We've all heard of the butterfly effect, that idea that one tiny insignificant action can ripple out into

massive, unpreicted consequences, like how Gavrillo-Princep, stopping to eat a sandwich,

allowed him to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thus starting World War I.

And sure, that's a famous one, but there are countless more examples, like the

fact that a simple cup of coffee led to one of the bloodiest moments in history. There are few

routines more sacred than our morning cup of Joe, right? In fact, sacred is more on the nose

than you might think. You see, the first coffee was imbibed by Muslim mystics known as Sufis, who, during

the Ottoman Empire, drank the stuff ceremonially while chanting the name of God. Soon,

the beverage began to travel, and so naturally people needed a place to buy it. Some say the

world's first coffee shop was called Kiva Han, and it opened in roughly 1475 in

Constantinople, Turkey, what is now Istanbul. Other sources say numerous cafes popped up in Cairo,

Aleppo, and Constantinople alike. Whatever the case, early coffee shops serve the same role in

society as they do today.

They were places to socialize and to share intellectual discourse, to discuss politics and current events.

And because coffee was cheap, these watering holes allowed people of all classes to mingle and converse about the world around them.

Flash forward to pre-revolution France, coffee shops still served as intellectual hubs,

and thus provided a space for French revolutionaries to gather, discuss injustice,

plot, and ultimately enact one of the most violent revolutions in world history.

In short, some anonymous, caffeinated Sufi

was the flap of a butterfly's wing that led to the French Revolution hundreds of years later.

Time is funny like that. History is one great big Rube Goldberg machine, each moment a link

in an endless chain of cause and effect.

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