Fan Favorite: Will Coffee Make Me Live Longer?

It turns out that even before his days of creating all those delicious breakfast foods like grape nuts and whatever like, Post was selling this caffeine free coffee substitute called Post Them, and apparently it was Cereal based Post Them. So this was a serial based coffee substitute that you did you actually drink it? Uh? That sounds gross, Yeah, I mean it sounds disgusting, But it actually found a pretty big audience, largely because Post marketed the heck out of it. And

you should see the ads. They are bonkers, like they only focus somewhat on how good Postum is and instead mainly they try to scare people by talking about how terrible that of coffee are on kids. So, in one ad for Posting serial from the nine thirties were told that coffee rob's children of their rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes. It lowers their vitality, lessens their resistance to disease, and

hampers proper development and growth. Well, I mean, I guess it's okay if it lessens their resistance to disease, but losing their rosy cheeks and their sparkling eyes like that is unacceptable, I know. And and even worse, Post sited some world famous research institute. Right, there's no mention of what this institute is, but it says that they found that coffee cause kids to get bad grades in school.

But I think my favorite part of the marketing plan by Post was this creation of a comic strip character who was named Mr. Coffee Nerves. Okay, at this point, Maga, you're just you're making this up, be honest. I mean I wish I were. But Mr Coffee Nerves was always causing problems and making people all restless and sick, and even causing kids to run away from home. But unfortunately the stories would always end on a happy note, with the victims, you know, making the very wise decision to

switch to post them. Oh thank goodness. But but really, I mean, you can see how even if all of this was a bunch of baloney, how that that idea that drinking that much coffee being that unhealthy and all that kind of stuff, you can see how this might stick around. Actually, yeah, and we'll discuss all of that today. I mean, it's far from the only time in history that people went to great lens to keep people from

drinking coffee. But of course, you know, we live in a coffee obsessed world, so you and I wanted to know how this all got started, what countries are the biggest drinkers, and what did the studies say about the connection between coffee and our health. So that's what we'll be looking at today. Let's dive in ye aither podcast listeners,

Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Manes Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass preparing to take his very first sip of Palm Civit coffee, that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Now this is a big day for Tristan because he's been waiting for weeks to try this stuff, and of course Palm Civic coffee can be tough to get your hands on, especially here

in the States. And in fact, he actually ordered this special, ordered these beans all the way from Indonesia, so I'm glad they arrived just in time for this episode. Yeah, but I feel like you're kind of varying the lead here, like, don't you think I mean, the real story is that Tristan is about to drink what is essentially cat poop coffee, Like those beans have actually passed through the digestive tract

of a wild animal. That might be true, and I don't want to be that guy, but I do want to clarify here that these came from an Asian palm civit, which isn't technically a cat, but it doesn't make this a less gross and honestly, as strange as this all sounds, gathering coffee beans from animal droppings has become this whole little kind of the subsection of the coffee industry, and I guess most of this has really developed over the

past decade or so. An assigned from civits you can buy, you know, those that have passed through the bodies of everything from monkeys to elephants, And it really isn't just for novelty's sake. There there's an idea behind this, and that's that these beans ferment naturally in an animal stomach, and so because of that, it results in this smoother and less acidic cup of coffee than any other bean

that's out there. That's pretty funny because I actually read a review that described the taste as quote petrified dinosaur dropping steeped in back to water, which just sounds gross. But at least it's not acidic back to water. I don't know. I feel like we have to pause for just a second and check out Tristan's facial expression, because I'm going to say, based on that alone, it's probably

a pretty fair description. But anyway, you today's show isn't just about Tristan's quest for this pricey cup of nasty coffee. And I will say it's pretty telling that even such a niche variety of coffee can attract an audience. And that's because coffee in general has become such a ubiquitous drink, and today it's consumed in one form or another and just about every region on the planet. But it hasn't always been that way, and and in fact, you know, when you compare it to the two most popular hot

beverages in the world. That's, of course, you know, tea and hot chocolate. Coffee is the youngest by far, and you know, the history is only about a third as long as you know these others that we were talking about. So anyway, with that in mind, we thought we'd take a look at just how far coffee has come, and of course why people all across the globe can't seem

to get enough of it. You know, in college, I was in someone's car and they breaked really hard and I ended up spilling coffee on my nice white shirt. So I had this immediate idea for an invention, which is clear coffee, like if you can make purple catchup and crystal PEPSI like, I not a clear coffee that doesn't stain your teeth through your shirts. And I really thought it was in genius. I'm sure I talked to

your ear off about it. I remember you talking about this, and honestly, every single person I I tried to tell about this was totally underwhelmed, Like especially chemistry majors. They just were unenthusiastic. It was a little like you're putting truck idea where a cement truck would come around like an ice cream truck and just dispense putting into kid's hands.

I mean, you have to admit the omago that idea is still pretty genius, I know, and so is clear coffee, and I can't wait to get the series A on both of those. But back to regular old brown coffee. So one thing we should get out of the way right upfront is who likes coffee the most, or at least who drinks the most of it. And while the US might seem like a safe bet given the size of our coffee cups and you know the way, we're never more than thirty ft from a Starbucks at any moment.

According to the latest stats from the International Coffee Organization, the US doesn't even crack the top twenty when it comes to per capita consumption. And that's actually saying something because the tooth in fifteen Gallop poll found that sixty percent of Americans drink at least one cup of coffee per day and two point seven cups on average. And not only that, we also consume a little over I

believe it's nine pounds per capita every year. Wow, So nine pounds per person and we're still not even in the top twenty. I mean, I feel like these other countries must just be like mainlining coffee, so how much could they possibly be drinking? Well, Finland tops the list, with each person consuming about twenty six and a half pounds of it every year, and the other Nordic countries

aren't too far behind it. In fact, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden all round out the top six. And that's what they're citizens, down in between eighteen and twenty two pounds per person per year. You know, I feel like this is the third or the fourth time that Scandinavian countries have dominated lists like this, you know, thinking back to some of our previous episodes, they have

the happiest citizens, they eat the most chocolate. I think they have the best prisons, and and now they drink the most coffee. Like what's going on here? Well, I mean we are talking about some pretty chilly countries here, so they probably just need all the help they can getting through those long, dark winters. Wow. Well, you know, I feel like at least were number one in something, and that has to be the number of Starbucks, because I can't imagine any other country has this beat on that,

at least on a per capita basis. So I hate to break your heart here because I actually thought the same thing. I thought we had Starbucks domination as well, but Monico edged us out a few years ago. Monaco they currently have a fifty two star Wucks branches for one million citizens compared to our forty one. So I mean, I guess we're number two in Starbucks. But now that we've established how much everyone loves the stuff, well, why don't we talk about where coffee comes from and how

we wound up drinking it in the first place. Well, I mean, it's a nice idea, but it's it's kind of easier said than done. You know, as we were starting to do our research on this, I just googled origins of coffee and of course got something like twenty million results, and even just clicking around through a handful of these, I do get this feeling that there's not a lot of consensus on the history of coffee. And we've run into this before, whether we were looking at

the origins of chocolate or cheese. It it really is tough to pin down where and when a staple food like this got it's you know, got its start. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely true, and the specifics are pretty hazy, but thankfully there's some broad points that most historians agree about. For instance, we know the coffee plant originated on the plateau of Ethiopia, and that's actually because it tends to spontaneously grow there like no place on Earth. And in fact,

the region in question is even called Kafa. You know, we're not sure if coffee took its name from the region or the other way around, but it's definitely linked somehow.

You know, it was fun and reading about some of these origins, and you know, you see these stories that go back to this old Ethiopian legend and I think we may have talked about this one before, but it's this story about this goat chew bird name called e or a k A that you know, the happiest hurd and happy Arabia, And the reason for his happiness was that one day Caldy noticed his goats had started dancing and jumping all over the place, and he noticed that

they've been eating the fruits and leaves of this certain bush, so naturally called. He gets curious, and he goes over and decides to try some of the fruit for himself, and of course he feels this big burst of energy and immediately started sharing these magic beans with his friends and family. And this is something that supposedly happened around eight fifty, but again, nobody really can say for sure. So I honestly love how many discoveries are goat based.

Like there's a legend about a blind goat walking through a thorn and carrying his cataracts, and that's how we started cataract operations. I want to say, there's like a goat hurd who went to look for his missing goat, and that's how we discovered the Dead Sea scrolls. Like we owe a lot to goats, and about all the productivity that comes from like coffee, from balls, act Beethoven, to the Velvet Revolution, to musicians, to politicians staying up late,

to craft laws, academics meeting deadlines. Like I mean, we kind of owe a lot to goats. Yeah, I mean that that may be true, and that is pretty funny, But I feel like we were talking about coffee, have we have we shifted to an episode on goats in a total goat direction here, but so so that so the man on the other side of the soundproof glass now ramming his cataracts into a bunch of bushes. That's our friend and producer Tristan Mingo. Right, so we're going

in a different direction. Maybe we should get back to coffee. So well, one thing we do know about coffee is that in its earliest days it was chewed rather than sipped, just like the goats did it. And you know, to make sense of that, it helps to know that coffee beans aren't actually beans at all. There are seeds which are found in the pits of the cherry like fruits that grow on coffee plants. And while we coffee drinkers are much more interested in the seeds than the fruit,

it was just the opposite for early Ethiopian tribes. For example, the Gala tribe would soften these coffee fruits and liquid and then they blend them with this animal fat to make kind of like a chewable energy ball. It's amazing, huh. Well, whatever the true origin, it definitely seems like the earliest folks to imbibe coffee, we're really doing it for the same reason we do today, and that's of course, for

that caffeine kick. I mean, there's always the chance that some desperate nomad was the first to eat a coffee cherry just to stay alive. But coffee's energizing effect is definitely why people kept coming back for more, and even the prophet Mohammed is said to have enjoyed the stimulation. There's this one account where um Mohammed was feeling under the weather until he was visited by the archangel Gabriel, who gifted him this hot drink that was quote dark

as the holy black stone of Mecca. So does that mean that Mohammed is supposed to have been the first person to actually drink coffee rather than eat it. I mean possibly, but if not, there's this other contender, this Persian doctor and philosopher who lived around the same time that Collide danced with his goats. His name was Rozzie and he was the first person known to write about coffee.

In his writings, he talked about this medicinal bever it she'd made from the bun fruit, which is the Ethiopian word for the coffee cherry. And there are also early writings that point to Yemen is the first place where coffee was cultivated, roasted, ground and brewed as a liquid. And this would have been around the early fifteenth century. Alright, So I know coffee plants aren't native to Yemen, so it's safe to assume they were imported from Ethiopia. Once

word of their discovery, it's spread. But but do we know the story from there? Like how did it get from Africa and this Arabian peninsula all the way to Europe and North America and I guess just about everywhere. Well, A big part of coffee spread is thanks to those early adopters in Yemen. Many of them were Sufis who used the plant's roasted seeds and leaves to prepare a beverage that helped them stay awake through long nights of prayer.

And then these holy men took their beans and all this brewing, know how, all across the Islamic world through the fifteenth century. And then you get to the sixteenth century, like coffee begins its global journey. The Ottoman Empire rises to power, and Muslims they've got this religious ban on alcohol that starts to take hold, and soon coffee replaces wine throughout the region. And by the fifteen fifties, the

first known coffee house opens in Constantinople. But here's the thing, right, Like, the Ottomans knew they had stumbled into something special during their conquest, which is why they tried to keep coffee this exclusive product of Yemen. And to do this they really had to do something clever. They only allowed coffee

beans to be exported if they'd been sterilized first. So while like Europeans started developing a taste for coffee during the sixteenth century, they really couldn't use the seeds to grow their own. But of course the Ottoman Empire couldn't keep an eye on every single bean, so pretty soon Muslim pilgrims as well as like Dutch and Venetian merchants, they were all smuggling these precious beans off the Arabian peninsula.

All right, So you know, we're looking at the early seventeenth century, and so obviously coffee had made its way into Europe, both legally and illegally, but you know, not everybody took to it from the start. It was interesting reading about this and seeing that, you know, like even the Catholic Church was strongly opposed the coffee because of

those stimul lighting effects that we were talking about. Apparently Pope Clement the eighth was urged by his councilman to speak out against this drink, and they referred to it as the bitter invention of Satan, which might have been a slight overreaction on their part, But what happened, Like did the Pope actually take their advice? Well, he was never one to follow the crowd, so Pope Clement insisted on tasting the coffee for himself before he made a

decision on what to do about it. And you know, thankfully he turned out to be a big fan. In fact, here's what he told his counsel. He said, the devil's drink is so delicious, we should cheat the devil by baptizing it. And so it was with that endorsement that Christian Europe decided to really indulge and it quickly became the world's favorite pick me up. So I love that, And also, like, can you just baptize anything you have

reservations about? Like led Zeppelin might have sold their soul to the Devil's to make led Zeppelin one through four, but I'm gonna baptize it, Like it's just such a convenient solution. But of course it wasn't just the Catholic clergy, who had all these qualms with coffees growing roan socide. Various rulers of the Ottoman Empire also tried outlining coffee and coffee houses over the years, but you know, the

band's never really stuck for long. The worst of these crackdowns came during the rule of Murad the fourth between sixty. Murad had already outlawed tobacco, and he was so committed to this band, like sometimes he wore a disguise in public just so he could catch illegal smokers in the act. And whenever the emperor did catch someone like sparking a cigarette, he'd reveal himself and then he'd wail on the culprit with his royal mace floor. So was he doing the

same kind of thing with coffee as well? Yeah, I mean it was horrible, and Murad was pretty angry when he realized that many of his subjects had been meeting at coffee houses to discuss I guess what a buzz kill of a ruler he was. So, of course, the response was to outrighte band coffee throughout the Ottoman Empire, and while getting caught with a cup of coffee carried the same punishment as tobacco as a first offense. The

repeat offenders got much worse than a beating. Anyone caught drinking be a second time was actually sewn into a sack and chucked into a local waterway. Man, it just sounds like such a fun guy, what a party, you know. But what's weird is like this isn't even the most bizarre opposition coffee faced in its early years. And I feel like we need to talk about these extremes, and especially those that some of the European officials went to while trying to stamp out coffee altogether. But before we

get to that, let's take a quick break. You're listening to part time Genius and we're giving you the full scoop on the history of coffee. All right, mango, So banning coffee and coffee shops is pretty bad, but actually this was funny to read about. Did you know that in Sweden they actually went even further and at one point actually outlawed cups and saucers to what So this

was the mid eighteenth century. It was during the rule of eight Frederick, and the king believed that coffee stimulated radical thinking and let his citizens to behave badly, so he imposes this heavy tax on coffee imports and even consumption, and he punished those who refused to pay the tax by confiscating their cups and saucers, and even that happened to fail, so they had to try to find another way to stop the coffee drinkers. So the king decided

to ban coffee altogether. I mean, it's pretty great that he thought taking away cops with solve the problem. But obviously the Sweedes are some of the biggest coffee drinkers in the world today. So I'm guessing the band died with King Frederick. Well not quite. I mean, his son tried to keep this going. His son was goosed off the third It just sounds like somebody who would want to ban coffee, right, and so he that's right. I mean, he shared his father's distaste for coffee and became convinced

that it was incredibly unhealthy. In fact, the guy was so convinced that coffee was harmful that he conducted this long running experiment to prove to his subjects that coffee was bad for him. So this is what he did. He found two convicted murders and they've been sentenced to death, and he offered them this chance to live. And so he said, here's this experiment, and if you participate in this will give you life sentences instead. And so the men agreed. And what happens next is they were given

their marching orders. So one of them was required to drink three pots of coffee every day. The other one was asked to drink an equal amount of tea. Wait, that's it. Like all they had to do is drink a bunch of tea and coffee and they got to live. Yep. I feel like this is like the luckiest convicted murderers in history. Oh definitely. I mean, Gustaf was convinced that the coffee drinker would be dead in no time, and this is how dangerous he thought coffee was. But of

course Gustav was wrong. In fact, not only did both prisoners outlive the king, they even outlived the doctors that have been charged with overseeing them. The tea drinker lived to be I think it was like eighty three years old, and the coffee drinker actually survived even longer than that. So that's amazing, and it actually reminds me of something similar that happened in Prussia around the same time. Apparently the Prussian King Frederick was also convinced that coffee was

a dangerous influence on these people. So not only did he ban coffee drinking, he even made it illegal to roast it. I was just pretty ridiculous, and I can to enforce something like that. I mean, that's the funny part, Like he actually sent royal sniffers into the streets to track down criminals just by the smell of the illicit brew.

But again, all of this was ultimately in vain, and coffee culture continued to thrive across Europe, you know, and we're lucky that it did, because if you think about it, prior to this spread of coffee, most people in Europe were drinking alcohol pretty much all day long, and you know, they'd have some beer with breakfast, some wine with lunch,

a little bit of both in the evening. And I actually, believe it or not, this was the healthiest way to go because most of the water that people had access to wasn't safe to drink. So you've got the fermentation process working in their favor and that would kind of take care of the problem and the alcohol. But it also has a downside, and that's the fact that everybody was walking around drunk all the time. I guess that.

You know, once that population switched from this more of a depressant to these stimulants like coffee and tea, suddenly there was this this real explosion of new ideas and innovations. Is more and more people began to think clearly again. Yeah, I mean, I've heard before how the spread and development of alignment owed a lot to coffee and also more specifically to coffee houses, because you know, just like today, coffee houses became these community gathering places where people could

get together to share ideas or conduct business. Um. The first ones in Europe open in the seventeenth century, with England getting its first in sixteen fifty two, and about a decade later London was up to about eighty different coffee houses, and forty years after that the city contained more than five hundred. Wow. I mean, the idea really did take off from the start. But you know, just like in the Ottoman Empire, coffee houses also had their share of detractors in Europe, and some of them are

pretty funny to read about. You know. For instance, in England that was a group of women who banded together in sixteen seventy four and they wrote something called the Women's Petition against Coffee, which was this manifesto that claimed that coffee robbed men of their masculinity. So the women refer to their husband's new pastime as quote the excessive use of that new fangled, abominable heathenish liquor called coffee. But it's been baptized. But right right? What they think

was so bad about drinking coffee? Well, I mean, I guess the idea was that these once vera hard working men were now just sitting around in coffee shops all days, sipping coffee, talking like a bunch of frenchmen, I guess. But you know, the men of England actually didn't take this affront of their manhood lying down, and instead they pinned their response to this, and it was called Men's

Answer to the Women's Petition against Coffee. I love the titles of these stages in that here's what they claimed that, far from making men impotent, coffee actually made quote the erection more vigorous, adding a spiritual ascendency to the sperm. I don't even know what that means. I'm sure I don't want to either. Is really wild to hear how dead certain people were that like, coffee must be bad

for you somehow. I mean, it's kind of ironic considering how often we hear about the potential health benefits of drinking coffee today. Well, you know, and I actually did a little bit of digging on some of those health claims because there's something I've heard pretty often too, and you know, the most prevalent one is that drinking a certain number of cups of coffee will help you live longer. And surprisingly, the science actually seems to bear this out.

Like I was looking at this study that was released last year by the European Society of Cardiology. So about a decade ago, these researchers got together about twenty volunteers in Spain, and they asked them about their food and coffee drinking habits, as well as their overall health history and lifestyles and all kinds of stuff like that. And so they look at them ten years later, and the researchers, you know, we're reconnecting with them and wanted to see

how they were holding up. And what they found was that those participants who drank at least four cups of coffee a day were astounding sixty more likely to avoid premature death than those who hardly drank coffee at all. But it's kind of not the weirdest part. The researchers also found that for each additional two cups of coffee that I participant drink each day, their risk of any causes immortality was actually reduced by an extra twenty two

per cent. So I think what you're saying here is if I drink like a dozen cops of coffee a day, I'll basically live forever. Yeah, I'm not sure that that's what I'm saying, but you know, you take away from it what you want. But you know, the real explanation for why coffee can boost your longevity is pretty interesting.

And I was looking at the study out of Stanford, and what they found was that the caffeine and coffee actually combats the inflammatory processes that go along with aging and these age related conditions like heart disease and Alzheimer's. So basically, the antioxidants in the coffee function like anybody's fighting off an illness, you know, they attack the harmful byproducts of our bodies metabolic reactions or like these are

the ones that would otherwise trigger that inflammation. Yeah, well, I've actually got good news for any of our non human listeners out there, because apparently coffees health benefits extend to the animal kingdom as well. And we know this because the oldest cat ever on record was actually an avid coffee drinker. Her name was cream Puff, and she lived to be a whopping thirty eight years old and

three days as well. Um, and this was actually thanks to her daily morning coffee, not to mention the bacon, eggs and broccoli she also ate. It doesn't sound like a bad diet, and obviously that's super impressive, But how do you know it was the coffee that kept around so long? Like, couldn't have this just been a coincidence? Yeah,

of course, anything's possible. But it is worth keeping in mind that the previous record holder before cream Puff was a thirty four year old cat named Grandpa Rex Allen. And not only the Gramps have the same owner as cream Puff, he was fed the exact same diet too, including that all important daily dose of java. And that is pretty convincing, to be honest with you. But there's still one health aspect of coffee. I'm not so sure about it, and that's whether or not it should be

considered cancerous. And scientist seemed to go back and forth from this from time to time. But if we're going to commit four or more cups of coffee a day, I feel like it'd be pretty nice to have a definitive answer on this. Yeah. Well, you're in luck because the World Health Organization actually made a statement about this not too long ago, and their conclusion was sort of surprising. Oh really, so what did they say? Well, I'll tell you about that in a minute, but first let's take

another quick break. Okay. Well, so I know you were curious about whether or not coffee causes cancer, and honestly, the answer is kind of a mixed bag. So first the good news, there's no conclusive evidence that drinking coffee leads to cancer. In the past, that in antional Agency for Research on Cancer had actually labeled the coffee as quote possible carcinogen, which landed in the same category as

chloroform and lots of other harmful substances. I mean, it's a little weird to think of coffee in the same class as chloroform. I feel like that's kind of extreme. But but you're saying that warning has been reversed at this point. Yeah, so the i r C changed its mind after reviewing over a thousands scientific studies and humans and animals, none of which provide enough evidence to support the quote possibly carcinogenic label. Okay, so that feels like a win for all of us. So why did you

say it was a mixed bag? Yeah? I mean that's because of the bad news, which is that the agency also conclude that basically all very hot drinks are most likely carcinogenic. Apparently there's now enough evidence to suggest that drinking anything a hundred forty nine degrees fahrenheit or hotter probably causes cancer of the esophagus. And since the average cup of Joe is typically served between one sixty and

one degrees fahrenheit, that's not so great news for coffee drinkers. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, t or hot water drinkers for that matter. But um, alright, So the good news is is that coffee itself probably isn't cancerous, but very hot coffee might be. And I don't know, I feel like if that's not a ringing endorsement for cold brew, I'm really not sure. What would be. Yeah,

I know, and I'm a huge cold brew drinker. But on a lighter note, when I was looking into the cancer angle, I also came across this bizarre thought experiment in Scientific American and it's actually just too weird not to share. So you know how on the show Friends, the cast is always drinking those enormous mugs of coffee at the central perk. Oh, yeah, definitely were huge. Yeah.

So this writer named Kyle Hill remembers too, and he actually crunched the numbers to see just how many people you could kill with all the caffeine and the cast of Friends consumed over the course of the show's ten seasons, And it turns out that, assuming each episode represents a week of time, on average, the six Friends down an incredible gallons of coffee, which is enough to send over people to the hospital. I like how this is the

lighter note that you wanted to talk about. I mean, I guess it at least raises the interesting question of how much caffeine is actually safe to consume. So did did you get a sense of that apart from this ridiculous hypothetical. Yeah, so, some scientists say it's about ten grams of caffeine. That's enough to do most people in but there are also reports of people dying from as

little as four milligrams. Honestly that there isn't like a universal overdose amount for caffeine because the number varies from person to person, and that's because of all sorts of factors, from you know, your heart help to your body weight. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say, with like heart health, especially because everybody's is so different, it seems like issues could be triggered with even a little bit of caffeine for some people. But but what about that ten grams

you mentioned? How easy is it to ingest that much? So not very thankfully, Like that would be the equivalent about fifty shots of five hour energy. And since there's only about a hundred fifty milligrams of caffeine and an eight ounds cup of coffee, you'd actually need to drink a full seventy cups to get to ten grams. And if that wasn't unlikely enough, like you'd actually have to drink all those cups at the same time. Because caffeine's effects less in over time. So there's some good news.

It's effectively impossible to odeon caffeine from coffee. There's just no way you could fit that much liquid in your stomach. Not and not to mention that most people's coffee breaks aren't long enough to bruise seventy cups of coffee, much less drink them. That's true. But you know, speaking of coffee breaks, and this is a total detour from what we were talking about, did you ever wonder how that practice got it start? Yeah, like I used to know the answer at one point. I feel like it has

to do with some sort of ad campaign or something. Well, yes and no, and they're there are actually some conflicting reports about this, much like the origins of coffee itself. But according to City Lab, coffee breaks are a product of early twentieth century unions. So factories finally standardized the

work day. They came to be eight hours a day, but they also added these rest breaks into the schedule, and it was during these breaks that workers would drink coffee to get that quick jolt of energy so they could finish the work day. And of course, entrepreneurs took notice of this practice, and pretty soon you started seeing these street carts and coffee counters and vending machines just

popping up all over the place. So I mean, it makes complete sense to me that coffee breaks would be this American invention, you know, American workers coming up with it. But you said some folks don't actually bind it that theory. Well, in particular, these would be the citizens of Stoughton, Wisconsin. They don't buy into it at all. So on the contrary, this tiny town insists that it was actually the area's

population of Norwegian female immigrants who invented coffee breaks. And this would have been back in the late nineteenth century. So apparently there was a tobacco warehouse in the town that hired these Norwegian women to help strip the plants, and since the warehouse wasn't too far from their homes, the women would routinely pop in to check on their kids or get dinner started, and of course grab a

cup of coffee before heading back to work. And even though outsiders continue to challenge Stoughton's claim to fame, the town itself has no doubt about this local lore being true. In fact, the residents still under the town's history each year by holding this official coffee break festival, and they build it. As quote the weekend when everyone is Norwegian. Well that's pretty sweet. But wait, so I was thinking coffee breaks had something to do with marketing and ad

Caffei's did Did I just make that up? Now? So that's another legit option. See, if you look back to the early nineteen hundreds, you had multiple companies beginning to offer coffee breaks as these official job perks for their employees, like, for instance, the company that makes bark A Loungers agreed to give workers short breaks during the morning in the afternoon and then they could heat up a cup of

coffee on like a kerosene fueled hot plate. While all kinds of companies like claim to having offered the first official coffee break, the first group to actually coin the phrase coffee break didn't come along until nineteen fifty two. And that's the year that Pan American Coffee Bureau launched an ad campaign encouraging the public to quote, give yourself a coffee break and get what coffee gives you. That's

just great ad coffee right there. But I always think it's so fun to find out where the lingo surrounding words and phrases comes from. And did you know the phrase cup of Joe might have come from a US naval secretary named Josephus Daniels. No. He apparently banned all drinks stronger than coffee from being served in the mess halls, so the officers started applying his name to the only

stiff drink he approved of. And of course there's also a good chance the phrase goes back even further, like some people say, Joe is a shortening of the word jamoke, which I guess is a hybrid of java and mocho, you know, two regions known for coffee cultivation. I'd actually never heard that. Well, since we're on that subject, the bureau that gave us coffee breaks was also behind another famous coffee phrase, and that's the phrase one for the road.

You know that phrases typically used now to mean like one more drink before I go, It was originally more literally taken. So remember the country's interstate highway system was brand new at this time, so that idea of one more for the road, it was really intended as a safety measure to make sure Americans were staying awake or not falling asleep while they were at the wheel during these long distance drives. That's awesome, but speaking of one more for the road, it looks like Tristan still got

a full pot of Civic coffee over there. If you're feeling thirsty before the fact, Yeah, I think I was gonna be a hard pass from the mango, But but I am ready for the fact off. So I'm reading up for this episode. I was looking at this New York Times article from a couple of years back that was about the fact that a surprising number of flights

are delayed each year because of broken coffee makers. So, as the article explained, these are incredibly expensive coffee pots, and we're talking ten dollars apiece, sometimes more, and that's because they have so many safety features like circuit breakers

and special wiring. What that also means is that there are more things that could possibly go wrong, and so if a coffee maker isn't working, they then have to do the full investigation to make sure it's not because of bad wiring on the plane or anything like that. But you know, people can't live without their coffee, so we just deal with this. That's amazing. So here's the fact about the role coffee played and trying to get the Brazilian Olympic delegation to the Nine two Games, and

this was in Los Angeles. It was a super expensive trip, so they decided to load up fifty thousand bags of Brazilian coffee on the ship they were traveling on, and the plan was to sell as much of it as

possible along the way to pay for the trip. But unfortunately, they didn't sell quite as much as they had hoped, and when they made it to the port in l a they couldn't afford to pay the one dollar per person charge, so only about half the team could get off the boat, and in fact, there were still fifteen athletes who were never able to get off the ship in the States, so during the entire voyage, these fifteen people never got off the ship. Yeah, it's terrible. I've

been wondering if there was an actual Maxwell House. I don't know why I was wondering this, but you know, it turns out that there was so Maxwell House hotel. It up just a few years after the Civil War, and it was the fanciest hotel in Nashville. Apparently Teddy Roosevelt liked visiting, as well as several of the Vanderbilts, and the coffee actually got its name from this hotel. I was looking into the history of it and Sally the hotel burned down in nine so it's no longer there.

But there was actually a Maxwell house. That's crazy. It was there until the sixties though. That's pretty impressive. So it turns out Beethoven was a big fan of coffee, but he was also incredibly particular about how it was to be made. In fact, he only wanted his cups made with precisely sixty beans. And I don't know why I find that surprising, but that's actually how I'll be ordering my coffee from now on, like like a venti Beethoven style. Right, all right, Well, I think I had

actually seen this fact before. But did you know that the first ever webcam was used at Cambridge? But it was actually set up to do something much less academic than you might imagine. It was used to give the researchers there the ability to monitor the coffee in the break room without having to get up to check it. I love that that became like an Internet star and everyone was checking the Cambridge coffee. But you know what

we opened talking about cat poop coffee. Well, I figured maybe we should close the show with an equally gross, but different kind of bean processing. That's vanilla flavored monkey saliva coffee and this comes from Taiwan. Apparently, these monkeys were becoming a big problem for coffee farms because they were like trying to get their buzz and destroying the crops. They would just suck on the coffee cherries and then

spit out the pits. But one thing a farmer noticed was that these beans the monkeys that spit out, had a unique vanilla flavor to them. So he just decided to team up with the monkeys, and now we have an even more rare coffee for Tristan to love. That is pretty wild. And I have to respect Mango, the fact that you were bold enough to start off the episode talking about poop coffee and in the episode talking about monkey spit coffee. So those might both be gross,

but I respect that. So I'm going to have to give you today's trophy. Thank you very much, and thank you guys for listening. I'm sure we left out some great facts about coffee, so don't hesitate to let us know the ones that we missed. We always love to hear from You can email us part time Genius and how stuff works dot com or call us one Fact hot line. That's eight four four pt Genius. You can always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks so

much for listening, Kay, thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the

exact producer thing. Gabeluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eve Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, and we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review for us, do you, Suget Jason who