Coffeehouses and the Rise of Science

Historians have long credited coffeehouses, venues for conversation where strangers met across social ranks, with fostering scientific contacts and activity during the Scientific Revolution. We test this claim in seventeenth-century London. Relying on newly geocoded records and a staggered event study across parishes, we find that the opening of the first coffeehouse in a parish is followed by a persistent increase in applied scientists and scientific instrument shops. Effects are concentrated among applied scientists with weak family ties to Oxford and Cambridge. Social connections that link craft skill to theory increase, and new shops turn toward experimental instruments. Across European cities in the seventeenth century, we similarly find that the numbers of applied mathematics titles and scientific instrument makers rise after a city’s first coffeehouse, relative to cities of similar size and growth. In a quantitative urban model calibrated to our parish- and city-level estimates, coffeehouses account for 31 percent of London’s applied scientists in the half century after the first one opened in 1652. These findings show that social institutions can raise the production and use of knowledge by broadening access to intellectual exchange beyond formal academic networks.