this is a part of a chapter from James Gleick's new book "Faster". This part talks a bit about speed (the drug) and is interesting in parts. There is more text in the book but this is all I had time to type across.
FYI the book is not about drugs, but about the acceleration and quickening of everything in our daily lives.
The New Accelerators- James Gleick (excerpted from Faster)
Just knowing the time served as an antecedent. But there were others. Amphetamines- most famously methamphetamine- stimulate the nervous system, accelerates the heartbeat, and spark a fast talking, restless feeling of excitement and energy. The inevitable slang for such drugs: speed. Anything fast is said to be on speed, a metaphor within a metaphor. The linguistic variants have slid by so rapidly that you can be expected to understand when a car or music video is said to be meth-paced or methamphetaminic. Athletes have used amphetamines as agents of literal speed (in vain); others have used them as dangerous antidotes to plain boredom. Meanwhile, narcotics offer a rush. And the last socially acceptable mood altering drug in the puritanical 1990’s, with alcohol and nicotine on the wane, turned out to be caffeine, the active ingredient not just in coffee but in new lines of soft drinks like Jolt and Surge. The Coca-Cola company promoted its Surge brand with the slogan "Feed the Rush." Pepsi fought back with the newly caffeinated Josta and Pepsi Kona. Smaller companies began marketing mineral waters with caffeine and orange juice with caffeine; for example, Edge2O and Edge2OJ. Young men and women who once might have let a neighbourhood bar soak up hours of their after-work time now settle for a few minutes at Starbucks. Connoisseurs on the run....
That was where Coca-Cola began, as a nineteenth century tonic with caffeine as the secret ingredient. The company has maintained slyly that caffeine, though known to pharmacologists as an alkaloid that stimulates the central nervous system, serves in Coke merely as a flavour element. Never mind that it is a flavour element with no discernable taste. Coca- Cola was born in an era of tonics, restoratives, and bottled pick-me-uppers, and it was advertised as a cure for, among other things, "slowness of thought." Caffeine as we know, can bring with it, in sufficient quantity, restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushed face, diuresis, gastro-intestinal disturbance, muscle twitching, rambling flow of thought and speech, tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia, periods of inexhaustability, psychomotor agitation, and several other well-known conditions of our accelerated times. But don’t worry- chew another chocolate covered dark roast bean as you swing by the "Coffee a Go Go" website, which croons: "Caffeine, your friend and mine! Near and dear to our hearts, not to mention very tight with our synaptic impulses."
Even drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco have become speed-based pursuits. Liquor and cigarettes entered human life as time savers, delivering their chemical effects faster than wine and pipes had done. We toss off distilled spirits, notes the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and thus we achieve more or less instantaneous intoxification, in contrast to the leisurely tippling of wine and beer. If we want to understand the progress of smoking technology from pipe to cigar to cigarette, he says, "what comes to mind is acceleration." We consume our stimulants faster and our depressants faster. It was thanks to cigarettes that the smoke became a unit of time, a quick five minutes or so, compared with the half hour a cigar could consume- "as different," says Schivelbusch, "as the velocity of a mail coach is from that of an automobile." Cigarettes and shots of whiskey: quick little packages.
..........So why not change the speed of a human machine as well? If speed is what we want, why not take it by the potion or tablet. In the nineteenth century, more than a few pioneers in substance abuse (a euphamism of a later era) discovered that they could quite effectively alter the pace of the central nervous system, or at least create the sensation of an altered pace. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, like quite a few real Londoners, relied on cocaine to shift from stupor to action. And H.G.Wells created a fantasy of drug induced speed taken to an impossible extreme in a 1901 story, "The New Accelerator."
Wells’s hero, a Mesphistophelean-looking Professor named Gibberdene, seeks to discover a "nervous stimulant." Alice, in Wonderland, imbided potions to change her size; Wells had different dimensions to explore. The times themselves were accelerating- "these pushful days" were his context- and ordinary people, "languid" people needed a little something to keep pace. So Professor Gibberne set out to discover an invigorator that would speed the nervous system by a factor of two or even three......
FYI the book is not about drugs, but about the acceleration and quickening of everything in our daily lives.
The New Accelerators- James Gleick (excerpted from Faster)
Just knowing the time served as an antecedent. But there were others. Amphetamines- most famously methamphetamine- stimulate the nervous system, accelerates the heartbeat, and spark a fast talking, restless feeling of excitement and energy. The inevitable slang for such drugs: speed. Anything fast is said to be on speed, a metaphor within a metaphor. The linguistic variants have slid by so rapidly that you can be expected to understand when a car or music video is said to be meth-paced or methamphetaminic. Athletes have used amphetamines as agents of literal speed (in vain); others have used them as dangerous antidotes to plain boredom. Meanwhile, narcotics offer a rush. And the last socially acceptable mood altering drug in the puritanical 1990’s, with alcohol and nicotine on the wane, turned out to be caffeine, the active ingredient not just in coffee but in new lines of soft drinks like Jolt and Surge. The Coca-Cola company promoted its Surge brand with the slogan "Feed the Rush." Pepsi fought back with the newly caffeinated Josta and Pepsi Kona. Smaller companies began marketing mineral waters with caffeine and orange juice with caffeine; for example, Edge2O and Edge2OJ. Young men and women who once might have let a neighbourhood bar soak up hours of their after-work time now settle for a few minutes at Starbucks. Connoisseurs on the run....
That was where Coca-Cola began, as a nineteenth century tonic with caffeine as the secret ingredient. The company has maintained slyly that caffeine, though known to pharmacologists as an alkaloid that stimulates the central nervous system, serves in Coke merely as a flavour element. Never mind that it is a flavour element with no discernable taste. Coca- Cola was born in an era of tonics, restoratives, and bottled pick-me-uppers, and it was advertised as a cure for, among other things, "slowness of thought." Caffeine as we know, can bring with it, in sufficient quantity, restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushed face, diuresis, gastro-intestinal disturbance, muscle twitching, rambling flow of thought and speech, tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia, periods of inexhaustability, psychomotor agitation, and several other well-known conditions of our accelerated times. But don’t worry- chew another chocolate covered dark roast bean as you swing by the "Coffee a Go Go" website, which croons: "Caffeine, your friend and mine! Near and dear to our hearts, not to mention very tight with our synaptic impulses."
Even drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco have become speed-based pursuits. Liquor and cigarettes entered human life as time savers, delivering their chemical effects faster than wine and pipes had done. We toss off distilled spirits, notes the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and thus we achieve more or less instantaneous intoxification, in contrast to the leisurely tippling of wine and beer. If we want to understand the progress of smoking technology from pipe to cigar to cigarette, he says, "what comes to mind is acceleration." We consume our stimulants faster and our depressants faster. It was thanks to cigarettes that the smoke became a unit of time, a quick five minutes or so, compared with the half hour a cigar could consume- "as different," says Schivelbusch, "as the velocity of a mail coach is from that of an automobile." Cigarettes and shots of whiskey: quick little packages.
..........So why not change the speed of a human machine as well? If speed is what we want, why not take it by the potion or tablet. In the nineteenth century, more than a few pioneers in substance abuse (a euphamism of a later era) discovered that they could quite effectively alter the pace of the central nervous system, or at least create the sensation of an altered pace. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, like quite a few real Londoners, relied on cocaine to shift from stupor to action. And H.G.Wells created a fantasy of drug induced speed taken to an impossible extreme in a 1901 story, "The New Accelerator."
Wells’s hero, a Mesphistophelean-looking Professor named Gibberdene, seeks to discover a "nervous stimulant." Alice, in Wonderland, imbided potions to change her size; Wells had different dimensions to explore. The times themselves were accelerating- "these pushful days" were his context- and ordinary people, "languid" people needed a little something to keep pace. So Professor Gibberne set out to discover an invigorator that would speed the nervous system by a factor of two or even three......
