Beer v. Clean Water

I was at Alpental yesterday afternoon. The Boy was skiing—he wanted to hit the last day of the season. It was a warm and sunny afternoon. All of the other area ski resorts were closed, and Alpental was packed.

“I’ve never seen lift lines here so long,” he said as he examined the crowds.

I was hoping for a quiet afternoon to look out at the mountain and get some work done. I brought along my laptop and planned to catch up on some writing and balancing the checkbook. I was met with a party on the patio, lots of people eating and drinking, as the B-52’s Rock Lobster played on the outdoor speakers. Since I wasn't skiing myself, I didn't feel like I earned a beer or would be fully welcomed in this impromptu Margaritaville celebrating the last day of the ski season. This environment inspired people watching, not heads-down work.

I noticed a large number of people drinking beer. I saw a bearded man with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other dancing with a toddler. The toddler was drinking something, and I hoped it wasn’t beer. The toddler was stumbling around, but most toddlers do. Maybe two hundred years ago, people would let toddlers drink beer instead of risking water-borne diseases like dysentery and cholera.

Hundreds of years ago, most water wasn’t safe to drink. Instead, people would drink beer, wine, and spirits which were at times safer than drinking water. This got me wondering: Did clean water make our world smarter because people weren’t drunk all of the time? Did society’s collective cognitive abilities increase with clean water? Would Alexander Graham Bell have invented the telephone if he were hammered all of the time? Would Thomas Edison have invented the light bulb if he drank every night? Maybe they were drunks, but I doubt it. Ernest Hemingway drank excessively, and that didn’t seem to limit his talents. Writers seem to be the categorical exception to the drunks aren't geniuses rule. 

Claire Adele is a strong student of U.S History, and we often hear obscure facts about our country’s past during dinner. I’ll ask her to correlate the timing of invention of clean water with the timing of major industrial and economic developments. Having studied history myself, I know there are other causes of the Industrial Revolution(s). Still, this idea of the collective sobering up creating technological advances could make an interesting thesis for a paper.