How a Cup of Tea Laid the Foundations for Modern Statistical Analysis

In the early 1920s, a trio of scientists sat down for a break at Rothamsted agricultural research station in Hertfordshire, UK. One of them, a statistician by the name of Ronald Fisher, poured a cup of tea, then offered it to his colleague Muriel Bristol, an algae specialist who would later have the plant C. muriella named after her. Bristol refused, as she liked to put the milk in before the tea. Fisher was skeptical. Surely it didn’t matter? Yes, she said, it did. A cup with milk poured first tasted better. “Let’s test her,” chipped in the third scientist, who also happened to be Bristol’s fiancé. That raised the question of how to assess her tasting abilities. They would need to make sure she was given both types of tea, so she could make a fair comparison. They settled on pouring several cups, some tea-then-milk and others milk-then-tea, then getting her to try them one at a time. But there were still a couple of problems. Bristol might try to anticipate the sequence they’d chose ... Read full article.