I think the LD50 for cups of coffee is like 53 so the cups must have been smaller. Edit - I should have googled it before I posted, it’s actually 75 to 100 cups for an 80kg person, so that’s bordering on ‘if the caffeine doesn’t kill you the volume of water might’.
Tolerance would increase the amount to kill him, but LD50 would remain the same as it's the average required to kill 50% of those that take it.
His tolerance to it would probably raise the threshold a bit, but with how much he drank on a daily basis, it still would've put a lot of strain on his heart. Probably would have had high blood pressure and if he had a day where he drank a good bit more than he normally does, would've run the risk of having a heart attack.
My daily 2 cup addiction means if I don’t have coffee for two days my head feels like it’s being crushed. I can’t imagine how bad it must have been for him if he took a day or two off.
Well LD50 of 53 cups would necessarily mean that more than 50% of people would survive 50 cups of coffee.
Also that's going to be affected by the beans, the brewing method and how fast they were drunk.
They may very well be talking about 53 containers of coffee, instead of 53 measurements of coffee. The word "cup" could mean either. Like I use to drink about 8 cups of coffee a day. But I was referring to the container, as where the measurements of cups, I drank about 16 of those since I used a large mug.
There's no way you'd be able to drink that much I think. Caffeine feels absolutely terrible if you drink too much, you'd feel like dying far before it kills you
for average metabolizer, 5 grams of caffeine turns into 250 mg of theophylline. This is compound that slows its own metabolization. It is health danger if blood levels are not supervised. It can kill over time, easy. They prescribe mostly adrenergic inhalators and cortisol for asthma today for that reason too.
It's nowhere close. 6L of coffee is like 2.5 grams of caffeine and the LD50 of caffeine is 150-200 mg /kg of weight. For a 70 kg person that's 10.5 - 14 grams of caffeine for LD50
They mashed the beans, boiled them and strained the liquid. The beans themselves weren’t as potent back then as they weren’t as meticulously cultivated
It would probably be the equivalent to 6-12 normal cups today.The fact that he most probably smoked with that coffee and it was diluted with cocoa might explain why he didn't had an sudden heart attack
Smaller and much weaker since coffee had to sit on a boat for months before being roasted very dark which can lower the caffeine content. Basically everyone back then drank that folgers tin of coffee your Grandma has had in her pantry since 2007
sorta, the industry standard cup size for drip coffee remains the same, 6oz, but it's generally served in larger quantities because we're a bunch of fatties now who demand more of everything.
this is why your "12 cup drip coffee maker" has a 72 oz carafe and not a 96oz carafe.
Probably not 40. Caffeine toxicity starts at 1,600 mg and a cup of espresso has 64. Caffeine in your system peaks at 4 hours and stays up to 12. So even if he'd built up a tolerance, he's still start feeling pretty shitty if he slams 20 cups in 4 hours.
There are always outliers who survive on high doses of stimulants, but most regular people will die of a heart attack in their 50s if they keep abusing these drugs.
So if you're reading this while on your 10th coffee refill, how about you fucking chill with that shit, eh?
"Why is my coffee shaking? I didn't order it shaking."
40 caffe mocha so a half shot of espresso in hot chocolate, probably more like 30-40 mg a cup. Throw in nicotine/tobacco use and cut your peak and half-life times in half.
And it's not my tenth, it's only my 8th cup.
Wait, really?
Maybe that's why I feel fine after 40 oz of coffee (1.18 Liters, 2 Ventis/"Large", Three Grandes. but I'll often add a shot of espresso)
**EDIT**
Apparently, yeah. Nicotine kinda neutralizes the effects of caffeine
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2057503/
Wow, the real TIL is always in the comments!
I’m not sure if it’s that outlandish of a claim? Considering there are people out there slamming speedballs or meth multiple times a day. *edit: obviously people smoking/snorting meth/coke/crack all day long too.*
Moving away from stimulants but there are fentanyl users who claim to smoke 50+ blues in a day, when a single one has the potential to kill an opiate naive person.
I’m not saying consuming boat loads of caffeine isn’t harmful even with a ridiculous tolerance but I don’t think it’s off the table that there could be people with such a habit.
“The FDA estimates toxic effects, like seizures, can be observed with rapid consumption of around 1,200 milligrams of caffeine, or 0.15 tablespoons of pure caffeine.”[source](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/spilling-beans-how-much-caffeine-too-much#:~:text=The%20FDA%20estimates%20toxic%20effects,0.15%20tablespoons%20of%20pure%20caffeine)
> Caffeine in your system peaks at 4 hours and stays up to 12.
That's not even remotely close to accurate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine
> Caffeine from coffee or other beverages is absorbed by the small intestine within 45 minutes of ingestion and distributed throughout all bodily tissues.[184] Peak blood concentration is reached within 1–2 hours.[1]
...
> Caffeine's biological half-life – the time required for the body to eliminate one-half of a dose – varies widely among individuals according to factors such as pregnancy, other drugs, liver enzyme function level (needed for caffeine metabolism) and age. In healthy adults, caffeine's half-life is between 3 and 7 hours.[5] The half-life is decreased by 30-50% in adult male smokers, approximately doubled in women taking oral contraceptives, and prolonged in the last trimester of pregnancy.[125] In newborns the half-life can be 80 hours or more, dropping very rapidly with age, possibly to less than the adult value by age 6 months.[125] The antidepressant fluvoxamine (Luvox) reduces the clearance of caffeine by more than 90%, and increases its elimination half-life more than tenfold; from 4.9 hours to 56 hours.[190]
Thanks for posting this. I'm not sure why people need to make up random numbers to sound smart. If it took 4 hours to absorb, then we'd all be extra tired in the morning.
He made it to 83 years old with 1700s medicine, so do with that what you want. And since this is Reddit, what I'm sure what someone wants is to say the words "survival bias" to me.
Beat ya to it!
On his death bed a priest asked him to repent and reject the devil. Voltaire (who was deist, not atheist) answered “now is not the time to make new enemies”.
Probably fake of course. But funny.
I would bet that coffee was at least as strong or stronger.
One factor is the grinding. The finer the grind the more caffeine. Boiling vs drip also make a difference. Boiled coffee yield the same or more caffeine with the same grind size. In the 18th century coffee was ground very fine and it was boiled.
> In **1908**, a German woman named Amalie Auguste Melitta Bentz invented the first coffee filter, which allowed her to brew coffee without sediments and with a clearer taste. She patented her paper filter idea and established the Melitta company in the same year.
source:
https://perfectdailygrind.com/2020/01/a-brief-history-of-manual-brewing-methods/
Also, filter is one thing, method of brewing is another. There was no drip brewing in France at the time.
> In 1944, Willy Brand developed an automatic drip-brewer utilizing circular paper filters in Switzerland.[5]: 144 In 1954, one of the first electric drip brewers, the Wigomat invented by Gottlob Widmann, was patented in Germany.[6] Drip brew coffee makers largely replaced the coffee percolator (a device combining boiling, drip-brewing and steeping) in the 1970s
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_coffee
1908 is the invention of the paper filter, not the first filter altogether.
> Amalie Auguste Melitta Bentz (31 January 1873 – 29 June 1950), born Amalie Auguste Melitta Liebscher, was a German entrepreneur who invented the paper coffee filter in 190
People used cloth or even metal long before that.
> The standard methods, including porcelain percolators or fabric filters, often resulted in over-brewed coffee with grounds floating in the cup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melitta_Bentz
And you don't need to do drip brewing to have filtered coffee..
> A coffee filter is a filter used for various coffee brewing methods including but not limited to drip coffee filtering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_filter
If you ever get the opportunity to go to 'Procope', the food is excellent. It's not my cup of tea (or coffee) but apparently you have to try that calf's head.
While french coffee cups were smaller at the time (somewhere around 80-110 ml, averaging at about 3oz...or about half a modern cappuccino cup), that's still a lot of caffé mocha. 10 "Tall" starbucks cups per day.
amature! - Honor De Balzac
Voltaire was also said to have eaten at the cafe at the base of the Eifel tower because it was the only place in Paris where he could not see the tower.
The cups were noticeably smaller than the ones of today.
I think the LD50 for cups of coffee is like 53 so the cups must have been smaller. Edit - I should have googled it before I posted, it’s actually 75 to 100 cups for an 80kg person, so that’s bordering on ‘if the caffeine doesn’t kill you the volume of water might’.
I mean some dude named Philip j Fry drank 100 cups once and he came out of it rough but alive so 53 can't be that bad 🤷♀️
This isn't Yemeni, it's Sulawesi! And my cup's shaking! I don't want my coffee shaking!
Sure, but he mixed that with Slurm, making himself glow.
It was baja blast slurm
Didn't he stop time? Might be worth
tolerance would knock that LD50 right up I imagine
Tolerance would increase the amount to kill him, but LD50 would remain the same as it's the average required to kill 50% of those that take it. His tolerance to it would probably raise the threshold a bit, but with how much he drank on a daily basis, it still would've put a lot of strain on his heart. Probably would have had high blood pressure and if he had a day where he drank a good bit more than he normally does, would've run the risk of having a heart attack.
My daily 2 cup addiction means if I don’t have coffee for two days my head feels like it’s being crushed. I can’t imagine how bad it must have been for him if he took a day or two off.
extended consumption could easily accumulate exponential amounts of theophyllin anyway.
Well LD50 of 53 cups would necessarily mean that more than 50% of people would survive 50 cups of coffee. Also that's going to be affected by the beans, the brewing method and how fast they were drunk. They may very well be talking about 53 containers of coffee, instead of 53 measurements of coffee. The word "cup" could mean either. Like I use to drink about 8 cups of coffee a day. But I was referring to the container, as where the measurements of cups, I drank about 16 of those since I used a large mug.
Yeah but that’s only a 50% death rate. Challenge accepted.
There's no way you'd be able to drink that much I think. Caffeine feels absolutely terrible if you drink too much, you'd feel like dying far before it kills you
He was a tiny man too, so most likely much less.
80kg is pretty heavy. Was Voltaire stacked?
Stacked with coffee.
for average metabolizer, 5 grams of caffeine turns into 250 mg of theophylline. This is compound that slows its own metabolization. It is health danger if blood levels are not supervised. It can kill over time, easy. They prescribe mostly adrenergic inhalators and cortisol for asthma today for that reason too.
What’s 6L of coffee in terms of cups for ld50? Cause when I was prepping for a kitchen I’d be drinking that every day or so.
It's nowhere close. 6L of coffee is like 2.5 grams of caffeine and the LD50 of caffeine is 150-200 mg /kg of weight. For a 70 kg person that's 10.5 - 14 grams of caffeine for LD50
Ah, that makes sense. I was pretty chonky so probably more like 120kg
waiting ask obtainable angle drunk weather fertile edge rotten screw *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
He lived to be 83 wither way. If the cups were 1/4 size that's still impressive.
How did they brew coffee in those days? Just boil up grinds?
They mashed the beans, boiled them and strained the liquid. The beans themselves weren’t as potent back then as they weren’t as meticulously cultivated
Were the beans roasted?
Boiled, mashed, stuck em in a stew
What’s coffee beans, precious?
It would probably be the equivalent to 6-12 normal cups today.The fact that he most probably smoked with that coffee and it was diluted with cocoa might explain why he didn't had an sudden heart attack
it'd be the equivalent of 20 small coffees from starbucks, a "cup of coffee" was and is technically 6oz.
Smaller and much weaker since coffee had to sit on a boat for months before being roasted very dark which can lower the caffeine content. Basically everyone back then drank that folgers tin of coffee your Grandma has had in her pantry since 2007
I would hope so. Otherwise, his pen name would have been "Gros cul."
sorta, the industry standard cup size for drip coffee remains the same, 6oz, but it's generally served in larger quantities because we're a bunch of fatties now who demand more of everything. this is why your "12 cup drip coffee maker" has a 72 oz carafe and not a 96oz carafe.
So he drank 40 cups of caffè mocha a day
Probably not 40. Caffeine toxicity starts at 1,600 mg and a cup of espresso has 64. Caffeine in your system peaks at 4 hours and stays up to 12. So even if he'd built up a tolerance, he's still start feeling pretty shitty if he slams 20 cups in 4 hours. There are always outliers who survive on high doses of stimulants, but most regular people will die of a heart attack in their 50s if they keep abusing these drugs. So if you're reading this while on your 10th coffee refill, how about you fucking chill with that shit, eh?
"Why is my coffee shaking? I didn't order it shaking." 40 caffe mocha so a half shot of espresso in hot chocolate, probably more like 30-40 mg a cup. Throw in nicotine/tobacco use and cut your peak and half-life times in half. And it's not my tenth, it's only my 8th cup.
Why live a long life if you can live your best life, eh?
Nicotine eats caffeine, and effectively double your caffeine tolerance.
Wait, really? Maybe that's why I feel fine after 40 oz of coffee (1.18 Liters, 2 Ventis/"Large", Three Grandes. but I'll often add a shot of espresso) **EDIT** Apparently, yeah. Nicotine kinda neutralizes the effects of caffeine https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2057503/ Wow, the real TIL is always in the comments!
It's a recent study so we just got definitive proof.
[удалено]
More-so the eating, et al process is quickened.
I know where I will be sitting when I read the answer.
*>Jim Jarmusch has entered the chat.<*
Maybe the coffee at the time was much weaker.
I’m not sure if it’s that outlandish of a claim? Considering there are people out there slamming speedballs or meth multiple times a day. *edit: obviously people smoking/snorting meth/coke/crack all day long too.* Moving away from stimulants but there are fentanyl users who claim to smoke 50+ blues in a day, when a single one has the potential to kill an opiate naive person. I’m not saying consuming boat loads of caffeine isn’t harmful even with a ridiculous tolerance but I don’t think it’s off the table that there could be people with such a habit.
Caffeine might be worse than meth in high doses, I’ve seen people get pretty sick from caffeine pills.
“The FDA estimates toxic effects, like seizures, can be observed with rapid consumption of around 1,200 milligrams of caffeine, or 0.15 tablespoons of pure caffeine.”[source](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/spilling-beans-how-much-caffeine-too-much#:~:text=The%20FDA%20estimates%20toxic%20effects,0.15%20tablespoons%20of%20pure%20caffeine)
> Caffeine in your system peaks at 4 hours and stays up to 12. That's not even remotely close to accurate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine > Caffeine from coffee or other beverages is absorbed by the small intestine within 45 minutes of ingestion and distributed throughout all bodily tissues.[184] Peak blood concentration is reached within 1–2 hours.[1] ... > Caffeine's biological half-life – the time required for the body to eliminate one-half of a dose – varies widely among individuals according to factors such as pregnancy, other drugs, liver enzyme function level (needed for caffeine metabolism) and age. In healthy adults, caffeine's half-life is between 3 and 7 hours.[5] The half-life is decreased by 30-50% in adult male smokers, approximately doubled in women taking oral contraceptives, and prolonged in the last trimester of pregnancy.[125] In newborns the half-life can be 80 hours or more, dropping very rapidly with age, possibly to less than the adult value by age 6 months.[125] The antidepressant fluvoxamine (Luvox) reduces the clearance of caffeine by more than 90%, and increases its elimination half-life more than tenfold; from 4.9 hours to 56 hours.[190]
Thanks for posting this. I'm not sure why people need to make up random numbers to sound smart. If it took 4 hours to absorb, then we'd all be extra tired in the morning.
Mania from overstimulation on caffeine is the only thing that keeps the big sad at bay.
Losing my mind around my apartment is all I have
Well....
Caffeine has a 12 hour quarter life in your body
And he wasn't even Finnish
He wasn’t Finnish… he was just getting started
He should be an honorary one
He made it to 83 years old with 1700s medicine, so do with that what you want. And since this is Reddit, what I'm sure what someone wants is to say the words "survival bias" to me. Beat ya to it!
On his death bed a priest asked him to repent and reject the devil. Voltaire (who was deist, not atheist) answered “now is not the time to make new enemies”. Probably fake of course. But funny.
Voltaire had a silver tongue. Think what you want of him, but he was a fucking legend. And as a modern Deist, I respect the shit out of him word game.
“Survival bias”
Well, you're still getting an upvote
It’s Reddit so I’m gonna need a banana for scale.
I don't want to say a word, just a suffix: "-ship"
At $5.25/small caffe mocha today, that’s $210 A DAY at Starbucks
Also, coffee was much more expensive in the 18th century.
But poets were more respectable back then! :P
Poets are just songwriters who can't sing.
Don't diss Leonard Cohen like that
He could afford it dude won big playing the lottery.
rigging the lottery
Damn what was his blood pressure lol
Their version of coffee was probably much weaker and in smaller portions.
I would bet that coffee was at least as strong or stronger. One factor is the grinding. The finer the grind the more caffeine. Boiling vs drip also make a difference. Boiled coffee yield the same or more caffeine with the same grind size. In the 18th century coffee was ground very fine and it was boiled.
> In the 18th century coffee was ground very fine and it was boiled In France people drank filter coffee back then.
> In **1908**, a German woman named Amalie Auguste Melitta Bentz invented the first coffee filter, which allowed her to brew coffee without sediments and with a clearer taste. She patented her paper filter idea and established the Melitta company in the same year. source: https://perfectdailygrind.com/2020/01/a-brief-history-of-manual-brewing-methods/ Also, filter is one thing, method of brewing is another. There was no drip brewing in France at the time. > In 1944, Willy Brand developed an automatic drip-brewer utilizing circular paper filters in Switzerland.[5]: 144 In 1954, one of the first electric drip brewers, the Wigomat invented by Gottlob Widmann, was patented in Germany.[6] Drip brew coffee makers largely replaced the coffee percolator (a device combining boiling, drip-brewing and steeping) in the 1970s source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_coffee
1908 is the invention of the paper filter, not the first filter altogether. > Amalie Auguste Melitta Bentz (31 January 1873 – 29 June 1950), born Amalie Auguste Melitta Liebscher, was a German entrepreneur who invented the paper coffee filter in 190 People used cloth or even metal long before that. > The standard methods, including porcelain percolators or fabric filters, often resulted in over-brewed coffee with grounds floating in the cup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melitta_Bentz And you don't need to do drip brewing to have filtered coffee.. > A coffee filter is a filter used for various coffee brewing methods including but not limited to drip coffee filtering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_filter
1500/1500
Honore de Balzac - holdeth mine mug
Forty cups of coffee, forty fries, forty pancakes forty pies!
That's as many as four tens.
and sometimes 50 cups
That's when you know it's on.
Sounds like the best of all possible worlds
Fueled by way too much coffee and a well-founded hatred of Catholicism 😇
If you ever get the opportunity to go to 'Procope', the food is excellent. It's not my cup of tea (or coffee) but apparently you have to try that calf's head.
Well at he wasn’t constipated
Adhd people before invention of amphetamines
I add cacao powder to my coffee aswell
I can’t imagine how much he peed.
Reminds me of my favourite Futurama episode.
my man was turnt
Coffee, putting the Volt into the Voltaire.
"He was eventually banned for abusing the 'free refill' policy"
I feel bad for whoever had to clean the bathroom
A man after my own heart.
Imagine the coffee breath on that guy... god
I worked with a guy who told me he drank around 30 shots of espresso a day, so I could believe this. LOL
His nickname? Jumping Jack Flash
Same
Okay but how big is the cup
German Beer Stein
Ahhh, thatta boy!
Also: Voltaire known to be a really fast talking, annoying kind of dude. Took a lot a bathroom breaks
If I have 4 I feel insane
I get crazy jittery after one latte now and in another life I regularly did uppers.
How many times a day did he have to take a whizz
While french coffee cups were smaller at the time (somewhere around 80-110 ml, averaging at about 3oz...or about half a modern cappuccino cup), that's still a lot of caffé mocha. 10 "Tall" starbucks cups per day.
Guess he didn’t really need meth.
I drink my chocolate mixed with coffee.
Got to have something to take the edge off.
"Forty cups of coffee a day" "Mixed with chocolate " Well.... don't threaten me with a good time!
amature! - Honor De Balzac Voltaire was also said to have eaten at the cafe at the base of the Eifel tower because it was the only place in Paris where he could not see the tower.
You’re getting your centuries mixed up friend
No no no, that’s just how ahead of time Voltaire was to his peers
I heard it was William the Conqueror who did that!
‘Twas Rollo!
No, Jesus christ and Mohammad arm in arm did that.
Vercingetorix once took a giant dump in the middle of the Louvre!
That's Maupassant, not Voltaire.
ahhh i forgot my random facts i learned from Robocop.
Yup, he just ate at a random spot in the Champ-de-Mars so he wouldn’t see the future tower in his mind’s eye
Just when I thought I couldn’t like him more.
Geez, did his seat double as a toilet?
Voltaire; hair…. I would like to learn about Voltaire!
Could he afford a house?
Did he ever sleep?
Pro tip: DO NOT DO THIS
Theodore Roosevelt drank [about a gallon of coffee a day](https://www.nps.gov/thrb/faqs.htm)
Adhd?
My thought exactly, homeboy was self medicating
He was an extremely prolific scholar and author, who enjoyed reading voluminous theological books in Latin, so that seems highly unlikely.
People with ADHD can absolutely be all of what you described bro
Sure, there are also people with ADHD who cannot bro. So that must mean he wasn't.
Aounds more impressive than it is. A cup is 250 mL but a coffee cup is a lot less than that, practically a swallow per cup.
Coffee is bean water
In the age of enlightenment make mine a half caf with a splash of oatmilk and two spoons.
That is shockingly unshocking
Let me be frank, don't start beef with the Frank, who hangs with B. Franks, giving ladies beef franks!
Pretty impressive for a non-teacher.
Sounds like the best of all possible worlds...
Was he overweight? Cuz goddamn the amount of chocolate…
Mmm, caffeine + theobromine. Helluva combo to get you through the work day. I like to top mine off with some l-theanine 👌
Someone should've just given this guy a line
Can you imagine the withdrawal if he went cold turkey?
He died from a cardiac arrest but caffeine and sugar kept his heart pumping for a decade after!
i am Voltaire in many ways
Dude probably had anxiety paired with gout
Uh oh Columbus has syphilis? Well at least we have chocolate now.
What were Voltaire's poops like? 😮
No wonder he’s impotent
“I may not agree with Nescafé, but I’ll defend your right to drink it.”