Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (5 page)

The Russo-Swiss expert, Gustav von Bunge, professor at Basle, considered that the longing for caffeine arose from the fact that this substance is akin to a highly nitrogenous substance known as xanthin, small quantities of which are found in all tissues of the body. In his view, therefore, the caffeine craving of human beings is the expression of an unconscious longing to increase their store of xanthin as one of the substances of which the tissues are built.

No matter whether caffeine be really summoned into the fortress of the body as an ally; as soon as it has crossed the threshold it induces a remarkable condition which, in the true sense of the word, is an “ecstasy,” a “being put out of place,” a marvellous disturbance. Promptly it brings about dilatation of the blood-vessels. The drawbridge is lowered. The central nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord, are invaded by its stimulant action; they are “occupied” by the intruder. . . . The great awakener, caffeine! It influences the respiratory centre in the
medulla oblongata,
and bestows upon the entire organism the advantage of an accelerated interchange of gases. Its powerful elixir facilitates the labour of the heart-muscle. In the joints of the arms and legs, it dispels the paralysing accumulation of the products of fatigue, the body’s auto-intoxicant poisons. It increases the vigour of the skeletal muscles. It promotes intestinal peristalsis and the activity of the kidneys. Every cell of the human body is, as it were, renovated, so soon as caffeine reaches it.

The American physiologist Horatio Wood has studied the effects of caffeine upon the circulation and the muscles, and Hollingworth has investigated the curves of the intelligence under the stimulus of coffee. Both these authors had access to abundant material. In the year 1912, Hollingworth made some seventy-six thousand measurements and other experiments. Wood describes the promotion of muscular energy by caffeine as follows: “Caffeine works as a stimulus upon the reflex centres of the spinal cord. It enables the muscles to contract more vigorously, without any subsequent depression, so that the total muscular work performed by a man who has had a dose of caffeine is greater than he could have done in default of it.”

Wood goes on to draw the following momentous conclusion: “If the caffeinized muscle always does better work, without having to pay for this in any other way than by the natural onset of fatigue in due course, we are compelled to recognize that caffeine does not merely intensify the vigour of muscular contraction, but also enables the muscles to act more economically—in a word, to do more work with the same expenditure of energy.”

This law, a definitive gain in the economics of the human labour process, was supplemented in 1925 by the work of Allers and Freund, who showed that coffee is an energizer of the brain no less than of the muscles. They found that the processes of acquiring knowledge were greatly facilitated by the drinking of coffee, but, on the other hand, that the reproduction of what had previously been learned was nowise furthered. (This reproduction is, rather, interfered with by a superfluity of new images and ideas.) The experiments also showed that in abstract thinking the visual elements of thought became more conspicuous. Furthermore, the intellectual elements of thought grew more pregnant, while the power of detailed expression was facilitated. The description of a movement, for instance, contains a larger number of optical subsections. “Sensory and conscious associations moved into the foreground while automatic associations passed into the background. Thus coffee is able to promote the brain’s power of effecting combinations. Where we have to do, however, with the reproduction of data previously stored in the memory, with the recalling of matter already learned, coffee would seem to be a hindrance rather than a help.” It would be hard to give a more vivid description of the “creative and liberative” power that coffee exerts upon the brain. This brilliant, rebellious, anti-conservative influence has made coffee, throughout its history, a harbinger of storms.

What, however, are the hundred thousand human beings studied during the twentieth century by Hollingworth, Wood, and others, in comparison with the countless millions who, since the beginning of the modern age, at first on the coast of Araby and thereafter in all quarters of the world, have been drinking coffee? Coffee has changed the surface of the globe! The muscular and cerebral stimulation and transformation produced in mankind by coffee have transfigured the visage of history.

For this remains unquestionable. If today the city of New York, with its skyscrapers and its indefatigable swarms of human beings, differs so greatly in aspect from Rome in the year 1300, there are, no doubt, many reasons for the contrast; but one of the most important is this, that since the discovery of coffee the human working day has, theoretically, been expanded from twelve hours to twenty-four.

Throughout classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the only drugs known to have a powerful action upon the nervous system were narcotics and depressants. (Physiologically considered, alcoholic beverages are essentially narcotics, or stupefacients!) “Denarcotizers” had not been discovered. No pure stimulant was known to those who sustained the civilization of classical days and of the Middle Ages; nothing that could keep the body bright and alert when it was craving for sleep.

The discovery of coffee was, in its way, as important as the invention of the telescope or of the microscope, without which we should know little of the incredibly vast and nothing of the incredibly small. For coffee has unexpectedly intensified and modified the capacities and activities of the human brain. For thousands of years, until the discovery of coffee, work always stopped when the worker’s body grew tired. But the cæsura of sleep, which ensued upon fatigue, changed the essential nature of the work; it was no longer the same man who resumed work after the interruption of sleep, not the man who had begun the labour process. Before the discovery of this stimulant, every kind of “differential” work, every task that needed extreme accuracy, extraordinarily minute measurements, was impossible, except for those few persons of altogether exceptional will-power who have existed in every century.

This is the marvellous fact, that since the discovery of coffee vast masses of persons who are far from being geniuses have found within their own brain-boxes a “docile domestic animal which has many of the capacities of genius.” Mathematics, chemistry, physics, the whole group of sciences belonging to the philosophico-mathematical category—above all, medicine and its ancillary disciplines—were, in classical antiquity, studied and practised, furthered and understood, only by a restricted number of persons, because, when human society was under the influence of wine, “the anteroom of sleep,” a great majority of cultured persons were averse to intellectual research. Bacchic civilization, the cult of eloquent drunkenness, switched most persons of culture on to a different road.

Analytical thought, which, in contrast with synthetical thought, has been the main characteristic of civilization since the opening of the modern era, is mainly attributable to the generalizing influence of coffee upon thought itself. Without effort, today, countless persons, in numberless professions, are engaged in “differential” activities, which in antiquity were possible only to such outstanding geniuses as Archimedes and Hero of Alexandria.

A cup of coffee is a miracle.

A miracle like a musical harmony, a wonderfully compounded assemblage of relationships.

Although our sense of taste is no less acute than our hearing, our gustatory nerve would react to pure caffeine, the chemical substance with the formula C
₈
H
₁₀
N
₄
O
₂
, not at all or only to report a faint and uninteresting bitter sensation. It is the fats and the mineral substances that impinge upon the taste-buds, and those that, volatilized, assail the endings of our olfactory nerve—the ethers, phenols, furfurals, acetones, ammoniacal substances, and twenty lesser satellites—which combine to produce the enthralling aroma and taste of a well-made cup of coffee.

The ratios must be carefully maintained. Otherwise there will be crude disharmony, and the general result will be nauseating. Trimethylamin, for instance, which plays so important a part in producing the agreeable flavour of coffee, is the substance which predominates in putrefying fish. It is thus something more than a possibility of discord; it is a vegetable poison. But, in the minute proportions in which it is found in a well-roasted coffee bean, it combines to produce the attractive harmony of the flavour.

There is a perpetual dance of the various ingredients. “Dance is universal.” By this proposition of the romanticist physicists and natural philosophers, a proposition which recalls the teachings of Oken and Schelling, we are reminded of what happens when we analyse the little planetary system of the coffee-bean. Attraction and repulsion, affinity and the harmony of numbers! Mankind is not made up simply of human beings, but of what individual human beings eat and drink. It consists of the demons that enter us through our mouths. Insoluble is the riddle why, in certain epochs, the demons of sleep predominated in what we put into our mouths, whereas in other epochs the demons of wakefulness have predominated.

Coffee has strange kinships; it has clansmen who march side by side with the chief. In chemical laboratories today remarkable discoveries are being made. Professor Nottbohm of Hamburg, for example, has discovered that in coffee there is another active principle, another alkaloid, besides caffeine, namely trigonellin. But this substance, as Hantzsch has proved, is one of the main constituents of nicotine, the active principle of tobacco.

The first time I heard that coffee and tobacco, the two great quellers of fatigue in contemporary civilization, stand chemically side by side, I was reminded of an exciting discovery of the geologists. It appears that in Swabia there is a region where, underground, the waters of the Danube and the Rhine mingle, before one river sets forth on its eastward and the other on its northward flow. Thus is it with coffee and tobacco, the magical elements join hands for a moment before they separate.

Dance is universal.

W
HEN
was it that, in Shehodet Monastery, the monks had their first taste of “k’hawah”? The date is hard to ascertain.

This much is unquestionable, that Avicenna, the famous Arabian philosopher and physician of Bukhara, often styled the Prince of Physicians, was acquainted with coffee by about the year
A
.
D
. 1000. He did not call it “k’hawah,” but “bunc”—the name by which coffee is still known in Ethiopia.

It was not then a beverage widely consumed by the people. True, both the Arabs and the Persians drank coffee, but we have no reason to believe that the coffee-plant was systematically cultivated either in Arabia or in Persia. Coffee was brought from Ethiopia and Somaliland by caravans; then it was shipped across the Red Sea for a further long journey by land. This made it a high-priced commodity, available only to the wealthy. Even so, it probably did not become a daily beverage, but was employed medicinally, for the relief of certain ailments.

Such a use of coffee may have continued inconspicuously during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the French national library there is preserved a manuscript by Sheikh Abd el Kader wherein we are informed that coffee was not known in Yemen earlier than the year 1450. This statement is certainly incorrect. The probability is that a certain Jemal Eddin, also known as Dhabani, who had travelled in Ethiopia, introduced the cultivation of the coffee-shrub and the use of the beverage into Yemen, so that, being locally produced, the expensive import was no longer needful, and coffee became much less expensive.

Even then, however, it had not become an article of widespread daily consumption. That did not happen until a religious dispute attracted general attention to it. People began to try the beverage as soon as it was forbidden. There was a prohibitionist movement, and the average man is likely to lust after forbidden fruit! In the holy city of Mecca, a zealot of high rank declared war to the death against coffee, with the result that its influence quickly spread wherever the Turks held sway.

In the year 1517, the sultan of Egypt appointed a new viceroy in Mecca. His name was Khair Bey, a proud and extremely ambitious young man. He found it vexatious that the world was so old. “A worn-out slipper is no longer a slipper,” he was accustomed to say to his servants. For this reason, he was mockingly spoken of as the “slipper philosopher.” Lampoons in verse were composed about him, making fun of his zeal for purifying public morals. Enraged thereat, he sent forth spies to find out who were the writers. Always they were coffee-drinkers, who sat beneath the colonnades of the mosques, giving their fancy free rein.

It was not the poems or the poets whom Khair Bey, the viceroy, wished to attack. They were too small game. His target was the “stimulant” that endowed ordinary persons with shrewdness and wit, and made their minds sparkle.

He concealed the true reason for his campaign, a personal one he would have been ashamed to acknowledge. He professed a determination to pass judgment upon coffee, coffee-drinking, and coffee-drinkers, in accordance with the dictates of the Book of Books. “Little do I care,” said he, “if people say that coffee has been drunk for centuries. The Koran has no concern with venerable customs. The Word of the Prophet is timeless; it is a sword of judgment in the hands of him who knows how to make distinctions.”

He assembled in his divan a number of Ulemas, muftis, military officers, philosophers, and men learned in the law. His brow was clouded with wrath, for he was a passionate youth.

To begin with he ordered the preparation of the beverage which was to be the subject of inquiry. Two slaves made coffee in the presence of the company, roasting the beans, pounding them in a mortar, and seething them in water. The coffee thus prepared gave off a pleasing aroma, which ran counter to Khair Bey’s intention. He said: “No matter if the odour be delightful. We read in the Koran that the devil can assume a seductive mask.”