Copy deadline

It's 1877. Newspaper reporter Archibald Forbes needs to write a report about the Russo-Turkish war but hasn't slept for the previous three days:

"I told the waiter to bring me a pint of dry champagne, unopened. I took the cork out, put the neck of the bottle into my mouth, drank it with all the fizz, sat up and wrote the four columns you read next morning in the Daily News."

From Famous War Correspondents by F Lauriston Bullard; quoted in The First Casualty by Phillip Knightley.