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What Has Coffee Done To You?

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Did you know that by 1700 there were 2,000 coffee houses in London alone?

 

Back then they were called Penny Universities because, for one penny you could get a cup of coffee and spend hours listening to enlightening conversations and debates.  Here are some famous ones to note:

 

  1. LLOYD'S Coffee House (of Lloyds of London)

  2. The Baltic Coffee House - this is where high-powered import-export executives of the London Shipping Exchange sipped their coffee and did much of their business.

  3. The Jerusalem Cafe - This is where East India Company employees did much of their business.

  4. Will's Cafe - Author's Alexander Poe and Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels) and painter William Hogarth frequented Will's cafe.

  5. The Grecian Coffee House - Isaac Newton's coffee house of choice.

Filtered Coffee

Each café became associated with poetry or business or science. And from that idea of these cafes devoted to particular disciplines grew a newspaper with different sections, because people would go to the café, note down the conversation, put them into these little sort of publications that became the modern newspaper.

 

That is where the modern newspaper was born, in the coffee houses of London in the 1600s to 1700s.

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