Notas del episodio
In 17th century England untreated water could kill, so nearly everyone, from children to scholars, drank ale all day and lived in a mild haze. Then a bitter black drink arrived, first described by travelers who saw men in Asian and Arabian empires stay up talking all night. Early marketers sold coffee as a cure for gout, scurvy, smallpox, and head melancholy, a supposed cold, dry imbalance of the humors that hot, dry coffee would correct, while critics warned it caused paralysis and trembling. The first English coffee house opened in Oxford around 1650, credited to a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob, where virtuosi like Christopher Wren escaped rote university learning. London followed in 1652 with Pasqua Rosée's shop.
A penny bought a seat at a communal table, and alcohol was banned. Swearing cost a 12 pence fine, and anyone who started a fight bought coffee for everyone he offended. Houses specialized, with Child's serving doctors and clergy and Moll King's hosting traders who spoke a thieves' slang called flash. Stockbrokers banished from the Royal Exchange traded at Jonathan's and Garraway's, and Edward Lloyd's shipping newsletter led merchants to write their names under risks, the origin of underwriting and Lloyd's of London. Jürgen Habermas later called this a new bourgeois public sphere. By the late 18th century it collapsed into private clubs and East India Company tea gardens.
- Runners sprinted between coffee houses carrying breaking political news and stock prices.
- Joseph Addison and Richard Steele mined coffee house talk for The Spectator and The Tatler, then sold the papers back to the same rooms.
- The 1674 Women's Petition Against Coffee blamed the drink for making men as unfruitful as the deserts it came from.
- Proprietors tried to make patrons write a centralized coffee house gazette for free, and were mocked for it.
- Tea houses and pleasure gardens welcomed both men and women, making the male-only coffee house obsolete.