The Coffeehouse – Sparkplugs of Economic Innovation Through the Ages

“As long as there was coffee in the world, how bad could things be?”
Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

The coffeehouse – it is the ubiquitous corner office for the intrepid creative and the shoestring entrepreneur. The low buzz of the patrons combined with the background music and the hissing of espresso machines has an almost implied sense of productivity.

It turns out research has discovered the bustle of coffee shops creates the ideal amount of noise at the precise level required to create processing disfluency – a slight difficulty experienced when processing information. This slight processing pressure suffered by the brain forces it to think in a more abstract manner, and spurs a greater degree of creative performance than it would experience in complete silence.

The bustle of the patrons, the cognitive disfluency, the warm hug from the black, bitter liquid and the buzz of the caffeine all within a space sanctified by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, almost bring an implied understanding of the significance of the coffee shop to humankind. They are the social and business hubs of the modern era, much as they have been throughout history. The current post office, the newspaper industry, classical physics, stock markets, economics and some of the most significant musical compositions all owe their creation and discovery to coffeehouses.

Coffee and the Temperance Movement Correlation

“That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow”
Anne Sexton

The obtuse path coffeehouses followed to become the epicenter of social activity and spark plugs of economic innovation seem to have a common starting point within temperance movements throughout western history.

Courtesy of the ambassador Soliman Aga from the Sublime Porte of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1669, France received its first introduction to coffee. During this period, Louis XIV was working to put down the institutionalized practice of drinking until public intoxication by individuals of all social classes. It was common practice to visit the Caboots (public drinking houses) for the express purpose of drinking to a deep state of drunkenness. Within seven years, the coffee houses displaced the Caboots, and the “men of rank and letters” deserted the alcohol-sodden halls for the atmosphere and confines of the coffeehouse. What the Sun King failed to accomplish with his limitless royal authority, the coffeehouse completed in just seven years.

Across the English Channel, the first coffee house sprung up in London in 1652, and a temperance movement began concurrently in England as well. In 1817, it was estimated not more than twelve coffeehouses existed in London. By 1842, registered coffeehouses in London numbered 1,700 and increased at the rate of approximately 100 per year. One proprietor stated in an interview for the Jeffersonian Republic in 1842 that his coffeehouse served between 1,500 and 1,800 patrons per day. By 1843, the Carroll Free Press reported Europe alone consumed and estimated 150,000,000 pounds of coffee annually.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the second and third temperance movements took hold in America following the Civil War reconstruction period after 1873. The concept of the “coffee taverns” from the British temperance movement migrated to the United States as the temperance movement in America began to take hold. In major American cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago, coffee taverns were erected next to existing saloons to create a space for the working man to discover satisfaction in an environment without alcohol.

Coffee-houses soon became popular gathering places for all types of men, for no other public place offered such comforts for such a small expenditure. Men could spend the between-meal hours of the day for a few pennies, smoking, talking, reading and discussing the news, writing letters, playing cards, etc.

Social Center and the Center of Commerce

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”
T.S. Eliot

The coffeehouse was the social epicenter for the working class man. The laboring man would start his day at four o’clock in the morning with a cup of coffee and a slice of bread with butter for one penny. He would then have breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning, where he would get another cup of coffee, a penny loaf and penny butter for three pennies. At one o'clock in the afternoon, the day laborer would again enter the coffeehouse for coffee, bread, and meat and at this hour of the day, he would find himself in the company of upwards of 100 other individuals in the dining room.

Coffeehouses provided a public gathering place, filled with comforts and resources without parallel for such a small expense to men of all socioeconomic strata. For a nominal cover charge of one penny, the entry would be permitted for the day without an obligation to purchase anything. Men could spend the between-meal hours of the day for a few pennies, smoking, talking, reading and discussing the news, writing letters or playing cards. They quickly became the social center of everyday life.

• Coffeehouses were the local news outlets of the day. Runners reporting major events of the day, such as significant military battles and political upheavals, would run from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, reporting their news. By the early 1700s, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were writing some of the first newspapers which featured the "Talk of the Town" – News learned from the local coffeehouses.

• Coffeehouses served as a delivery point for the mail and newspapers in the days of an unorganized postal service. The transatlantic network of coffeehouses became the central dispersion centers for this informal postal system developed and operated by ship captains. An individual often had their mail and newspaper delivered to their favorite coffeehouse.

• Coffeehouses became the defacto place for a man to conduct both his business and daily affairs. Travel across the region could be treacherous, so men of business advised their clientele which coffeehouse they would frequent regularly, and concluded business there.

Benjamin Franklin embodied the lifestyle of the coffee shop gentleman while living in London. He held his political meetings in coffeehouses and directed his sister to send his mail to the London Coffee-House. In his memoirs he even remarked, “…but to be serious, my old friend, I love you as much as ever, and I love all the honest souls that meet at the London Coffee House. I only wonder how it happened that they and my other friends in England came to be such good creatures in the midst of so perverse a generation.”

The Penny Universities

Coffee houses were often referred to as “Penny Universities” because, for the price of admission (generally one penny), a man of any socioeconomic class could engage with a diverse array of educated men. No topics would be considered taboo in the establishment and only within the bounds of the coffeehouse, the rules of precedence according to social class were waived.

The concept of the coffeehouse as the penny university became so deeply embedded in societal norms as to be immortalized in contemporary English verse,

So great a Universitie, I think there ne'er was any;
In which you may a Scholar be, for spending of a Penny.

Scenes from the Penny Universities

Coffee Cantata Johan Sebastian Bach

“Without my morning coffee I’m just like a dried up piece of roast goat.”
J.S. Bach

It was the early 18th century, and the country of Prussia found itself consumed by the coffeehouse craze as demand for coffee from the middle class surged. During this period, coffee found its way into the homes of the working class man of Prussia, usurping the traditional role of flour soup and warm beer at the breakfast table.

Responding to this surge in demand, Fredrick the Great, King of Prussia moved to restrict coffee consumption to the wealthy and privileged, by designating coffee-bean roasting activities exclusively to royal roasting establishments, and designating it a drink of "quality." His objective was to confine the use of coffee to the elect. To these representatives of the cream of Prussian society, the king issued special licenses permitting them to do their roasting. Of course, they purchased their supplies from the government; and as the price was enormously increased, the sales yielded Frederick a handsome income.

The massive demand for coffee from the working class became so widespread; it was impossible to quash quickly. Illegal roasting became commonplace, as the black market moved in to fill the working class demand. In response, King Frederick instituted a crackdown so absurd in scope he employed royal coffee smellers to stalk the streets smelling for the aroma of illegal home coffee-bean roasting.

A four and one-half story building located at 14 Katharinenstrasse, home of Zimmermannsche Kaffeehaus (Café Zimmerman), was the largest and most well-appointed coffeehouse in Leipzig. It became the fraternal gathering spot for working class men and gentlemen to congregate and socialize. The founder, Gottfried Zimmerman, played host to weekly performances by the Collegium Musicium - a closed amateur society of musicians and professors who performed vocal and instrumental music for pleasure every Friday evening. The Collegium Musicium frequently included noteworthy professionals to fill out the music and admitted non-members to performances. These coffeehouse concerts were always free admission, and the popularity of these shows was such he recouped his costs and generated substantial revenue through the sale of coffee.

While women were encouraged to attend these concerts and often did regularly, they were expressly forbidden from drinking coffee or partaking in the coffeehouse culture. In fact, many doctors campaigned for and actively reinforced this position arguing that women who actively participate in coffee consumption must forego child-bearing.

In 1729, J.S. Bach, tired of endless arguments with the church and the council of the University, took the position of the Director of Music for the Collegium Musicium. In essence, he quit his day job to become the head of the coffeehouse band. It was during this period, he wrote one of his greatest secular pieces of his storied career – The Coffee Cantata. In true fashion of court jesters and artists before him, Bach uses comedy to address the absurdities of the institutions around him.

The Coffee Cantata was a semi-staged comedy about a young woman named Aria who loves coffee. Her killjoy father is dead set against his daughter having any kind of caffeinated fun, so he tries to ban her from the drink. Eventually, Aria and her father reconcile when he agrees to have a guaranteed three cups of coffee a day written into her marriage contract. The story concludes with them singing the moral: that drinking coffee is natural.

”Bach wrote other ‘music dramas’ besides just the ‘Coffee Cantata,’ including ‘Aeolus's Bag of Wind,’ ‘The Contest Between Apollo and Pan,’ and others. Most of them are called ‘secular cantatas’ today, though the manuscripts in the hand of J.S. Bach or copies made by those close to him refer to these pieces as ‘music dramas’ - the same term used for operas - rather clearly.”

Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Edmund Haley and the Principia

“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems”
Paul Erdos

In 1684, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and a young Edmund Halley were having a heated debate in an Oxford Coffee shop (possibly The Grand Café or the Grecian) about the inverse square law and how it applied to planetary motion as defined by Kepler’s laws. While all independently came to understand Kepler's laws did apply, none had derived the mathematical proof it was responsible for the elliptical orbit of planets. Robert Hooke boldly asserted he could mathematically prove the fact, and Sir Christopher Wren offered him a prize of 40 shillings if he could provide mathematical proof within two months. Mathematics was widely known not to be Hooke’s strong suit, so the deadline came and went without Hooke producing such evidence.

Edmund Haley remained completely consumed with mathematically proving the inverse square law related to planetary motion. He decided to visit an eccentric, yet renowned master mathematician at Trinity College in August 1684 named Isaac Newton. When Halley posed his inverse square theory to him, Newton replied he knew it to be true because he calculated it. Edmund Halley could hardly believe what he just heard. When Halley asked to see his mathematical proof, Newton was sure he left his evidence somewhere in his office. After much fruitless, frantic searching, he promised Halley he would redo the calculations and send them to him later. In November 1684, Newton sent Halley a nine-page manuscript which not only proved the inverse square application but also mathematically derived all three of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from some very fundamental assumptions about the forces.

Within a year, the revised manuscript generated from that nine-page copy, The Principia Mathematica was unveiled and was instantly recognized as one of the greatest scientific treatise ever created.

Robespierre and the Cafe De La Regence

The Café de la Regence rose from the rags of humble beginnings. A Parisian named Lefévre peddled coffee in the square of the Palais Royal. By 1718, Monsieur Lefévre had grown the business to a point where he sold the coffeehouse to Monsieur Leclerc, who renamed the establishment the Café de la Regence in honor of the Regent of Orleans.

Chess consumed the city of Paris, and the Café de la Regence became the epicenter of chess and French society. The poet and novelist Victor Hugo, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher and playwright Voltaire, the philosopher Denis Diderot and the young Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte all frequented the café.

This particular evening during the Reign of Terror, the café was virtually deserted as Robespierre paid his favorite coffeehouse a visit to join his fellow celebrated chess players of the café for the evening. He was intensely passionate about the game of chess.

A nervous young man asked Maximilien Robespierre for the honor of a match this evening. Robespierre acquiesced, and the young man proceeded to checkmate Robespierre. Looking to the young man with his sly, cat-like eyes filled with an odd mix of admiration and suspicion, Robespierre asked him what the stakes were. The young man revealed he was, in fact, a woman and she demanded Robespierre spare the life of her lover.

“She left her chair with a written order for his immediate enlargement, and with a passport, by virtue of which the joyful pair passed the French frontier in safety.”

Adam Smith and the British Coffee House on Cockspur Street

It had been almost four years since the murder of Hew Scott in Paris, and his self-imposed sabbatical to Kirkaldy. Long walks by the seaside, deep reflection and study made him revisit the drafts of a sequel to The Theory of Moral Sentiments he began writing in Toulouse. Adam Smith resolved he needed access to more material and in 1770, moved to London.

When he was not researching material at the British Museum, Adam Smith was drafting and editing new chapters of his most famous work The Wealth of Nations at the British Coffeehouse on Cockspur Street. He attended weekly dinner parties with Scottish intellectuals, artists of the day and colleagues such as the philosopher David Hume, portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, architect Robert Adam and author Adam Ferguson. He shared copies of new chapters with each of them which they discussed, criticized, and debated. On March 9, 1776, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published, and was immediately heralded as a classic on the study of economics.

Evolution of the Coffeehouse from Penny Universities to Business Incubators

As coffeehouses became more ubiquitous, the crowds which they attracted became more specialized. They gradually shifted from penny universities into meeting places focused on particular trades or elite clubs for the wealthy.

Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House

Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house in 1686 on Tower Street in London. It quickly became the meeting place for merchants, ship owners, ship captains, insurance brokers and others involved in the maritime trade. It soon became the epicenter of news, and Lloyd began to publish a newspaper which quickly began generating more income than the coffee he sold. Insurance brokers, in particular, began to favor his establishment, and rented booths to conduct their business.

After Edward Lloyd had died, the coffeehouse had become a corporation owned by the very brokers who rented booths within it. Lloyds of London was born.

Johnathan’s Coffee House London

Johnathan Miles opened his famous coffeehouse in Exchange Alley in 1680. It quickly became known as “the general mart of stock-jobbers.” The coffee shop was the center of the South Sea mania.

"At a table a few yards off sat a couple of men engaged in the discussion of a newly-started scheme. Plunging his hand impatiently under the deep silver-buttoned flap of his frock-coat of cinnamon cloth and drawing out a paper, the more business-looking of the pair commenced eagerly to read out figures intended to convince the listener, who took a jewelled snuff-box from the deep pocket of the green brocade waistcoat which overflapped his thigh, and, tapping the lid, enjoyed a pinch of perfumed Turkish as he leaned back lazily in his chair. Somewhat further off, standing in the middle of the room, was a keen-eyed lawyer, counting on his fingers the probable results of a certain speculation in human hair, to which a fresh-coloured farmer from St. Albans, on whose boots the mud of the cattle market was not dry, listened with a face of stolid avarice, clutching the stag-horn handle of his thonged whip as vigorously as if it were the wealth he coveted.”

Johnathan’s Coffe House in London would soon grow and evolve from Coffee House on Exchange Alley to the London Stock Exchange.

Tontine Coffee House New York, NY

In early 1793, a group of stockbrokers established and built the Tontine Coffee House on the corner of Wall Street and Water Street in New York, as a place for trade and correspondence. The group formed a tontine, a type of investment plan and the namesake of the coffee house. With the creation of the Buttonwood Agreement, a new organization of tradespeople was formed.

Political demonstrations and violence were not uncommon at the Tontine Coffee House. In the wake of the French Revolution, fistfights between those respectively sympathetic to the British and the French broke out on a daily basis.

”The Tontine Coffee House was filled with underwriters, brokers, merchants, traders, and politicians; selling, purchasing, trafficking, or insuring; some reading, others eagerly inquiring the news […] The steps and balcony of the coffee-house were crowded with people bidding, or listening to the several auctioneers, who had elevated themselves upon a hogshead of sugar, a puncheon of rum, or a bale of cotton; and with Stentorian voices were exclaiming, "Once, twice. Once, twice." "Another cent." "Thank ye gentlemen." [...] The coffee-house slip, and the corners of Wall and Pearl-streets, were jammed up with carts, drays, and wheelbarrows [...] Everything was in motion; all was life, bustle and activity...”

The Tontine Coffeehouse grew and evolved to become the New York Stock Exchange.

The golden era of coffeehouses began to experience a decline around the late 1700s as the Industrial Revolution redistributed wealth and altered social patterns of society. The creature comforts afforded to the working class man for a penny, now were provided by private business. The postal service and newspapers now delivered to private residences. Gradually, businesses such as Buttonwood exchanges and insurance had grown so vast and wealthy; they purchased their offices rather than continue to conduct business within the coffeehouse.

Towards the mid eighteen hundred, as coffeehouses began to fade and morph into private clubs, liquor was served in the establishments. The working class man, without access to the refuge and social comforts of the coffeehouse, returned to the solace of the saloon once again.

History Does Not Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes

“Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.”
Edward Abbey

Starbucks seems to follow the time-honored tradition of the coffeehouse. The company finds itself in the same unenviable position of its predecessors as competition encroaches. Interesting that in recent history, Starbucks has opted to follow this time honored tradition as same-store sales began to slide.

• The company evolved locations in 2004 to prototype a music bar concept called the Hear Café – a modern version of the Collegium Musicium.

• As McDonald's encroached into the premium coffee space, Starbucks evolved to expand their food offering to include sandwiches, potato chips, soda, etc. following in the footsteps of Thompson's Spa in 1895 when the coffee taverns of the second temperance movement in America failed to take hold as they did in Britain.

• When all else failed, Starbucks began to incorporate beer and wine sales in an attempt to stem continued sliding in store sales numbers. Essentially it was embracing the same last gasp effort of coffeehouses in the eighteen hundreds.

It leaves one to wonder what the next evolution of the modern coffeehouse will be.