[Illustration: THE WORLD'S COFFEE TOWER COMPARED WITH THE EIFFEL AND
WOOLWORTH TOWERS

The Woolworth Building, the world's loftiest office structure is 792
feet high from street to top of tower; its main section of 151 by 196
feet stretches up 386 feet, and its volume equals a total of 13,110,942
cubic feet. But a tower made of the year's supply of bags of green
coffee (132 pounds each) would equal 73,649,115 cubic feet, or nearly
six times the bulk of the Woolworth Building. In the same proportions it
would rise 1,386 feet, with the lower section 260 by 340 feet and 670
feet high. Its dimensions would be nearly double those of the Woolworth
Building in every direction. And the Eiffel Tower, reaching up 1,000
feet toward the sky would be lost in a tower made of a year's bags of
coffee. Such a tower would stand 1,425 feet high on a base area of 230
feet square, the size of the Eiffel's first floor.]

CHAPTER XXII

THE PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF COFFEE

_A statistical study of world production of coffee by
countries--Per capita figures of the leading consuming
countries--Coffee-consumption figures compared with tea-consumption
figures in the United States and the United Kingdom--Three
centuries of coffee trading--Coffee drinking in the United States,
past and present--Reviewing the 1921 trade in the United States_

The world's yearly production of coffee is on the average considerably
more than one million tons. If this were all made up into the refreshing
drink we get at our breakfast tables, there would be enough to supply
every inhabitant of the earth with some sixty cups a year, representing
a total of more than ninety billion cups. In terms of pounds the annual
world output amounts to about two and a quarter billions--an amount so
large that if it were done up in the familiar one-pound paper packages;
and if these packages were laid end to end in a row; they would form a
line long enough to reach to the moon. If this average yearly production
were left in the sacks in which the coffee is shipped, the total of
17,500,000 would be enough to form a broad six-foot pavement reaching
entirely across the United States, upon which a man could walk steadily
for more than five months at the rate of twenty miles a day. This vast
amount of coffee comes very largely from the western hemisphere; and
about three-fourths of it, from a single country. The production,
shipment, and prepar