“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Advertisement: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More


According to many historians, the English Enlightenment may never have happened were it not for coffeehouses, the public sphere where poets, critics, philosophers, legal minds, and other intellectual gadflies regularly met to chatter about the pressing concerns of the day. And yet, writes scholar Bonnie Calhoun, “it was not for the taste of coffee that people flocked to these establishments.”

Indeed, one irate pamphleteer defined coffee, which was at this time without cream or sugar and usually watered down, as “puddle-water, and so ugly in colour and taste [sic].”

No syrupy, high-dollar Macchiatos or smooth, creamy lattes kept them coming back. Rather than the beverage, “it was the nature of the institution that caused its popularity to skyrocket during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

How, then, were proprietors to achieve economic growth? Like the owner of the first English coffee-shop did in 1652, London merchant Samuel Price deployed the time-honored tactics of the mountebank, using advertising to make all sorts of claims for coffee’s many “virtues” in order to convince consumers to drink the stuff at home. In the 1690 broadside above, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, Price made a “litany of claims for coffee’s health benefits,” some of which “we’d recognize today and others that seem far-fetched.” In the latter category are assertions that “coffee-drinking populations didn’t get common diseases” like kidney stones or “Scurvey, Gout, Dropsie.” Coffee could also, Price claimed, improve hearing and “swooning” and was “experimentally good to prevent Miscarriage.”

Among these spurious medical benefits is listed a genuine effect of coffee—its relief of “lethargy.” Price’s other beverages—“Chocolette, and Thee or Tea”—receive much less emphasis since they didn’t require a hard sell. No one needs to be convinced of the benefits of coffee these days—indeed many of us can’t function without it. But as we sit in corporate chain cafes, glued to smartphones and laptop screens and mostly ignoring each other, our coffeehouses have become somewhat pale imitations of those vibrant Enlightenment-era establishments where, writes Calhoun, “men [though rarely women] were encouraged to engage in both verbal and written discourse with regard for wit over rank.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

The Psychedelic Animated Video for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (1979)

Ah, yes, “Autobahn.” From the moment the door slams and the ignition starts, prog rockers and pre-new wavers know a journey is afoot. Though the members of Kraftwerk made three albums before this, the members still looking like well meaning bookish hippies, 1974’s “Autobahn” is considered Year Zero for the denizens of the electric cafe, the four German robots who made human music with machines.

Created in 1979, but bopping around again in pop culture orbit is this cel-drawn animation by Roger Mainwood, created to promote “Autobahn” after most of the culture had caught up. By that last year of the ’70s Omni magazine was a year old, music was sifting through the shockwaves left by Bowie’s Low and Heroes, analog was flirting with digital, and the world was ready to drive on that long, electric highway.

Mainwood’s protagonist is part alien, part human, and he begins looking around in awe in his hip goggles, then setting off for a run straight out of a Muybridge loop, only to wind up floating, flying, sailing and swimming through a landscape indebted to Peter Max, PushPin Studios, underground comix, and 1930 modernism.

Mainwood had just graduated from London’s Royal College of Art Film and Television School, and was commissioned by John Halas, the Hungarian immigrant who became known as the Father of British Animation, for Kraftwerk’s record label. The label wanted to put out one of the first music Laserdiscs. (Halas, by the way, directed a very UPA-influenced short called “Automania” in 1963). According to Mainwood, he still doesn’t know if the band liked the short or even if they watched it.

Mainwood avoided any direct representation of driving or automobiles, much to his credit, which may be why the film holds its fascination. The animator continued in his field, winding up a producer of several classics of British animation, including The Snowman and the chilling When the Wind Blows. As for the meaning of “Autobahn,” we’ll let Mainwood have the last word:

Thinking back to my thought processes at that time, I remember wanting to specifically not have conventional cars in the film. I wanted a sense of a repetitive journey, and alienation, which I took to be what the music was about…hence the solitary futuristic figure, protected by large goggles, moving through and trying to connect with the journey he is taking. The automobile “monsters” are deliberately threatening (I have never been a big fan of cars or motorways!) and when our “hero” tries to make human contact (with different coloured clones of himself) he can never do it. In the end he realises he is making the repetitive and circular journey alone but strides forward purposefully at the end as he did in the beginning. All of which sounds rather pretentious…but I was a young thing in those days!

You can read more of an interview with Mainwood here.

Find more animations in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

John Waters Takes You on a Comical Tour of His Apartment (1986)

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this: John Water giving a tour of his 1980s apartment. Highlights of the tour include: his collection of portraits of murderesses (preferably murderesses who have since found religion), an electric chair, a witches’ broom, fake pieces of meat found in various rooms … well, you get the picture. Enjoy!

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via Boing Boing

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Artist Makes Astonishing Armor for Cats & Mice

As a child, Jeff De Boer, the son of a sheet metal fabricator, was fascinated by the European plate armor collection in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum:

There was something magical or mystical about that empty form, that contained something. So what would it contain? A hero? Do we all contain that in ourselves?

After graduating from high school wearing a partial suit of armor he constructed for the occasion, De Boer completed seven full suits, while majoring in jewelry design at the Alberta College of Art and Design.

A sculpture class assignment provided him with an excuse to make a suit of armor for a cat. The artist had found his niche.

Using steel, silver, brass, bronze, nickel, copper, leather, fiber, wood, and his delicate jewelry making tools, DeBoer became the cats’ armorer, spending anywhere from 50 to 200 hours producing each increasingly intricate suit of feline armor.  A noble pursuit, but one that inadvertently created an “imbalance in the universe”:

The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse.

“The suit of armor is a transformation vehicle. It’s something that only the hero would wear,” De Boer notes.

Fans of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard series will need no convincing, though no real mouse has had the misfortune to find its way inside one of his astonishing, custom-made creations.

Not even a taxidermy specimen, he revealed on the Making, Our Way podcast:

It’s not an altogether bad idea. The only reason I don’t do it is that hollow suit of armor like you might see in a museum, your imagination will make it do a million things more than if you stick a mouse in it will ever do. I have put armor on cats. I can tell you, it’s nothing like what you think it’s going to be. It’s not a very good experience for the cat. It does not fulfill any fantasies about a cat wearing a suit of armor.


Though cats were his entry point, De Boer’s sympathies seem aligned with the underdog – er, mice. Equipping humble, hypothetical creatures with exquisitely wrought, historical protective gear is a way of pushing back against being perceived differently than one wishes to be.

Accepting an Honorary MFA from his alma mater earlier this year, he described an armored mouse as a metaphor for his “ongoing cat and mouse relationship with the world of fine art…a mischievous, rebellious being who dares to compete on his own terms in a world ruled by the cool cats.”

Each tiny piece is preceded by painstaking research and many reference drawings, and may incorporate special materials like the Japanese silk haori-himo cord lacing the shoulder plates to the body armor of a Samurai mouse family.

Additional creations have referenced Mongolian, gladiator, crusader, and Saracen styles – this last perfect for a Persian cat.

“I mean, “Why not?” he asks in his TED-x Talk,Village Idiots & Innovation, below.

His latest work combines elements of Maratha and Hussar armor in a veritable puzzle of minuscule pieces.

See more of Jeff De Boer’s cat and mouse armor on his Instagram.

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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Carl Sagan Explains Evolution in an 8-Minute Animation

Biological evolution: never has a phenomenon so important so lent itself to such clear, understandable, elegant explanations. But just as evolution itself produces a seemingly infinite variety of life forms, so the human understanding of evolution has produced countless educational and entertaining kinds of illustrations by which to explain it. In the video above, astronomer-astrophysicist-cosmologist Carl Sagan, no stranger to demystifying the once seemingly unfathomable phenomena of our universe, shows how evolution actually works with eight minutes of crisp animation that take us from molecules in the primordial soup, to bacteria, to plants and polyps, to lampreys, to turtles, to dinosaurs and birds, to wombats, to baboons and apes, to us. Then he goes back and does the whole four billion-year evolutionary journey again in forty seconds.

This concise lesson concerns itself not just with how we human beings came about, but how everything else came about as well. That wide-angle view of reality won a great deal of acclaim for Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the 1980 television series on which the segment originally appeared. Though most of its original broadcasts on life, the universe, and everything still hold up as well as this clip on evolution, a 21st-century successor has lately appeared in the form of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, doubtless the most suited heir to Sagan’s tradition of enthusiasm and rigor in public science communication. For a more extended treatment of evolution, see also our post from earlier this week on deGrasse Tyson’s episode on the subject, in which he spends an entire hour on his equally fascinating explanation of what, up to and including you, he, and I, natural selection has so far come up with.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

DIY Air Purifiers for Teachers: Free Designs & Step-by-Step Instructions Online

If you’re a teacher returning to the classroom, you may want some extra COVID protection. Thankfully, some researchers and practitioners have created “a design for an in-room air purifier which can remove a significant amount of COVID-19 virus from the air.”

“The design involves making a ‘box’ out of four 20″ MERV-13 filters (the ‘sides’ of the box), a 20″ box fan (the ‘top’ of the box), and a cardboard (the ‘bottom’ of the box’). Air flows in through the filter sides, removing particulates of the sizes that can transport COVID-19 particles, and then flows out through the fan at the top.” These devices can be built from parts available at Home Depot, Walmart and other big box stores, and assembled in about 30-60 minutes. Total cost runs $70-$200. Find designs and a step-by-step instructions here. And read more about the purifier at NPR.

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Foo Fighters Perform “Back in Black” with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson: When Live Music Returns

At Saturday’s benefit concert, “Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World,” the Foo Fighters took the stage and performed “Back in Black” with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson. It’s a tantalizing taste of the world to come, if we all do our part…

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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Peanuts Plays Yes’ “Roundabout”

Digital filmmaker Garren Lazar gives us a creative parody video and a badly-needed mental health break. Enjoy.

To watch previous Peanuts parodies of songs by Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Journey & more, click here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

via LaughingSquid

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.