What is a technology editor doing writing about this topic?
My previous books all looked at a historical technology in the light of a modern one. By comparing the 19th-century telegraph boom with the internet boom of the 1990s, for example, I was inviting readers to see the present in the past, and the past in the present. It’s both a way of understanding history better (through our familiarity with modern technologies) and way to understand the impact of modern technologies better (by learning lessons from history). In this book, I’m doing a similar thing: each drink is really a technology, and the introduction of each drink, and the story of why it displaced the previous drink, is really a tale of the social impact of technology, which is what I’m interested in. Most drinks were water purification technologies, and many doubled as currencies, status symbols or medicines. But we still drink them today. So I’m still linking the past and present, and this book is not as different from my previous books, or my day job covering technology at The E
