The World of Caffeine (63 page)

1
. We know that, in the context of religious devotions, the Buddhists of China and the Sufis of Arabia had each relied on their own caffeinated beverage to help them conform to the discipline of prayer and meditation. Perhaps Europe encountered the need for a corresponding discipline in a civil context, with the advent of machines and the industrial age.
In the fifteenth century people still usually judged the time by the height of the sun or the positions of the stars. But as the seventeenth century wore on, the entire continent ran increasingly by the clock, and caffeine is the indispensable analeptic that allowed men to live by the clock, to knit their working lives together and engage each other as cogs engage in a machine.

2
. The Egyptians used sundials and clepsydrae, or water clocks, from about 1500 B.C., and the same rude instruments, or refinements of them, were relied on by every subsequent civilization until the invention of the accurate mechanical clock. This invention occurred in the eighth century in China and in a different form and not until the sixteenth century in Europe.
The hours themselves varied in length by design in the ancient world. Their hour was not of the astronomical day, as it is for us, but of the actual time from sundown to sunrise. The length of the ancient hour changed with the season, equally between ¾ and of a modern hour. Among the Greeks, the sun during the day and the stars during the night were used to estimate these hours. Thus time, in the millennia before the invention of accurate mechanical clocks, was reckoned by rough estimates, so that “The length of a man’s shadow indicated the progress of the day.”

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.”

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).

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.

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 into 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.