The next time you pay a visit to your favorite coffee house, be it part of a mega-chain like Starbucks, or a neighborhood gathering place, stop and reflect on the discussion going on there. Why? Great ideas and enterprises have been spawned over coffee house tables.
On May 17, 1792, at the Merchant’s Coffee House on the corner of New York City’s Wall and Water Streets, a group of brokers and merchants signed the “Buttonwood Agreement” named for the buttonwood tree where they were in the habit of gathering to do business. The agreement contained rules for buying an selling securities. And the New York Stock Exchange was born.
Nearly a century before, Londoner John Castaing posted stocks and commodities prices at his establishment, Jonathon’s Coffee House. The coffee house outlasted Jonathan, and in 1761 a group of about 150 brokers formed a stock trading club there. They remained until 1773, when they built their own establishment called “New Jonathon’s”, which is now the London Stock Exchange.
Insurance giant Lloyd’s of London also had humble beginnings as Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House, a London meeting place for ship owners and marine insurers; the ship freight brokerage the Baltic Exchange takes its name from an 18th century coffee house; and Isaac Newton, the father of gravitational theory, and Edmund Halley, discoverer of the comet, joined in a group of Britain’s Royal Society’s members dissecting a dolphin at London’s Grecian.
On July 12, 1789, unemployed lawyer Camille Desmoulins leapt onto a table in the Café du Foy at the Palais Royale In Paris, shouting,” To arms, Citizens!”; a mob of French peasants stormed the Bastille prison two days later, and Marie Antoinette went from dining on cake and coffee at Versailles to dry bread and water at the Tuillieres shortly thereafter.
Napoleon, Richelieu, Emperor Joseph II, and Voltaire were among many French luminaries who amused themselves over coffee and chess at Paris’ Café du Regence.
The humble coffee house has an amazing history. Who knows what will emerge from it next?
So sip your coffee and eavesdrop on your neighbors. You might be amazed at what you hear.
