of interest to M&D readers

[pynchonoid]

The internet in a cup
Dec 18th 2003 

Coffee fuelled the information exchanges of the 17th
and 18th centuries

WHERE do you go when you want to know the latest
business news, follow commodity prices, keep up with
political gossip, find out what others think of a new
book, or stay abreast of the latest scientific and
technological developments? Today, the answer is
obvious: you log on to the internet. Three centuries
ago, the answer was just as easy: you went to a
coffee-house. There, for the price of a cup of coffee,
you could read the latest pamphlets, catch up on news
and gossip, attend scientific lectures, strike
business deals, or chat with like-minded people about
literature or politics.

[...] Coffee came to be regarded as the very
antithesis of alcoholic drinks, sobering rather than
intoxicating, stimulating mental activity and
heightening perception rather than dulling the senses.

This reputation accompanied coffee as it spread into
western Europe during the 17th century, at first as a
medicine, and then as a social drink in the Arab
tradition. An anonymous poem published in London in
1674 denounced wine as the “sweet Poison of the
Treacherous Grape” that drowns “our Reason and our
Souls”. Beer was condemned as “Foggy Ale” that
“besieg'd our Brains”. Coffee, however, was heralded
as


...that Grave and Wholesome Liquor,
that heals the Stomach, makes the Genius quicker,
Relieves the Memory, revives the Sad,
and cheers the Spirits, without making Mad.


The contrast between coffee and alcoholic drinks was
reflected in the decor of the coffee-houses that began
to appear in European cities, London in particular.
They were adorned with bookshelves, mirrors,
gilt-framed pictures and good furniture, in contrast
to the rowdiness, gloom and squalor of taverns.
According to custom, social differences were left at
the coffee-house door, the practice of drinking
healths was banned, and anyone who started a quarrel
had to atone for it by buying an order of coffee for
all present. In short, coffee-houses were calm, sober
and well-ordered establishments that promoted polite
conversation and discussion. 

[...]As the Tatler's categorisation suggests, the
coffee-house most closely associated with science was
the Grecian, the preferred coffee-house of the members
of the Royal Society, Britain's pioneering scientific
institution. On one occasion a group of scientists
including Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley dissected a
dolphin on the premises. Scientific lectures and
experiments also took place in coffee-houses, such as
the Marine, near St Paul's, which were frequented by
sailors and navigators. Seamen and merchants realised
that science could contribute to improvements in
navigation, and hence to commercial success, whereas
the scientists were keen to show the practical value
of their work. It was in coffee-houses that commerce
and new technology first became intertwined.

[...] Other coffee-houses were hotbeds of financial
innovation and experimentation, producing new business
models in the form of innumerable novel variations on
insurance, lottery or joint-stock schemes. The
best-known example was the coffee-house opened in the
late 1680s by Edward Lloyd. It became a meeting-place
for ships' captains, shipowners and merchants, who
went to hear the latest maritime news and to attend
auctions of ships and their cargoes. Lloyd began to
collect and summarise this information, supplemented
with reports from a network of foreign correspondents,
in the form of a regular newsletter, at first
handwritten and later printed and sent to subscribers.
Lloyd's thus became the natural meeting place for
shipowners and the underwriters who insured their
ships. Some underwriters began to rent booths at
Lloyd's, and in 1771 a group of 79 of them
collectively established the Society of Lloyd's,
better known as Lloyd's of London.

Similarly, two coffee-houses near London's Royal
Exchange, Jonathan's and Garraway's, were frequented
by stockbrokers and jobbers. Attempts to regulate the
membership of Jonathan's, by charging an annual
subscription and barring non-members, were
successfully blocked by traders who opposed such
exclusivity. So in 1773 a group of traders from
Jonathan's broke away and decamped to a new building,
the forerunner of the London Stock Exchange.
Garraway's was a less reputable coffee-house, home to
auctions of all kinds and much dodgy dealing,
particularly during the South Sea Bubble of 1719-21.
It was said of Garraway's that no other establishment
“fostered so great a quantity of dishonoured paper”.

[...]Dark rumours of plots and counter-plots swirled
in London's coffee-houses, but they were also centres
of informed political debate. Swift remarked that he
was “not yet convinced that any Access to men in Power
gives a man more Truth or Light than the Politicks of
a Coffee House.” Miles's coffee-house was the
meeting-place of a discussion group, founded in 1659
and known as the Amateur Parliament. Pepys observed
that its debates were “the most ingeniose, and smart,
that I ever heard, or expect to heare, and bandied
with great eagernesse; the arguments in the Parliament
howse were but flatte to it.” After debates, he noted,
the group would hold a vote using a “wooden oracle”,
or ballot-box—a novelty at the time.

[...] Coffee-houses were popular in Paris, where 380
had been established by 1720. As in London, they were
associated with particular topics or lines of
business. But with strict curbs on press freedom and a
bureaucratic system of state censorship, France had
far fewer sources of news than did England, Holland or
Germany. This led to the emergence of handwritten
newsletters of Paris gossip, transcribed by dozens of
copyists and sent by post to subscribers in Paris and
beyond. The lack of a free press also meant that poems
and songs passed around on scraps of paper, along with
coffee-house gossip, were important sources of news
for many Parisians. [...] Despite their reputation as
breeding-grounds for discontent, coffee-houses seem to
have been tolerated by the French government as a
means of keeping track of public opinion. 

[...] The kinship between coffee-houses and the
internet has recently been underlined by the
establishment of wireless “hotspots” which provide
internet access, using a technology called WiFi, in
modern-day coffee-shops. [...]

...read it all:
<http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2281736>



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