Quotes from Tom Standage

According to an account in Anecdotes of the Telegraph, when his request was questioned, the man ran off, grinning a horrible, ghastly smile.

At the time there were no printing presses and no paper.

these sacrifices sustained the cosmic cycle: Maize became blood, and blood was then transformed back into maize. Sacrificial victims were referred to as "tortillas for the gods.

Drinks have had a closer connection to the flow of history than is generally acknowledged, and a greater influence on its course. Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce.

The practice of linking entire networks, rather than individual computers, came to be known as "internetworking" or

what looks like a quick fix today may well end up having far-reaching and unintended consequences tomorrow.

Dental remains show that farmers suffered from tooth decay, unheard of in hunter-gatherers, because the carbohydrates in the farmers' cereal-heavy diets were reduced to sugars by enzymes in their saliva as they chewed.

The short answer is that they did not realize what was happening until it was too late.

In effect, hunter-gatherers work two days a week and have five-day weekends.

One such factor was greater sedentism

Farming may have been prompted by social competition, as rival groups competed to host the most lavish feasts; this might explain why, in some parts of the world, luxury foods appear to have been domesticated before staples.

Many of our technology-related problems arise because of the unforeseen consequences when apparently benign technologies are employed on a massive scale.

Carrots were originally white and purple, and the sweeter orange variety was created by Dutch horticulturalists in the sixteenth century as a tribute to William I, Prince of Orange.

However, one listing of common abbreviations compiled in 1859 includes 1 1 (dot dot, dot dot) for I AM READY; G A (dash dash dot, dot dash) for GO AHEAD, S F D for STOP FOR DINNER; G M for GOOD MORNING.

And one man in Nebraska thought the telegraph wires were a kind of tightrope; he watched the line carefully ''to see the man run along the wires with the letter bags.

According to Chinese tradition, the first cup of tea was brewed by the emperor Shen Nung, whose reign is traditionally dated to 2737–2697 BCE.

before long there were also pneumatic tube networks in Vienna, Prague, Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, Rome, Naples, Milan, and Marseilles. One of the most ambitious systems was installed in New York, linking many of the post offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This system was large enough to handle small parcels, and on one occasion a cat was even sent from one post office to another along the tubes.

The language's two main advantages are its simplicity and flexibility. Its straightforward syntax and use of indented spaces make it easy to learn, read and share.

By listing Disease X, an undetermined disease, the WHO is acknowledging that outbreaks do not always come from an identified source and that, as it admits, "a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease".

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

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.

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.

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. —Aristophanes, Greek comic poet (c. 450-385 BCE)

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.