In public places, at work and elsewhere, ideas spread spontaneously, are developed and give life to entrepreneurship. This is the ‘coffee-machine effect’, particularly prevalent it seems amongst students and academics in universities and colleges in the UK and the USA. However, the effect is older than Anglo–Saxon places of learning. Coffee, then, is (if it ever was) an ancient medicine that many people now like and enjoy drinking. Above all, it is a very pleasant drink to share with others, to sip during meetings – which gatherings, in the Age of Exploration, can be regarded as the intellectual counterpoint to geographical discoveries.
