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People have been drinking tea for so long that its origin story is rooted in mythology: More than 4,700 years ago, one popular version of the story goes, a legendary Chinese emperor and cultural hero named Shennong (his name means "divine farmer") discovered how to make a tea infusion when a wind blew leaves from a nearby bush into the water he was boiling.

By the 4th century B.C., as Jamie Shallock writes in his book Tea, the beverage had become part of everyday life in China — though in a very different form than we might recognize today.

As the culture surrounding tea has changed through the centuries, so, too, have the tools we use to drink it. From the first dainty tea bowls to the mugs people use to warm themselves with a cup of tea today, tea sets have changed to meet cultural and utilitarian needs.

Before 1500

The first tea leaves weren't drunk in loose form; instead, they were compressed into cakes. To prepare tea, early drinkers had to tear off a piece of the compressed brick (often stamped with intricate patterns, and so valuable that it could be used in lieu of currency), roast it and tear it into even smaller pieces. Then they boiled their tea in heat-resistant kettles. According to Rupert Faulkner's book Tea: East & West, by the Song Dynasty (960-1279), tea had moved into a powdered form that could be set in a cup and whipped into the boiling water poured onto it. This whipped tea is most commonly associated with Japanese tea ceremonies today.

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A modern-day tea brick, compressed and embossed with an intricate design. Before the 1500s, tea leaves came in bricks not unlike this one. Wikimedia hide caption

itoggle caption Wikimedia

A modern-day tea brick, compressed and embossed with an intricate design. Before the 1500s, tea leaves came in bricks not unlike this one.

Wikimedia

A proper tea service could include 25 objects, according to Lu Yu, whose seminal 8th century book, The Classic of Tea, is the authority for early drinking habits. But the most important of these was the tea bowl. These glazed, ceramic vessels were simple in shape and tended to be between two and three inches in height.

1500s

By the 1500s, powdered and whipped tea had given way to steeped tea, which came in the form of rolled leaves rather than bricks. This necessitated the invention and use of the teapot as we know it today. These first teapots, James Norwood Pratt writes in A Tea Lover's Treasury, came from the Yi-Xing region of China and were soon copied throughout the world. Japanese potters moved the handle from the side to the top of the teapot.

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A Yi-Xing teapot made circa 1900. The first teapots came from the Yi-Xing region of China. Japanese potters moved the handle from the side to the top of the teapot, a style that later made its way back to China. Wikimedia hide caption

itoggle caption Wikimedia

A Yi-Xing teapot made circa 1900. The first teapots came from the Yi-Xing region of China. Japanese potters moved the handle from the side to the top of the teapot, a style that later made its way back to China.

Wikimedia

1700s

Tea finally reached Europe in the 1600s, along with the necessary tea wares manufactured in Japan and China. As English potters began to adapt the tea set to their countrymen's tastes, they eventually added a handle to the tea bowl to protect fingers from the transmission of heat through the delicate porcelain. According to Steeped in History, edited by Beatrice Hohenegger, this "became necessary because of the British habit of drinking hot black tea, which is consumed at higher temperatures than Chinese green." The English based the new design off existing large, handled mugs and containers used for hot beverages. The size of tea cups also grew to accommodate the English taste for milk and sugar in their tea.

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An illustration of Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century English writer, at tea, by R. Redgrave and H. L. Shenton R. Redgrave and H.L. Shenton/Corbis hide caption

itoggle caption R. Redgrave and H.L. Shenton/Corbis

An illustration of Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century English writer, at tea, by R. Redgrave and H. L. Shenton

R. Redgrave and H.L. Shenton/Corbis

However, Christina Prescott-Walker, a European ceramics expert and the director of the Chinese ceramics department at Sotheby's, believes the invention of the handle may have been a fashion statement more than a utilitarian choice. "In England, tea bowls were still being made as late as 1800," she tells The Salt. Faulkner writes in his book that the original bowls were perceived as more "authentically oriental" than their handled cousins.

1920s

By the early 1900s, innovations in tea drinking became an American affair. The most revolutionary was the tea bag, which was accidentally commercialized by a tea merchant named Thomas Sullivan. He had been sending customers tea wrapped in silk, and rather than take the leaves out of the bag, as Sullivan intended, the customers put the bags into their teapots instead. According to Faulkner, not only did the tea bags push the teapot back to the sidelines of tea service, they were too large for tea cups and ushered in the modern practice of drinking tea from large mugs.

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The tea bag was an American invention, commercialized by tea merchant Thomas Sullivan. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Ryan Kellman/NPR

The tea bag was an American invention, commercialized by tea merchant Thomas Sullivan.

Ryan Kellman/NPR

Today

Today's designers are thinking up ways to integrate technology into our tea. Take, for example, Playful Self, a new exhibition piece at the Dublin Science Gallery. The tea set – which is still far from commercial use — responds to and collects biometric data from the user, including heart rate, breathing rate and even sweat production. From bowls to biosensors, the tea set has come a long way.

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The creators of the Playful Self tea set believe that "in the future, biometric data will only become more ubiquitous." And your tea set could become one of the devices gathering these data. Project by: Alex Rothera & Jimmy Krahe. Tea set design: Pascal Hien. Photo by: Marco Furio, Magliani Photo. Playful Set Editor: Karen Oetling. Marco Furio Magliani and Karen Oetling/Courtesy of Alex Rother and Jimmy Krahe hide caption

itoggle caption Marco Furio Magliani and Karen Oetling/Courtesy of Alex Rother and Jimmy Krahe

The creators of the Playful Self tea set believe that "in the future, biometric data will only become more ubiquitous." And your tea set could become one of the devices gathering these data. Project by: Alex Rothera & Jimmy Krahe. Tea set design: Pascal Hien. Photo by: Marco Furio, Magliani Photo. Playful Set Editor: Karen Oetling.

Marco Furio Magliani and Karen Oetling/Courtesy of Alex Rother and Jimmy Krahe

Tea Tuesdays is an occasional series exploring the science, history, culture and economics of this ancient brewed beverage.

Tove Danovich is a writer based in New York City.

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The Children's Crusade jumps around in time and point-of-view — not in a needlessly confounding way, but as a way to intensify another one of its themes: that the four Blair children — like all children — each came fully loaded at birth with their own idiosyncratic temperaments. The oldest, Robert, is, from the get-go, an overachiever; he becomes a doctor like his father, albeit a depressed one. Rebecca, the lone daughter, is a psychiatrist — a profession she started practicing (without a license) as an adolescent, closely observing her parents; Ryan the third and most endearing child is, we're told, distinguished by "a quality of sweet lively tenderness"; as an adult he returns to his crunchy private school to be a beloved teacher. That leaves odd-man-out youngest child, James: the narcissistic ne'er do well he turns into as an adult was prefigured by the raging id he was as a child, never getting enough of his mother's attention. In fact, the title of the novel derives from a scheme all four of the Blair children hatch to woo their mother, Penny, away from the solitude she craves over their company.

Even as it delves into the Blair family dynamics, Packer's novel also gracefully nods to how the tenor of the changing decades shapes the behavior of parents and children alike: for instance, Penny finds a political cover story to validate her long festering alienation from husband, kids and kitchen when Second Wave Feminism comes along and gives her the language — if not, perhaps, the correct diagnosis — of her feelings. (She and Bill were never compatible; she was probably the type of person who would have been happier — or just as unhappy — on her own.)

The Children's Crusade is a big heavily plotted family saga to dive into and savor: deftly written, at times, funny, and always psychologically astute. It's a mark of just how nuanced Packer's characters are that, by story's end, you'll probably find you've switched your allegiances to each of them at least twice.

Read an excerpt of The Children's Crusade

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There's no shortage of tech startups in Silicon Valley, and since these companies are founded by people who can identify every Star Wars character at the drop of a hat, their names tend to sound pretty weird. Is Zurg a new app that analyzes your dreams, Doctor Who's nemesis, or a 12th-century warlord? For our show at San Francisco Sketchfest, we make contestants earn their nerd cred by telling us — is it a historical figure, a sci-fi villain or a tech company?

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Ride-hailing service Uber has launched a new service in the Indian capital of New Delhi — for auto rickshaws, the popular three-wheeled vehicles.

#Delhi, you can now request for an Auto through your Uber app and pay for the ride in cash! More info: http://t.co/OaHaOk7aC1 #uberAUTO

— Uber Delhi (@Uber_Delhi) April 9, 2015

The big difference between UberAuto and the ride-hailing service's other offerings worldwide: You pay the autos, as the vehicles are known in India, only in cash. Fares are set by the state.

"Autos are an iconic and ubiquitous part of the Delhi landscape and we are excited to have them as another option on the Uber platform," Uber said in a statement on its blog.

The city has some 100,000 auto rickshaws on its streets. They are a cheap and convenient way to travel, though residents of the Indian capital — and other Indian cities — often complain about drivers ignoring the actual fares and asking for more.

Riders can use their Uber app to hail the vehicle and, The Wall Street Journal reports, rate drivers. The paper adds:

"Uber's main domestic competitors, ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.'s Ola, already operates a similar service, known as OlaAuto, in six Indian cities, including Delhi. Last month, Ola also gave its auto passengers the option for cashless travel using an online-payment system. Ola charges a 'convenience fee' of 10 rupees, or about 16 cents, on top of the meter fare."

Uber says it won't charge a booking fee.

Uber ran into trouble in India last year following the rape of a female passenger in an Uber taxi. The company added an SOS button to its app in India following the incident.

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