In this unpublished chapter from Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants, Wu explains how the coffeehouse came to be not just a social hub, but the center of news distribution and in a way, the forerunner to the modern media industry.
In 1654, on Queen’s Lane in Oxford, a Jewish immigrant from Syria named Cirques Jobson opened a new kind of business. It was, at the time, just the second in Oxford and among the very first in Europe outside of Turkey. On the outside, it looked just like a normal house, because it was, in fact, Jobson’s house. But in a large room on the first floor, Jobson had opened a space that was among the very first to fuse English and Ottoman traditions in a manner that would come to transform civilization as we know it.
Jobson’s house had tables and chairs for patrons, and between the tables and the kitchen, young boys bringing patrons a new and exotic drink, then called kahveh or caffe. (The boys, for an additional fee, also shined shoes.) As a contemporary described the beverage: “It is a Turkish kind of drink made of water and some berry or Turkish beane… It is somewhat hot…
