Steven Johnson makes a connection between the coffee house culture and the Age of Reason:
His point is that in the 17th and 18th centuries England changed from a culture that was drunk during the daytime to one that was caffeinated.
That’s an interesting point that I’m going to have to add to my lectures about how economic growth began before the industrial revolution.
I have two additions.
First, I think there’s an issue of economic serendipity here. People drank all day at that time because the water wasn’t safe to drink. They didn’t understand the mechanism, but there were clear medicinal reasons for a lot of beer and wine (remember that spirits were in their infancy at this point).
Yet, people had the technology to boil their water. The thing is, they didn’t recognize the advantages of this. There’s an unusual research project there for a Ph.D. student: why exactly wasn’t this discovered. Because what’s interesting is that they did learn to boil water to make a mild drug: coffee or tea. So it clearly took a little extra marginal benefit to convince people to drink hot liquids, but not too much.
Secondly, there’s a general point that is specifically relevant to where I teach: relatively dry Utah (pun intended). Mormon culture is proud of their alcohol avoidance. But, a little known fact in Utah is that while there have been other dry-ish cultures around the globe, prior to the provision of clean public drinking water, the only places those cultures were successful was in arid and mountainous regions. The reason is that there isn’t much water to get polluted in those areas — so people see it as more valuable, and it’s never standing — so that it’s biological impurities can’t thrive. In short, pure mountain streams make teetotaling more feasible.
What’s interesting about Utah is that the local culture doubled-down on this advantage: not only to they discourage alcohol, but they’ve also discouraged hot caffeinated drinks for over a century. Interestingly, there are a lot of quibbles about how effective that ban was in the 19th century. What is clear is that it became much more solid in the 20th century with the provision of clean public water.
And to finish, many Mormons are aware that alcohol, coffee, and tea were used substantially more by Mormons in their faiths first two decades. But the strong religious discouragement of those really began to take hold only after the faithful moved away from the plentiful, but fetid and slow-moving waters of Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, and New York.
Video via Greg Mankiw.
Stealing a bit from Wikipedia, the first microscope was devised about 1590. That little living things could be found in water wasn't reported until 1676 or so (Antoni van Leeuwenhoek). I don't know at what point it was observed that heating water to the boiling point would kill microorganisms, but it was probably around this time.
However, it wasn't until the 19th century that people really started to connect microorganisms with diseases (a process continuing into the 20th), and it wasn't until late in the 19th that Pasteur established that killing microoganisms and keeping the water or other medium free of subsequent contamination kept the medium "germ-free" -- prior to that time, orthodox belief was that life was spontaneously generated. By this time, the microscope was three centuries old.
The first demonstration that a disease (cholera) was spread by contaminated water was by Dr. John Snow, of London in 1855. This eventually led to municipal sewage systems and other efforts to keep water pure, but not to boiling water.
Perhaps the argument for boiling drinking water was more Darwinian than intellectual? It could be that coffee and tea drinkers simply lived longer beer and spirits drinkers and bred more children, who followed in their (soggy) footsteps. But there I speculate wildly.
Interesting points about Mormon and Utah teetotalism; I'll remember them.
Posted by: mike shupp | January 10, 2012 at 12:55 AM
My point was more vicarious.
People drank coffee and tea because they liked them, but they found two things rather than one: 1) improved mental capacity, and 2) no increase in disease.
As to the Mormons, I make that point because I live in Utah. But, it's actually something I heard first before I moved to Utah, and it regarded Moslem abstinence: historically, it was only strong in areas with clean water, and it's a fairly recent phenomenon for Moslems on the more humid geographic fringes of that faith to avoid alcohol.
Once I was tuned in to that argument, I found it in a second place. Protestants that advocated avoiding alcohol didn't thrive in urban centers until potable municipal water became available. Their teetotalling lifestyle choice actually decreased their viability if they stayed in an urban center. Broadly, they attributed that to the sinfulness of the urban center, but it may just have been the sin of poor sanitary habits.
Posted by: Dave Tufte | January 10, 2012 at 08:52 AM
Studies show that we may be benefitting from more than just the energy-boosting caffeine in coffee -- we might also be reaping its cancer-preventing and depression-lowering effects, just to name a couple.
Posted by: Water Heaters Indiana | February 21, 2012 at 12:32 AM
Cool
Posted by: Dave Tufte | February 28, 2012 at 11:03 AM