p. 27).

  Muddiman was an ex-schoolmaster turned journalist, a man with an unsavory reputation. In Cambridge, in 1659, he started Newsbook, a sixteen-page newspaper that was distributed at Kirk’s coffeehouse, and he was also employed by the Commonwealth to help regulate the coffeehouse keepers, for whom the Puritans had little affection. In fact, Cromwell had overcome his scruples against the intoxicating power of caffeine and the unwholesome dens of the coffeehouses and refrained from banning coffee only on account of its medicinal value.

  13. Ibid., p. 28

  14. Aubrey gives a slightly different account of the origins of the Royal Society, which, however, comes to the same ending. In his biography of John Wilkins (1614–72), private chaplain to Charles I’s nephew, and first secretary of the officially constituted Royal Society, he says,

  He was the principall Reviver of Experimentall Philosphy at Oxford, where he had weekely an experimentall philosophicall Clubbe, which began 1649, and was the Incunabula of the Royall Society. When he came to London, they mett at Bullhead taverne in Cheapside (e.g. 1658, 1659, and after) till it grew to big for a Clubb. The first beginning of the Royal Society (where they putt discourse in paper and brought it to use) was in the Chamber of William Ball, Esqr., eldest son of Sir Peter Ball of Deven, in the Middle Temple. They had meetings at Taverns before, but ‘twas here where it formally and in good earnest sett up: and so they came to Gresham Colledge parlour.

  15. John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London, pp. 269–70.

  16. Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, p. 467.

  17. Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 26.

  18. Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, p. 467.

  19. The list was published by Thomas Dangerfield (1650–85), himself a perjurer and conspirator.

  20. Bramah, Tea & Coffee, p. 107

  21. Ellis, Penny Universities, p. 38.

  22. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 55.

  23. Jacob, Epic of a Commodity, p. 95

  24. Ibid.

  25. Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History, p. 44.

  26. The population had expanded rapidly in the thirteenth century, until it reached about five million and roughly stabilized. Great landlords prospered, but the median size of peasant farms fell, with no compensating productivity increase.

  27. Nicol, Treatise on Coffee, p. 15.

  28. Moseley, Effects of Coffee, p.20.

  29. This year also marks the first mention of coffee in the statute books of England, for in 1660 a duty of fourpence a gallon was imposed on the prepared drink.

  30. Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, pp. 379–80.

  31. In the introduction to his edition of Curiosities of Literature, Benjamin Disraeli, Isaac’s famous son, relates how his father liked come to town to “read the newspapers at the St. James’ Coffee-house,” finding their “columns filled with extracts from the fortunate effusion of the hour,” and that it was in this place that he first heard his own fame as a writer manifested in animated conversations. Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii.

  32. Evelyn, Works, note, p. 11.

  33. Forrest, Tea for the British, p. 25.

  34. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. 5, p. 521.

  35. Waller’s poetic celebration of taking tea continued through the eighteenth century, for example, in the works of John Cooper (1723–69), called “the Laureate of the tea-table.” Quoted in Walsh, Tea, p. 234.

  36. Forrest, Tea for the British, p. 28.

  37. Thomas Brown, The Works of Thomas Brown, vol. 3, p. 86.

  38. Tatler, no. 148, Tuesday, March 21, 1710.

  39. Certainly the dialogue was nothing new in the history of prose, for it had been a vital literary form from Plato’s Symposium (fourth century B.C.) to Galileo’s vernacular Dialogue of Two World Systems (1632), which, even though the scientist had obtained permission to write it, incurred his condemnation by the Inquisition.

  40. Of course not everyone welcomed the new style. John, Baron Hervey of Ickworth (1696–1743), in his masterpiece, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, depicts the life at court from George II’s accession in 1727 to Queen Caroline’s death in 1827. Written in a largely discursive and occasionally epigrammatical style, his prose conveys vivid, intimate images of royal lives. Speaking of himself in the third person, he writes that, as he entered the queen’s bedroom at breakfast, “Lord Hervey found her [the ailing queen] and Princess Caroline together, drinking chocolate, drowned in tears.”

  Hervey’s style is brilliantly realistic, and its sustained reportorial restraint is moving in the manner of Stendhal, but as third-person narrative it is at the antipode from dialogue. Neither did Hervey find any use for dialogue in polemics, complaining that an argument posed in dialogue was “stiff, forced, and unfair.” Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, p. 352.

  41. As Socrates had said that the dialectic was an image of the activity of philosophy.

  42. Quoted in Jacob, Epic of a Commodity, p. 97.

  43. Dobrée in his outstanding English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (1959), while acknowledging the social impact of the coffeehouse, asserts that, as literary forums, they hosted insular cliques that could have had little influence on the development of ideas or letters. Dobrée cites Swift’s quip, spoken of the clergy but which could have been applied with equal justice to other groups of coffeehouse attendees of the day, “They have their particular Clubs, and particular Coffee-Houses, where they generally appear in Clusters.” We reply that, even if only in regard of their having been the places where the first newspapers were written and published, it is difficult to entertain an image of coffeehouse insularity. Further, London was small, and the critical influence of the judgments rendered in coffeehouses, from the redoubtable Rota to the Literary Club a century later, were enough to make or break a new book throughout the city. And, after all, many of the literary stars of the coffeehouses took their place alternately in one coffeehouse constellation or another, as their fancies of an evening inclined them in their courses.

  44. Ibid., p. 566.

  45. Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, p. 227.

  46. Quoted in Stella Margetson, Leisure and Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, p. 39.

  47. Although most of what we know of this illustrious society appears in Boswell’s work, Macaulay tells us that the maligned follower of Johnson “was regarded with little respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat among them.” Thomas Macaulay, Life of Johnson, pp. 43–44.

  48. Ibid., p. 45.

  49. Ibid., pp. 44–45.

  50. For example, G
reat Britain‘s Postmaster, a political and commercial publication, devoted an entire issue in 1707 to a dreadful poem called “The British Court,” about the sublimities of the entourage of Queen Ann. As Dobrée, who describes Addison as “the first Victorian,” explains in English Literature in the Eighteenth Century: “It was possibly in this way that a mass of new readers, intent in the first instance upon the actual, practical, the useful, came to regard verse as natural medium, would read at first, perhaps, Defoe’s ‘True Born Englishman,’…and finally [progress] to better things…even Pope’s ‘Windsor Forest’ (Dobrée, p. 8)

  51. Dobrée, English Literature, p. 8.

  52. Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London, p. 323.

  53. Macaulay, Life of Johnson, p. 51.

  54. Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1300, 8.49.

  55. Tea also figured into the lives of the Romantic poets, as this snippet from 1802, written after a cross-country walk of many miles during the years Coleridge and Wordsworth were still collaborating on the Lyrical Ballads, demonstrates:

  The Rocks, by which we passed, under the brow of one of which I sate, beside an old blasted Tree, seemed the very link by which Nature connected Wood & Stone...

  Here too I heard with a deep feeling the swelling unequal noise of mountain Water from the streams in the Ravines

  We now found that our Expedition to the Trossacks was rashly undertaken we were at least 9 miles from the Trossacks, no Public House there or here it was almost too late to return, and if we did, the Loch Lomond Ferry Boat uncertain. We proceeded to the first House in the first Reach, & threw ourselves upon the Hospitality of the Gentleman, who after some Demur with Wordsworth did offer us a Bed & his Wife, a sweet and matronly Woman, made Tea for us most hospitably. Best possible Butter, white Cheese, Tea, & Barley Bannocks.