THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 1

Does drinking coffee make you a better target for April Fools’ jokes?

Subject:  Invention/Persuasion - Caffeine

Event:  Nescafe instant coffee goes on sale on April Fools’ Day, 1938

On this day in 1938, Nescafe instant coffee went on sale for the first time.  The process of creating this soluble powdered coffee was anything but 

instant.  It began 9 years earlier with the Wall Street Crash in 1929.  Like the rest of the economy, coffee prices collapsed.  The necessity of figuring out what to do with tons of unsold coffee sitting in warehouses in Brazil became the mother of invention for a chemist named Max Morgenthaler.  First launched in Switzerland, Nescafe soon became popular globally during World War II because of the fact that it had a longer shelf life than regular coffee.  A majority of Nescafe’s production was used in C Rations for U.S. soldiers (1).

The release of Nescafe on April First probably has nothing to do with April Fool’s Day; however, there is an interesting 2005 study that raises the question of whether or not coffee might make you more gullible, and therefore a bigger target for April Fool’s shenanigans.  

Researchers from the University of Queensland, Australia, began their study by giving their subjects orange juice; half of the subjects received orange juice spiked with caffeine.  After consuming their orange juice, subjects read well-crafted arguments on controversial issues.  Results revealed that subjects who had consumed caffeine were 35% more likely to be persuaded by the arguments than those who had consumed just orange juice. 

In a second study, instead of reading well-crafted arguments, all subjects read weak arguments. In this second study, whether or not subjects consumed caffeine had no effect on whether or not they were persuaded.  These results lead to the conclusion that instead of making coffee consumers more gullible, caffeine actually makes them more alert and more primed to process cogent, logical arguments (2).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  Does drinking coffee make you a better target for April Fools’ jokes?

Today’s Challenge - Instant Coffee, TV Dinners, and ?: An ancient proverb attributed to Plato says that “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  Just as Nescafe instant coffee was born out of the crisis of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, there are many stories about innovations and inventions born of necessity.  One example is the classic TV dinner.  Just after Thanksgiving 1953, the Swanson Company realized that it had overestimated the demand for turkey.  Not only did Swanson have 260 tons of frozen turkey, it also had the turkey stored in refrigerated railroad cars that only kept their contents frozen when moving.  As the trains traveled back and forth between Nebraska and the East Coast, Swanson executives scrambled to generate ideas for what to do with tons of turkey. The answer came from a salesman named Gerry Thomas who had the idea of packaging the turkey in aluminum trays along with stuffing and potatoes.  Thomas got help from Swanson’s bacteriologist Betty Cronin, who solved the problem of how to simultaneously heat the meat and vegetables so that the meals would be safe for consumers to eat (3).  Research other inventions that were born of necessity, and tell the story of how one such invention came to be.

Sources:  

1-”Celebrating 75 years of the Nestlé brand that invented instant coffee.” Nestle.com.

2-Goldstein, Noah J., Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini. Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Free Press, 2009.

3-Biakolo, Kovie. “A Brief History of the TV Dinner.” Smithsonian Magazine November 2020.