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How did they do that?

Mar 16, 2017

I’m one of those blokes, who often sits around doing nothing for a while, giving silly ideas the opportunity to wander about in my old and rarely used brain.

Like this morning for instance, when I sat out on our veranda, the warm, early morning sun on my face and a lovely cup of tea in my hand, (that valuable first one that is always so much nicer than any following!). It suddenly crossed my mind, (that’s a tiny littles spot hiding somewhere in the just-mentioned brain), that someone, at some time in the far distant past had picked some Camelia leaves, especially the young ones at the top of the plant. He then thought it might be a good idea to dry them out in the sun, before rolling them, (without tearing them), and placing them in a large room to ferment. Once he’d fermented them to a level he thought appropriate he stuck them in a large oven for a while, then he crushed them. He now had a pile of blackened bits of leaves in front of him, so he decided to try putting some of them in boiling water again, after which he finally took the plunge as it were, and drank some of it! Now what would possess some bloke, (or blokes), to do all that on the off-chance that something usable would come out at the other end, and why did he think it would make a drink and not a new fuel for fires or something like that, so that we wouldn’t be able to have our first tea of the day and might have been drinking Coca-Cola instead!

The process to produce coffee is just as complicated, involving picking “cherries” which each contain one seed, (this is the ‘bean’ we are familiar with), drying them in the sun, removing the flesh of the fruit leaving just the bean, called ‘hulling’ and then ‘polishing’ them to arrive at the final raw bean. These are exported all over the world, where they are roasted, ground and brewed to provide the powerful drink we are used to.

I just can’t imagine how either of these highly complicated processes were established – it’s not like crushing some grapes accidentally and finding the resulting juice to be acceptable as a drink. Then I can imagine some of the juice being accidentally left out somewhere for a few days, and when someone came to drink it, they found the character had changed, and it made them pleasantly drunk! An easy-to-follow natural progression that could have happened almost without the help of man at all and often does in fact. During the apple season, we get blackbirds eating fallen fruit from our tree that has fermented on the ground. Within a very short time, they are staggering about our garden absolutely ‘pissed’, to the extent that you can just go up to them and gently pick them up, without worrying them at all!

There are many other processes that beggar belief when you have my silly mind and stop to think about them. For instance, who discovered that you could skim the cream off the top of cow’s milk, whisk it vigorously for a while, resulting in a very tasty and nourishing dollop of fat that they called ‘butter’? Or the mystery of the discovery of the elements. How on earth did Joseph Priestley know he had a jar full of oxygen in front of him, and how did Madame Curie know that by reducing a dish of ‘dirt’ over and over again, until virtually nothing was left, that she was going to find a tiny amount of something very special, which she called Radium?

Of course the list of these types of discoveries is pretty well endless, but in my daft brain it’s a list filled with mystery and excitement, and wonder at the power of the human brain, not my shabby old thing, but the real brains that have made all the wondrous discoveries throughout history, from the discovery of how to make iron right up to the iPhone!