3rd August 2011
Coffee House to Internet Café by Adrian Procter
Adrian Proctor’s day job is Electronic Engineering but for more than 40 years he has pursued his interest in the history of London, particularly the City of London. This abiding passion makes him a popular lecturer and he is also the author of “The A-Z of Elizabethan London” .
The underlying theme of his talk was the changing face of communications; from the founding of the Royal Exchange in 1568 to the rise of the Internet Café in this century.
The common thread, he explained, was the need for faster and more effective systems of communication, driven by both trade and defence of the realm.
Unfortunately time was against us and he had to skip his sections on telephones, radio and TV. This meant we made an unlikely jump from the electric telegraph to the internet, bypassing Marconi and Baird in the process.
The story begins with the need for wealthy merchants and ships captains to meet together in mutually acceptable circumstances, with the captains selling and the merchants buying. In boats no bigger than 30 feet long and half as broad, 30 crew would sail the seven seas, bringing back exotic cargoes of immense value. Nutmeg for example was literally worth its weight in gold.
To provide a venue for the trade bargaining Thomas Gresham financed the building of the Royal Exchange in 1568. This building, rebuilt several times over the centuries is now a shopping mall but has given rise to the trading in all financial products including stocks and shares and insurances.
Royal Exchange in 2011
At the same time as the exchange was flourishing so too was the postal system. It started with the King’s mail being taken on horseback across the country and Sit Brian Tuke was the first Postmaster in 1516.
By 1548 the first regular private service was running and charging 1d per mile; and by 1680 the Metropolitan Postal Service was in business making a delivery each hour to places of business.
In the mid 1600’s coffee showed itself in England, together with chocolate and tea and very quickly won the popularity stakes. By 1702 there were over 500 coffee houses in central London and a hundred years later this had risen to 8000. Coffee houses became the meeting place and social centres for the merchants, politicians, learned men, wits and men of fashion. Ladies were very thin on the ground although we did see a drawing (left) of a bewigged grande dame presiding over her coffee house. No nonsense there then!, and run very differently to the squalid and dreary taverns that abounded in the area.
The coffee houses became themed very quickly with Garroway’s attracting medics, Jonathan’s astronomers, the Baltic, Baltic trading and the most famous Lloyd’s; looking after Shipping Insurance.
As an aside Garroway’s also sold leaf tea at prices ranging from 80p to £2.30 per pound. (Note the value of the pound in 1650 is £ 67 today}
Today’s Stock Exchange arose from the issuing of commodity prices at Jonathans coffee house but he was overtaken by Edward Lloyd, a coffee house owner who attracted shippers to his premises and by 1734 had begun issuing what is now known as the Lloyds List.
Edward Lloyd's Coffee House
In similar vein the Baltic Exchange began and flourished in the Baltic Coffee house.
At this time it became obvious that the coffee houses were not only a forum for doing business but a critical source of timely and accurate news, by the standards of the day.
Adrian made an aside about the South Sea Bubble, likening it to the recent recession and implicating bankers greed as the catalyst that clouded every ones judgement.
In 1640 the stage coach ushered in a step change in communication speed allowing news and information to travel at roughly 10mph across Britain.
It took four days to get from London to York whilst London to Holyhead, a distance of 260 miles was covered in 27 hours. By 1797 there were 42 routes across Britain covering more than 4000 miles and horses were changed every 10 miles. A lot of rhubarb was grown along the routes.
This couldn’t last and by the mid 1800’s the emergence of the train, capable of an average speed of 18mph, sounded the death knell of the coach and four.
Newspapers also contributed to the dissemination of accurate news and in 1702 the Daily Courant was launched, followed in 1758 by the first national paper The Universal Daily Register or Times as it became.
But more technology was looming, the use of mechanical signalling telegraph, communicating to each other at distances between of about 10 miles and requiring a route dotted with hills. Generally starting in London and heading out to the coast and the fleets. It took around 15 minutes to get a signal to and fro over a 60 mile route.
Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower (shown left) is the best-preserved part of a chain of signalling stations to enable Whitehall to communicate with Portsmouth.
In 1816 the new electric telegraph was born, followed by the invention of morse code in 1838 and the first Atlantic underwater cable, insulated with Gutta-Percha. This now made the communication almost instantaneous.
Now we come right up to date with the birth of the internet in 1983, pioneered by the brit Sir Tim Bernars-Lee. The internet is the linked network over which the information flows and the web is the information in the form of the pages that we call up when we use the internet.
We have also completed a full circle with the advent of the Internet Café where in places like McInternet and Starbucks (and below) we see coffee being drunk as information and business is conducted with the lap top, smart phone, tablet etc. The issue of today however is trying to keep up with the news as it’s arriving, four hundred years ago they were waiting for it. What will the next 400 years bring?
Ken Taylor
