AS REPORTEDno primary record reached; this is what the reporting says
Available historical sources and articles report the well-known rumor or claim that Voltaire consumed around forty to fifty cups of coffee daily, citing accounts such as Frederick the Great, but this is presented as a traditional report rather than verified fact.
François-Marie Arouet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his pen name Voltaire (, US also ; French: [vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity (especially of the Catholic Church) and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of re
François-Marie Arouet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his pen name Voltaire (, US also ; French: [vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity (especially of the Catholic Church) and of slavery, Voltaire was an…
The town of Ferney, where Voltaire lived out the last 20 years of his life, was officially named Ferney-Voltaire in honor of its most famous resident, in 1878. His château is a museum. Voltaire's library is preserved intact in the National Library of Russia at Saint Petersburg. In the Zürich of 1916, the theatre and performance group who would become the early avant-garde Dada movement named their theater the Cabaret Voltaire. A late-20th-century industrial music group later adopted the same name. Astronomers have bestowed his name on the Voltaire crater on Deimos and the asteroid 5676 Voltaire.
Voltaire was also known to have been an advocate for coffee, drinking it at every turn: fifty times a day, according to Frederick the Great; three times a day, said Wagniere. It has been suggested that high amounts of caffeine stimulated his creativity. His great-grandniece was the mother of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic philosopher and Jesuit priest. His book Candide was listed as one of The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, by Martin Seymour-Smith.
In the 1950s, the bibliographer and translator Theodore Besterman started to collect, transcribe and publish all of Voltaire's writings. He founded the Voltaire Institute and Museum in Geneva where he began publishing collected volumes of Voltaire's correspondence. On his death in 1976, he left his collection to the University of Oxford, where the Voltaire Foundation became established as a department. The Foundation has published the Complete Works of Voltaire, a chronological series in 205 volumes completed in 2022, more than fifty years after the first volume appeared. It also publishes the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, begun by Bestermann as Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, which has reached more than 500 volumes.
The Caffeinated History of Coffee | Stories | PBS Food
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# The Caffeinated History of Coffee
by Tori Avey on Apr 8, 2013
Each coffee drinker has their own preference and taste, but what are the roots of this caffeinated beverage?
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On her website ToriAvey.com, Tori Avey explores the story behind the food -- why we eat what we eat, how the recipes of different cultures have evolved, and how yesterday's recipes can inspire us in the kitchen today. Learn more about Tori and The History Kitchen.
Second only to oil, coffee is the most valuable legally traded commodity in the world. We love it, we rely on it, and we drink it in massive quantities. It is estimated that 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day worldwide. New Yorkers are said to drink 7 times the amount of any other U.S. city, which is why it may seem like there is a Starbucks on every corner of Manhattan. Famed French writer and philosopher Voltaire was rumored to have drunk 40 - 50 cups per day. Coffee is a daily ritual in the lives of millions o
# Did Voltaire drink 40-50 cups of coffee a day?
Tags: history, coffee
- Score: 11
- Views: 2991
- Answers: 2
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: Sridhar Ratnakumar (309 rep)
- Asked: 2022-09-15
- Edited: 2022-09-16
- Site: skeptics
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From 9 Famous Geniuses Who Were Also Huge Coffee Addicts:
Voltaire is said to have drunk 40-50 cups of coffee a day.
Elsewhere, from Did Voltaire really drink 40 to 50 cups of coffee a day? Stephen G. Tallentyre (which is the pen name of Evelyn Beatrice Hall) wrote that:
He dined in Paris that night at a coffee-house, with a few other literary men. He arrived rather late. He had come straight from Versailles, and alone of the company knew what had occurred there. He made his dinner, after his frugal fashion, off seven or eight cups of black coffee and a couple of rolls, and was very talkative and amusing.”
Stephen G. Tallentyre, The Life of Voltaire (1903)
But this says only about dinner, and not the whole day.
From Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic, p. 15.
“[T]he philosopher took as high as fifty cups on some days. This would perhaps explain the nobility of Voltaire’s mind and its sudden bursts of enthusiasm, for, according to Condorcet (Vie d
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This check searched the claim as stated. It did not run a separate search for evidence against it.