Glimpses of Coffee History

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In the first known coffee advertisement, a handbill produced in 1652 (original in the British museum), proclaimed that coffee "quickens the spirits, and makes the heart lightsome...is good against sore eyes... neither laxative nor restringent.

Continental Europe, too, became well implanted with the idea of coffee, and the coffeehouses flourished in most of these countries later in the 17th century. In the major cities of North America (Boston, New York, and Philadelphia), coffeehouses also became popular, starting about 1689. The first license to sell coffee in the Merchants' coffeehouses, established in New York in 1737, is claimed by some authorities to have been the "birthplace of the American Union".

 

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One of the most dramatic stories that explains how coffee was brought to the new world is that of Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, a young French naval officet assigned as captain of infantry at Martinique. In 1723 ( some authorities set the date as 1720), de Clieu, while on a visit to France, heard that the Dutch had succeeded in transplanting coffee from Arabia to the East Indies; he became determined to carry the cultivation to Martinique, where the climate resembled that of the East Indies. The few coffee plants then being cultivated in Paris were guarded in the royal hothouse of Louis XV. De Clieu obtained one ( some weiters say two or three) of the precious plants. During his return trip across the Atlantic, De Clieu recorded that for more than a month he was obliged to share his scanty ration of water with his tiny coffee plant "upon which my happiest hopes were founded and which was the source of my delight." De Clieu's little tree was finally planted in Martinique and carefully nursed to its first harvest of coffee cherries, from which seeds a big majority of the coffee plants in the Americas are said to be descended. By 1777, three years after the death of De Clieu, there were nearly 19,000,000 coffee trees in Martinique.

 

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By the 20th century, coffee has become responsible for much of the income of many countries lyin between the Tropic Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer. Although practically every country within this area produced some coffee, the greatest concentration of production became centered in the western hemis- phere. This began to change, however, toward the middle of the century as the growth of coffee in Africa began to assume major importance.

 

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Coffee, introduced into Europe by Arabic traders, was considered by many Roman Catholics to be a drink of infidels. As its popularity spread and Venetian and French merchants began to import it, Pope Clement VIII was urged to ban it.
Clement, however, found it so delicious that he chose instead to baptize the beverage and, in 1592, issued an edict formally recognizing it as a "Christian" drink.

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In 1892, British physicist Sir James Dewar invented an insulated bottle-within-a-bottle type flask. The container was used to store gases at low temperatures and also had such specialized uses as transporting rare fish.
Not until one day eleven years later, when Dewar's assistant Reinhold Burger put coffee in it, was the thermos as we know it born.
Dewar, Sir James (1842-1923) Scottish chemist and physicist - noted for his research on gas liquefaction and low temperature physics and for such inventions as the insulated bottle (the so-called Dewar flask) and cordite (with Sir Frederick Abel, 1889)

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"So closely were some coffee-houses associated with particular topics that the Tatler, a London newspaper founded in 1709, used the names of coffee-houses as subject headings for its articles. Its first issue declared:

"All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment shall be under the Article of White's Chocolate-house; Poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; Learning, under...Grecian; Foreign and Domestick News, you will have from St James's Coffee-house".

Richard Steele, the Tatler's editor, gave its postal address as the Grecian coffee-house, which he used as his office.

In the days before street numbering and postal services, many people used coffee-houses as mailing addresses.

Trivia: The Grecian coffee-house was frequented by Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and other members of the British Royal Society, who once dissected a dolphin on the premises. Alexander Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock" was based on coffee-house gossip. And Lloyd's of London was founded by a group of underwriters who regularly met at a coffee-house opened in the late 1680s by Edward Lloyd.