The World of Caffeine (2 page)

Caffeine-bearing beverages are so common in the late twentieth century that it is difficult for us to imagine the curiosity, wonder, excitement, fanfare, disapproval, intrigue, and even reverence that surrounded their early use in the East and attended their introduction to the West. Today the culture of caffeine is experiencing a renaissance in the dramatic increase of cafés and coffeehouses occurring in virtually every major American city; and there can be no doubt that the ancient Turkish tradition of meeting at cafés to discuss, gossip, mingle, and relax, carried forward by the English coffeehouse institution, has come to life around us. In the workplace, most Americans have developed a deep sympathy with T.S.Eliot’s J.Alfred Prufrock, who said, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” The story of caffeine, as a controversial drug of work and play, is what we explore in the pages that follow.

Although caffeine-bearing plants may have been used for their pharmacological effects from before recorded history, it was not until the flowering of interest in plant chemistry in Europe in the beginning of the nineteenth century that caffeine itself was first isolated and named. The discovery was made by Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, a young physician, in 1819 as a result of an encounter with the seventy-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, baron of the German empire, one of the greatest poets the world had seen, and the preeminent intellectual and cultural hero of the Europe of his day.

Runge was born in Billwärder, a small town near Hamburg, Germany, on February 8, 1794, a pastor’s son and the third of what was to become a family of seven children. As a boy, Runge demonstrated the scientific curiosity and sharp powers of observation that presaged his creative career in analytical chemistry. While he was preparing a medicine from the juice of the deadly nightshade, or belladonna plant, a drop splashed accidentally into his eye, and he noticed that the pupil dilated and his vision blurred. Ten years later, just after Runge completed a medical degree at the University of Jena, his early observation brought him the audience with Goethe that would lead to the discovery of caffeine.

Although Goethe’s reputation throughout his lifetime rested primarily on poetic genius, in his mature years he became an avid and accomplished amateur scientist, pursuing a broad range of empirical studies, including optics, pharmacy, chemistry, botany, biology, mineralogy, and meteorology. In his 1790 monograph on plant development and his essays on animal morphology, Goethe conceived of organic evolution and anticipated significant aspects of Darwin’s theory.
¹

We know that caffeine and alcohol had enlivened his youthful transports, for, as Goethe approached his thirtieth birthday in 1779, he resolved to lead a purer life and later that year rejoiced in having cut his consumption of wine in half and significantly reduced his intake of coffee. Despite having frequented the Café Greco in Rome and Café Florian in Venice during his life-altering Italian sojourn, he evidently continued in the conviction that coffee contained a drug deleterious when taken in excess, for in his fortieth year he wrote to Charlotte von Stein, rejoining to her criticisms of his character by charging that she was again indulging in coffee, despite having forsworn this habit as part of their covenant to lead spiritual and exemplary lives.

In his soberer middle years Goethe outgrew the influences of cabalistic alchemy and mysticism. He became interested in an inquiry into the “secret
encheiresis
” or hidden handiwork and connections, of nature, the sort of investigations proper to the rapidly developing analytical sciences of his day.
²
During this period of his life, it is not surprising that Goethe’s earlier somewhat inchoate reservations about coffee should have been supplanted by pointed curiosity about its pharmacological constituents and medical effects. Goethe must have questioned his prior misgivings about the beverage after learning that the medical faculties at the Universities of Jena and Wittenberg, where he had seated his intellectual court, harbored a venerable tradition promoting the pharmacological and medicinal value of both coffee and tea. As Fielding H.Garrison explains in his
History of Medicine
(1929), the followers of the leading Dutch physician Franciscus Sylvius (1614–72), such as his countryman Stephan Blankaart, “had recommended enormous quantities of the newly important novelties, tea and coffee, as panaceas for acidity and blood purifiers. The universities of Jena and Wittenberg espoused his [Sylvius’s] doctrines.”
³

In his voluminous autobiographical writings and diaries, Goethe makes only a few passing references to his two brief encounters with Runge. In notes made in 1819, he comments on meeting, “a young
Chemicus,
by the name of Runge, who seems to me to be quite promising.” Naturally, the meeting had much more significance for the young scientist. Fifty years later, Runge was still talking and writing about the interview with excitement and pride, and, in an article published in 1866, he related the story of his audience and how it led to the discovery of caffeine.

At the time of his encounter with Goethe, Runge was twenty-five and studying under the great chemist Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner (1780–1849), whose important theoretical work contributed to the development of the periodic table. As it happens, Döbereiner was greatly admired by Goethe, served as his chemical advisor, and was one of several scientists with whom Goethe maintained a close connection during his later years. Runge was pursuing research into plant chemistry, and Döbereiner brought his discoveries to Goethe’s attention. Goethe, fascinated when Döbereiner told him of Runge’s ability to dilate the eye of his cat at will with belladonna extract, asked that the gifted student visit him to demonstrate the feat.

Wearing a high hat and tails borrowed for the occasion, and carrying his pet under his arm, Runge attracted considerable notice from his fellow students (who had nick-named him
“Gift,”
or “Poison,” because of his investigations into toxic chemicals) as
he made his way through the Jena marketplace to keep his appointment. Runge relates that their amusement changed to awe when he told them whom he was hurrying to meet.

It was natural that they should have felt awe. By 1819 Goethe, Europe’s first great literary celebrity, had long been one of the most famous and sought-after men on the Continent.
⁴
Goethe’s celebrity grew until, as Auden tells us in his foreword to
Werther,
“during the last twenty years or so of Goethe’s life, a visit to Weimar and an audience with the Great Man was an essential item on the itinerary of any cultivated young man making his Grand Tour of Europe.”
⁵

Imagine the youthful Runge, draped in his borrowed formal frock coat, ruddy-cheeked, clutching his cat firmly in his arms, as he proudly but nervously tells the story of his teenage accident. He performs the requested experiment by placing a few drops of belladonna extract in the cat’s eye. Goethe is impressed by the dramatic results, and, as Runge stands to leave, the aging poet reaches over his desk, a small box of rare Arabian mocha coffee beans in his hand, admonishing his visitor to perform an analysis of the contents. At this moment Runge, in leaning forward to accept the precious gift, fails to notice as his cat bounds off toward the corner of the room.

Runge, excited by his gift, starts to leave without his pet.

“You are forgetting your
famulus
” Goethe tells him, humorously alluding to the magical animal companions that were supposed to have attended the alchemists of an earlier day.

Runge returned to his laboratory and within a few months had successfully extracted and purified caffeine.

“He was right,” Runge wrote later, referring to Goethe’s belief in the value of studying coffee. “For soon after I discovered in these beans the caffeine that has become so famous.”

Exigent and orderly, but energetic and good-spirited, Runge, who never married, was devoted to scientific studies. His visit with Goethe led him to a brilliant career in purine chemistry. In 1819, in addition to isolating caffeine, he was the first to discover quinine, although virtually all sources erroneously award this honor to Pierre Joseph Pelletier (1788–1842) and Jean Bienaimé Caventou (1795–1877). After completing his studies at Jena, Runge returned to the University of Berlin, where he earned a doctorate in chemistry in 1822. He then took his own Grand Tour of Europe, a trip that lasted more than three years. After returning to Germany, he served for a few years as extraordinary professor of technical chemistry at the University of Breslau. Finding academia unreceptive to his practical interests, he ended his academic career in 1831, taking a job in a chemical factory where he investigated and developed synthetic dyes. In 1833 he was the first to make aniline blue, a discovery of major importance, as it was the earliest artificial organic coloring prepared from a product of coal tar. As a result of such investigations by Runge and his contemporaries, coal tar became the basis of several major industries by making possible the synthesis of dyes, drugs, explosives, flavorings, perfumes, preservatives, resins, and paints. Runge was also a pioneer in and, some would account, the inventor of paper chromatography, still a vital tool in chemical analysis for resolving a chemical mixture into its component compounds.

In 1850 E.E.Cochius, the business director of the company for which Runge worked, managed to acquire ownership of the company. For a long time he had considered his position and authority threatened by Runge’s farsighted suggestions for the development of new coal-tar technologies. And so in 1852 he dismissed Runge, granting him a small pension and allowing him to continue living in the small company house that had been his home for years.

As a result of ill will arising from a dispute over the rights to a process Runge had developed for making artificial guano, Cochius’ widow, who had inherited the chemical plant following her husband’s suicide, fought a successful legal battle in 1856 to evict him from his house and reduce his pension. Moving to a nearby house owned by a friend, Runge spent the last ten years of his life “in the company of a few chosen companions…puttering a little, writing much for newspapers and magazines.”
⁶
One of the most brilliant technical chemists of the nineteenth century, Runge died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1867. Two years after his death, the German Chemical Society collected donations to place a memorial at his grave. In 1873 they erected an obelisk with a bronze medallion showing a relief of Runge’s profile.

Scientific discovery was rife in Germany at the inception of the nineteenth century, and Runge’s analytical work was by no means pursued in isolation. Perhaps the most important precursor to his discovery of caffeine was the isolation of morphine by Frederich Wilhelm Adam Serturner, who, in 1803, at the age of twenty, had identified it as the active principle of opium (the so-called
principium somniferum,
⁷
to which he later gave the name “morphine”). At the same time he formulated the concept of the alkaloid, a member of a class of organic compounds composed of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and usually oxygen that are generally derived from plants. Many alkaloids present a double face, exhibiting both poisonous and curative properties. Caffeine and morphine are both alkaloids, and other alkaloids discovered around this same time include strychnine, quinine, nicotine, atropine, and cocaine. Serturner’s work made it possible for doctors to prescribe a precise dose of the pure morphine alkaloid itself, instead of a weight of plant matter or extract, which carried a host of impurities and an uncertain amount of the therapeutic drug itself.

If Goethe had never met Runge, never presented him with that gift of mocha beans, would caffeine have lain undiscovered for untold years? It might tickle the romantic fancy to think so, but the facts are otherwise. At least four scientists, including Pierre-Jean Robiquet and the team of Pierre Pelletier and Caventou, are reliably credited with the independent discovery of caffeine within only a year or two of Runge’s work. Serturner himself, without having heard of Runge’s results, duplicated Runge’s find in 1820.
Cofeina
appeared in 1823 in the
Dictionnaire des termes de médecine,
and
“caffein”
was used by the German physician Gustav Theodore Fechner in 1826. And when Jobat,
⁸
in 1840, discovered Oudry’s
“thein”
in tea to be identical with caffeine, it was recognized that the stimulating and mood-altering effects of both coffee and tea were the result of their caffeine content. In 1843 caffeine was isolated from mat (a South American plant infused as an energizing beverage), and it was found in cola nuts in 1865. On July 22, 1869, the London
Daily News
reported “A piece of kaffeine, of the size of a breakfast plate, produced from 120 pounds of coffee.” It would seem that the time for the discovery of caffeine had come.

Profile of Runge, bronze memorial medallion erected at his gravesite. A painting also exists of Runge drinking his synthetic wine, perhaps toasting his discoveiy of caffeine. In addition to pursuing his serious chemical investigations, Runge was a fine chef who loved to give dinner parties to exhibit his skills. He was also very interested in household tasks and applied his chemical knowledge to stain removal, canning meats and vegetables, and making wines from fruits. (Courtesy of
Goethe and Pharmacy,
G.Urdang, American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, Madison)

Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was as a result of an encounter between a scientist and a poet that caffeine was first revealed to the world; a curiously symbolic origin when one considers the vast panorama of the drug’s history, encompassing, as it does, so much of the disparate worlds of science and culture.