To people alive today it may seem incredible that the classical and medieval worlds did not have any stimulant drug, and, even more incredible that they seem to have managed happily without one.1 Since the seventeenth century, however, Europeans have relied on caffeine to help them keep to their work schedules by waking them up when they are sleepy and keeping them going when they are tired, and they have done so to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine what modern life would be like without it.
It may be that some of the advantages of using caffeinated drinks became apparent only once society could no longer mark appointments by the sun and stars. During medieval times, schedules were lax, holidays many, and disorganization pervasive. Throughout this period in the West there was not a single accurate clock on the entire Continent.2 The exactness of timepieces was so limited that a single-handed clock face, indicating the quarter hours, sufficiently answered to their precision. This remained true until the uniformity of pendulum motion was discovered by Galileo in 1583, during his sophomore year at the University of Padua. Over the next hundred years, it came into general use in Europe as the basis for the first accurate clockwork mechanism. By around 1660 the minute hand, representing a fifteenfold increase in accuracy, became common in England.3 Larger-scale industrial and economic endeavors became possible only once the measurement of small units of time had become standardized and routine, allowing for coordinated efforts across time and space. This improvement in precision occurred in the same decades when caffeine use became general in Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and across the Continent.4 Its date corresponds well with the opening of the first coffeehouses in London and the beginning of the vigorous coffeehouse culture as a center of the trades, the sciences, and the literary arts.5 Once this chronometric standardization occurred, the use of an analeptic became a virtual necessity to regulate the biological organism, allowing people to meet the demands of invariant scheduling. The only suitable analeptic, one easily available, well tolerated, safe, and effective, is caffeine. There is a sense, therefore, in which the combination of the clock and caffeine may have been essential to the development of modern civilization, and it may not be going too far to assert that the modern world, at least as we know it today, could neither have been envisioned nor built without this combination to make it possible.6
It also may be that another advantage of the caffeinated drinks, that they did not contain alcohol, could only be appreciated by peoples who, having been troubled by intemperate drinking, were no longer able to afford the resulting impairments. During medieval times, most heavy work was done by people who had been drinking alcohol since breakfast and who continued to drink it throughout the working day. In a besotted Europe, the caffeinated beverages were heralded as the great agents of sobriety, which could free men from the intoxication and distress of alcoholic drinks. It is a challenge to the twentieth-century imagination to conceive how medieval man designed and built the great cathedrals during a period when beer for breakfast was standard fare. The tour guides conducting visitors through European or English cathedrals frequently point out a site near the ceiling where some hapless person, often the architect or chief engineer, slipped off a scaffold to his death. Considering how much alcohol was being consumed, it is easy to envision how this mischance could have been so often repeated.
Brian Harrison, writing of the temperance movement in Victorian England, ably sums up both aspects of the relation of modern work to caffeine:
The effects of industrialization on drinking habits are complex…in some ways it made sobriety more feasible. The change in methods of production at last created a class with a direct interest in curbing drunkenness. Traditionally, work-rhythms had fluctuated both within the day and within the week: idleness on “Saint Monday” and even Tuesday was followed by frantic exertion and long hours at the end of the week.... Early industrialists needed to create a smooth working rhythm and to induce their employees to enter and leave their factories at specified times. Investment in complex and costly machinery placed the employee’s precise and continuous labor at a higher premium than the spasmodic exertion of his crude physical energy. Once this need had arisen, customary drinking patterns had to change.7
Caffeine, therefore, in the vehicles of coffee and tea, fostered the productivity gains that a newly competitive environment demanded, and did so in two important ways. First, caffeine helped large numbers of people to coordinate their work schedules by giving them the energy to start work at a given time and continue it as long as necessary and, in some cases, even increased the accuracy of their work. This meant that people could work longer hours and accomplish, proportionately, even more than they had before. Second, the caffeinated beverages, by displacing the heavy consumption of alcohol, markedly reduced one of the endemic impairments of medieval industry. Sober workers always produce more and better work than drunken ones.
In the sixteenth century, an an additional factor made the drinks in which caffeine was served desirable and perhaps indispensable, even apart from their value in conveying a stimulant.8 Beginning at this time, a mini-ice age gradually overtook Europe, bringing with it famine, hard winters, and cold summers. The Swiss scholar H.J.Zumbühl searched drawings, paintings, and photographs in museums and private collections throughout the Continent, amassing more than three hundred visual representations of the Lower Grindelwald glacier between 1640 and 1900. When Zumbühl systematically dated the pictures and made suitable adjustments for each artist’s viewpoint, he was amazed to note these images proved the ice had been in overall advance since the start of that period, and in overall retreat since about 1850. Detailed histories of the Mont Blanc region of the Alps confirm the advance of the glacier, which apparently began around 1550.
Extensive seventeenth-century French accounts of the “impetuosity of a great horrible glacier” were confirmed in the early 1970s by climatologist and cultural historian E.Le Roy Ladurie. Some of the stories that survive tell a chilling tale of how, in 1690, poor peasants from Chamonix paid the travel expenses for the bishop of Geneva, in the hopes he would exorcise the juggernaut of ice from their farmlands and meadows. His prayers were apparently answered when the ice withdrew. Unfortunately, it resumed an inexorable return a few years later.9
The chill deepened over the decades. Famine claimed many lives in Finland, Estonia, Norway, and Scotland in the winter of 1695, the coldest winter of a cold decade. In 1771, famine struck again, after a long sequence of snowy summers in central Europe, and the beginning of a rapid spurt forward by the Swiss glaciers.10 Possible causes of the mini-ice age include the earth shifting on her axis, increasing sunspots that reduced the amount of solar heat, or exploding volcanic activity that spewed light-filtering dust into the atmosphere. Whatever brought on the chill, this long freeze may have prompted Europeans to resort to the caffeinated drinks for their value in staving of hunger and keeping warm and may well have been the initial impetus for the adoption of the caffeinated beverages and the spread of caffeine as the most popular drug on earth.