Tom Standage Quotes

#1. As the historian Tom Standage observes, they were among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos ... . Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing.

Steven Johnson

#2. 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.

Tom Standage

#3. John Adams, by then one of the country's founding fathers, wrote to a friend: I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.

Tom Standage

#4. Such a social-media environment; it is merely the most recent and most efficient way that humans have found to scratch a prehistoric itch. The compelling nature of social media, then, can be traced back in part to the evolution of the social brain, as

Tom Standage

#5. 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.

Tom Standage

#6. 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

Tom Standage

#7. The inclusion of lemon or lime juice in grog, made compulsory in 1795, therefore reduced the incidence of scurvy dramatically. And since beer contains no vitamin C, switching from beer to grog made British crews far healthier overall.

Tom Standage

#8. During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.

Tom Standage

#9. One survey of American newspapers found that the number of articles written by papers' own writers increased from 25 percent to 45 percent between the 1820s and 1850s.

Tom Standage

#10. 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.

Tom Standage

#11. (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.)

Tom Standage

#12. 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.

Tom Standage

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

Tom Standage

#14. 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.

Tom Standage

#15. But an oft-heard complaint, as companies spread their tentacles around the world and compete on a global playing field, is that globalization is merely a new form of imperialism.

Tom Standage

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

Tom Standage

#17. 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.

Tom Standage

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

Tom Standage

#19. 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.

Tom Standage

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

Tom Standage

#21. 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.

Tom Standage

#22. Literacy was power.

Tom Standage

#23. It is a sign of a medium's immaturity when one of the main topics of discussion is the medium itself.

Tom Standage

#24. The Coca-Cola Company is the biggest single supplier of such drinks. Globally, the company supplies 3 percent of humanity's total liquid intake.

Tom Standage

#25. 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

Tom Standage

#26. Stronger! stronger! grow they all, Who for Coca-Cola call. Brighter! brighter! thinkers think, When they Coca-Cola drink. - Coca-Cola advertising slogan, 1896

Tom Standage

#27. But [Coca-Cola] was also genuinely welcomed by the servicemen in far-flung military bases: Coca-Cola reminded them of home and helped to maintain morale.

Tom Standage

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

Tom Standage

#29. 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.

Tom Standage

#30. 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.

Tom Standage

#31. People enjoy being able to articulate their interests and define themselves by selectively compiling and resharing content created by others

Tom Standage

#32. The mere act of sharing something can, in other words, be a form of self-expression.

Tom Standage

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

Tom Standage

#34. 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.

Tom Standage

#35. Anyone who started a quarrel had to atone for it by buying a dish of coffee for everyone present.

Tom Standage

#36. When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider - in a county with only 391 voters.

Tom Standage

#37. Most of the stories in the Boston News-Letter were simply copied from the London papers.

Tom Standage

#38. By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life.

Tom Standage

#39. When coffee became popular in Oxford and the coffee houses selling it began to multiply, the university authorities tried to clamp down, worrying that coffee houses promoted idleness and distracted members of the university from their studies

Tom Standage