Tom Standage Quotes & Sayings

Is it any surprise that the current center of coffee culture, the city of Seattle, home to the Starbucks coffeehouse chain, is also where some of the world's largest software and Internet firms are based? Coffee's association with innovation, reason, and networking - plus a dash of revolutionary fervor - has a long pedigree. — Tom Standage

Yet the history of media shows that this is just the modern incarnation of the timeless complaint of the intellectual elite, every time technology makes publishing easier, that the wrong sort of people will use it to publish the wrong sorts of things. — Tom Standage

The Coca-Cola Company is the biggest single supplier of such drinks. Globally, the company supplies 3 percent of humanity's total liquid intake. — Tom Standage

Most of the stories in the Boston News-Letter were simply copied from the London papers. — Tom Standage

The inclusion of lemon or lime juice in grog, made compulsory in 1795, therefore reduced the incidence of scurvy dramatically. And since beer contains no vitamin C, switching from beer to grog made British crews far healthier overall. — Tom Standage

One common abbreviation used in Roman letters was SPD, which was short for salutem plurimam dicit, or "sends many greetings." This served as a greeting at the beginning of a letter, to indicate the sender and the receiver, as in "Marcus Sexto SPD" ("Marcus sends many greetings to Sextus"). Another popular acronym was SVBEEV, which was short for si vales, bene est, ego valeo ("if you are well, that is good, I am well"). Such abbreviations saved space and time, just as acronyms (BTW, AFAIK, IANAL) do today in Internet posts and text messages. — Tom Standage

When coffee became popular in Oxford and the coffee houses selling it began to multiply, the university authorities tried to clamp down, worrying that coffee houses promoted idleness and distracted members of the university from their studies — Tom Standage

In 1872, Western Union (by then the dominant telegraph company in the United States) decided to implement a new, secure scheme to enable sums of up to $100 to be transferred between several hundred towns by telegraph. The system worked by dividing the company's network into twenty districts, each of which had its own superintendent. A telegram from the sender's office to the district superintendent confirmed that the money had been deposited; the superintendent would then send another telegram to the recipient's office authorizing the payment. Both of these messages used a code based on numbered codebooks. Each telegraph office had one of these books, with pages containing hundreds of words. But the numbers next to these words varied from office to office; only the district superintendent had copies of each office's uniquely numbered book. — Tom Standage

Although it is no longer customary to offer visitors a straw through which to drink from a communal vat of beer, today tea or coffee may be offered from a shared pot, or a glass of wine or spirits from a shared bottle. And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid. These are traditions with very ancient origins. — Tom Standage

Food has a unique political power, for several reasons: food links the world's richest consumers with its poorest farmers; food choices have always been a potent means of social signaling; modern shoppers must make dozens of food choices every week, providing far more opportunities for political expression than electoral politics; and food is a product you consume, so eating something implies a deeply personal endorsement of it. But — Tom Standage

Social media is not new. It has been around for centuries. Today, blogs are the new pamphlets. Microblogs and online social networks are the new coffee houses. Media-sharing sites are the new commonplace books. They are all shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the privileged bottleneck of broadcast media. The rebirth of social media in the Internet age represents a profound shift - and a return, in many respects, to the way things used to be. — Tom Standage

In the United States radio listeners were gathered up by networks that saw them as consumers to be sold to; in Britain they were the masses to be instructed and improved; in Germany they were the people to be indoctrinated and misled. — Tom Standage

The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas. First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant European nation in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, gaining control of the spice trade in the process and briefly becoming the world's leading commercial power. — Tom Standage

Anyone who started a quarrel had to atone for it by buying a dish of coffee for everyone present. — Tom Standage

Stronger! stronger! grow they all, Who for Coca-Cola call. Brighter! brighter! thinkers think, When they Coca-Cola drink. - Coca-Cola advertising slogan, 1896 — Tom Standage

Paul used social media to ensure that his view prevailed, cementing the establishment of the Christian church as a religion open to all, and not just to Jews. Such is his influence that his letters are still read out in Christian churches all over the world today - a striking testament to the power of documents copied and distributed along social networks. — Tom Standage

This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies. — Tom Standage

Ten years after the Boston Tea Party, tea was still far more popular than coffee, which only became the more popular drink in the mid-nineteenth century. Coffee's popularity grew after the duty on imports was abolished in 1832, making it more affordable. The duty was briefly reintroduced during the Civil War but was abolished again in 1872. — Tom Standage

Such a social-media environment; it is merely the most recent and most efficient way that humans have found to scratch a prehistoric itch. The compelling nature of social media, then, can be traced back in part to the evolution of the social brain, as — Tom Standage

It is a sign of a medium's immaturity when one of the main topics of discussion is the medium itself. — Tom Standage

March 1774 by declaring the port of Boston closed until the East India Company had been compensated for its losses. This was the first of the so-called Coercive Acts - a series of laws passed in 1774 in which the British attempted to assert their authority over the colonies but instead succeeded only in enraging the colonists further and ultimately prompted the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775. It is tempting to wonder whether a government less influenced by the interests of the company might have simply shrugged off the tea parties or come to some compromise with the colonists. — Tom Standage

There is no hope of any major increase in scientific knowledge by grafting or adding the new on top of the old," Bacon declared in his book The New Logic, published in 1620. "The restoration of the sciences must start from the bottom-most foundations - unless we prefer to go round in perpetual circles at a contemptibly slow rate. — Tom Standage

The exchange of consent being given by the electric flash, they were thus married by telegraph. — Tom Standage

You Americans are a very singular people," he later recalled to one of his friends. "I went with my automaton all over my own country - the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France they exclaimed, Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe! The English set themselves to prove - one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to see me and said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like another thing like that? I can make you one for five hundred dollars.' I laughed at his proposition. A few months afterwards, the same Yankee came to see me again, and this time he said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like to buy another thing like that? I have one already made for you. — Tom Standage

People enjoy being able to articulate their interests and define themselves by selectively compiling and resharing content created by others — Tom Standage

Television's appeal is apparent from the steady increase in the average amount of time spent watching television in America, from four and a half hours a day in 1950 to five hours in 1960, six hours in 1970, and seven hours in 1990. As the number of homes with multiple screens increased, and cable and satellite television provided dozens and then hundreds of channels to choose from, the number of hours watched increased still further, exceeding eight hours a day in the early twenty-first century. — Tom Standage

The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer. - Egyptian proverb, c. 2200 BCE — Tom Standage

But [Coca-Cola] was also genuinely welcomed by the servicemen in far-flung military bases: Coca-Cola reminded them of home and helped to maintain morale. — Tom Standage

Descendants of de Clieu's original plant were also proliferating in the region, in Haiti, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. Ultimately, Brazil became the world's dominant coffee supplier, leaving Arabia far behind. — Tom Standage

No doubt there was some time-wasting in coffee houses, as their critics claimed. But coffee houses also provided a lively intellectual and social environment in which people could meet and ideas could collide in unexpected ways, producing a stream of innovations that shaped the modern world. On balance, the introduction of coffee houses did far more good than harm, which should give those concerned about the time-wasting potential of Internet-based social platforms pause for thought. What new ideas and unexpected connections might be brewing in Twitter's global coffeehouse? — Tom Standage

All this will come as a surprise to modern Internet users who may assume that today's social-media environment is unprecedented. But many of the ways in which we share, consume, and manipulate information, even in the Internet era, build upon habits and conventions that date back centuries. — Tom Standage

in Britain, for example, it meant that a centralized "nickname" system could be introduced. Under this scheme, companies and individuals could reserve a special word as their "telegraphic address" to make life easier for anyone who wanted to send them a telegram. — Tom Standage

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began. — Tom Standage

One survey of American newspapers found that the number of articles written by papers' own writers increased from 25 percent to 45 percent between the 1820s and 1850s. — Tom Standage

In the United States radio was centralized to maximize advertising revenue; in Britain to preserve and promote the values of the elite; and in Germany to advance Nazi propaganda. Whatever the reason, the result was the most centralized medium in history. In the United States radio listeners were gathered up by networks that saw them as consumers to be sold to; in Britain they were the masses to be instructed and improved; in Germany they were the people to be indoctrinated and misled. In each case there was a striking "us and them" division between broadcasters and the faceless mass of their listeners. — Tom Standage

By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life. — Tom Standage

Coffeehouses were centers of self-education, literary and philosophical speculation, commercial innovation, and, in some cases, political fermentation. But above all they were clearinghouses for news and gossip, linked by the circulation of customers, publications, and information from one establishment to the next. Collectively, Europe's coffeehouses functioned as the Internet of the Age of Reason. — Tom Standage

John Adams, by then one of the country's founding fathers, wrote to a friend: I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes. — Tom Standage

When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider - in a county with only 391 voters. — Tom Standage

But an oft-heard complaint, as companies spread their tentacles around the world and compete on a global playing field, is that globalization is merely a new form of imperialism. — Tom Standage

The mere act of sharing something can, in other words, be a form of self-expression. — Tom Standage

A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning. - Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, April 1997 — Tom Standage

An enormous semiofficial drug-smuggling operation was established in order to improve Britain's unfavorable balance of payments with China - the direct result of the British love of tea. — Tom Standage

He proposed a steam-powered pneumatic tube system to carry telegraph forms the short distance from the Stock Exchange to the main telegraph office. — Tom Standage

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. - Marcus Tullius Cicero — Tom Standage

Literacy was power. — Tom Standage

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. — Tom Standage

(In the computer era we have returned to the custom of scrolling through texts, but we now scroll up and down, rather than right to left as the Romans did.) — Tom Standage

A particularly important use of codes a was by banks. Worries about the security of telegraphic money transfers — Tom Standage

Indeed, the construction of a global telegraph network was widely expected, by Briggs and Maverick among others, to result in world peace: 'It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.' — Tom Standage

Illness and death are not the only consequences of the lack of access to water; it also hinders education and economic development. Widespread illness makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. According to the United Nations, one of the main reasons girls do not go to school in sub-Saharan Africa is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells and carrying it home. — Tom Standage

Image of a Roman wax tablet, which looks very like an iPad. — Tom Standage

Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks - a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece. — Tom Standage

Chappe also had all sorts of ambitious plans for his invention; he hadn't intended its use to be so predominantly military in nature, and wanted to promote its employment in business. — Tom Standage

This new, telegraphic writing style also influenced public speaking: short sound bites became popular because they were easier for stenographers to transcribe, and cheaper and quicker for reporters to transmit. — Tom Standage

Post Horses and Conveyances of every description may be ordered by the electric telegraph to be in readiness on the arrival of a train, at either Paddington or Slough Station. — Tom Standage

Civilization - a word that simply means "living in cities ... "
Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. "A History of the World In 6 Glasses. — Tom Standage

Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world. — Tom Standage