Caffeine is a natural substance found in at least 60 plants. As early as 1700, researchers throughout Europe and America began studying caffeine's widespread use and health benefits. In the 1980s, its increased popularity led to a number of clinical studies, spurring a myriad of caffeine myths.

Caffeine is generally regarded as the most widely consumed food/drug in the world. In recent years, scientists from prominent medical institutions have relied on more accurate studies to set the record straight: In moderation, caffeine has no harmful effect on the body. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classified caffeine as a safe and effective OTC stimulant. In fact, caffeine is the only nonprescription stimulant approved by the FDA in the US.

The Sufis of the Yemen introduced caffeine to the Arab world when they began using strong coffee to sustain their religious devotions throughout the night. More conservative Muslims objected to the practice, arguing that, because coffee produced what was called the "marquaha", their word for caffeine's stimulating effects, coffee drinking, like alcohol drinking, was forbidden by the Koran. After a fierce public debate, coffee was banned by Mecca's chief of police. However, the Sultan of Cairo, a coffee drinker himself, soon reversed the ban, agreeing with those who found caffeine a refreshing aid to keeping awake and alert. The Sufis and the lay community, to whom coffee drinking had rapidly spread, could again enjoy the benefits of caffeine.

Curiously, the Sufis were not the only religious group devoted to caffeine. The Taoists and Zen Buddhists also relied on the caffeine in tea to help sustain and facilitate their meditations. One legend tells how Bodhidharma, who founded the school of meditation that evolved into Zen Buddhism, became angry with himself for falling asleep after nine continuous years of meditation. In disgust, he cut off his own eyelids. They fell to the ground and took root, growing into tea bushes that would sustain meditations forever after.

Before caffeine was chemically identified in the nineteenth century, people didn't know what gave coffee, tea, and chocolate and certain other beverages their special "kick." But they knew they contained a precious ingredient that could help them stay alert and get their work done. For this reason, the seeds and leaves of the plants containing caffeine were so valued that, like silver, gold, and jewels, they were all used as currency in the regions of their origin. This was done by the Egyptians with coffee beans, by the Tibetans and Chinese with bricks of tea leaves, by the Africans with cola nuts, by the South American Indians with cacao beans and mate leaves.

When Columbus and his crew witnessed Maya boatman scrambling to pick up a few cacao beans that had spilled on the deck of their cargo ship, they were the first Westerners to learn of the high value placed on these caffeinated botanicals by the natives.

The Maya used cacao beans as currency throughout their domains, and prices were fixed "by the bean." For example, a sixteenth century document lists an exchange value of one bean for a large tomato, two hundred for a turkey cock, one hundred for a turkey hen, three for a turkey egg, and three for a fish wrapped in maize husks. The day's pay of a porter in central Mexico at this time was 100 beans-which also gives us some idea of the cost of living for the native population and what an expensive luxury cacao-their only source of coveted caffeine-must have been for the average Maya peasant.

When coffee first arrived in Europe in the seventeenth century, it was consumed as a way of getting a dose of caffeine. No one enjoyed the taste of the beverage as it was then prepared. The advertisements for the first English coffeehouse mention dozens of real and imagined health benefits related to what we now know to be caffeine, but never once mention enjoying the taste of coffee, which was brewed with heavily reboiled beans and was bitter and murky. Strangely, at least until the nineteenth century, an egg was frequently added to preparations of both coffee and tea, a practice attested to in a recipe from the diaries of the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The first caffeine users we know of were the Gallae warriors of the remote Ethiopian highlands. In antiquity, these nomadic raiders prepared little balls of fat mixed with ground coffee beans. They carried these balls and used them to help keep alert during their dangerous military raids on the surrounding countryside.

Other peoples have used some pretty strange and challenging preparations in order to receive the benefits of caffeine. The Burmese prepared letpet, or "pickled tea salad," by boiling tea leaves, stuffing them into a hollow bamboo shoot and burying them for several months, after which they were excavated to serve as a delicacy at an important feast. To this day, Tibetans mix their tea with rancid yak butter, barley meal, and salt to make a nourishing breakfast treat or snack.

William Harvey, the greatest physician of the seventeenth century, is renowned as the man who discovered the way blood circulates in the human body. What most people don't know is that, in addition to being a pioneer in medicine, he was also a pioneer in the use of caffeine.

When Harvey became a medical student at the University of Padua in Italy in 1599, coffee and caffeine were still almost completely unknown in Europe. During his tenure there, he not only learned the elements of anatomy, but also became acquainted with the power of caffeine, probably from Arab students whom he saw preparing coffee. He was so enthralled with the stimulating effects of the new beverage that, on his return to England, he began to import his own private supply of the beans, becoming an avid coffee drinker and using caffeine to help him stay alert to conduct his studies and investigations. By 1650, when the first coffeehouses opened in England, Harvey had been drinking coffee for over fifty years - truly a man ahead of his time! Some even say that a strong pulse induced by large doses of caffeine was the experience that led him to conceive of the theory that made him famous. He died, holding a coffee bean between thumb and finger, proclaiming, "This little bean is the source of all happiness and wit." Of course, although Harvey didn't know it, it wasn't really coffee that he was praising, but the mental boost imparted by the caffeine it contained.

Harvey thought the secret of caffeine was too good to keep to himself. In his will, he left his entire supply of coffee beans, fifty-eight pounds, to his fellows in the Royal College of Physicians, directing that they celebrate the date of his death each month by drinking coffee until the supply he had provided became exhausted.

The Royal Society of England, one of the most famous scientific societies in the world today, began as the Oxford Coffee Club in 1650. Its members, including some of the leading scientists, physicians, writers, philosophers, mathematicians, and architects of the century, were among the first avid users of caffeine in Europe. They met at a pharmacist's house to down unpleasantly strong cups of coffee, in order to enjoy the mental stimulation conferred by what we now know is caffeine. They continued enjoying caffeine as they created the theories, performed the experiments, and achieved the groundbreaking discoveries that heralded the advent of modern science.

Among the founding members of the Royal Society was Robert Boyle, perhaps the leading scientist of his time, recognized as the father of modern chemistry for formulating the modern theory of the elements. Another was Christopher Wren, one of the most gifted men of his age, who, among his many other accomplishments, designed and built St. Paul's Cathedral and hundreds of other churches throughout London. Both men might have owed some of their prodigious output to the regular use of caffeine to increase their alertness and give them a mental boost. Others among the early members of this illustrious society of caffeine users were Sir Edmund Halley, who discovered Halley's comet, and Sir Isaac Newton, who invented the calculus and created modern physics.

As soon as it became available, caffeine was immediately recognized by the first scientists as an agent that could facilitate thought, work, and conversation. After nearly 400 years, there is still no safer, more effective way to increase your alertness.

Everyone knows that caffeine can help us finish what we're doing on time. But did you know that the widespread use of caffeine in Europe and the invention of the accurate clock occurred simultaneously and may have been causally connected?

During medieval times, schedules were lax, holidays many, and disorganization pervasive. Throughout this entire period in the West there was not a single accurate clock on the entire Continent. The exactness of timepieces was so limited that a single-handed clock face indicating the quarter hours sufficiently answered to their precision. This remained true until the uniformity of pendulum motion was discovered by the young Galileo. By around 1660 the minute hand, representing a fifteen-fold increase in accuracy, became common in England. This improvement in precision occurred in the same decades when caffeine use became general in Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and across the Continent. Its date corresponds well with the opening of the first coffeehouses in Europe.

What was the connection between caffeine and the clock? Once the standardization of clocks had been accomplished, the use of an energizing agent became a virtual necessity to help people meet the demands of invariant scheduling. The only suitable energizing agent, one known to be well tolerated, safe, and effective was then and still is caffeine.

Literary historians tell us that the first newspapers, written and published in coffeehouses, and a new literary style, marked by directness and the extensive use of dialogue, were largely created in response to and made possible by the caffeine-charged conversations of the early London coffeehouses.

At the end of the seventeenth century, these coffeehouses became places where, for the first time, people from all social classes and of every level of education and type of occupation could mingle and converse. Students, aristocrats, merchants, soldiers, sailors, clergymen, and travelers gathered in the coffeehouses to enjoy conversations, enlivened by caffeine, and to share the company of the writers who found that the mental boost from caffeine stimulated their creativity.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the great English novelist, Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, became one of the first and most prolific of the coffeehouse journalists and publishers. Among other leading coffeehouse journalists of this time were Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, whose daily newspaper the Spectator was read by almost every literate person in London. Of his goals, Addison said, "I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I brought philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges to dwell in clubs and assemblies at tea-tables and coffeehouses."

The same caffeine that energized an entire society is conveniently available in VIVARIN today. So remember VIVARIN whenever you need a mental boost to help you cope with the demands of your busy life.

Credit: Bennett Alan Weinberg is the author, with Bonnie K. Bealer, of the critically acclaimed book The World of Caffeine (Routledge, 2001)