Quotes from Tom Standage

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

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.

There were no musicians or dancers, for Plato believed that educated men ought to be capable of entertaining themselves by speaking and listening in turns in an orderly manner.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. —Karl Popper, philosopher of science (1902-94)

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.

Literacy was power.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

most of the stories in the Boston News-Letter were simply copied from the London papers.

people enjoy being able to articulate their interests and define themselves by selectively compiling and resharing content created by others

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

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.