This is one of many nuggets in the latest edition of the Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook. This annual compendium of historical market data, compiled by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton of the London Business School, is the most authoritative guide investors can find to how the mainstream asset classes - stocks, bonds and bills or short-term bonds - have performed over the long term across a wide range of markets.
This year, the academics also split their historical data for the US and UK markets up by sector to get a better handle on the performance of specific industries. One clear finding is that apparently declining industries have proved buoyant investments, while new technologies have often fallen flat.
Transport is an obvious case study. The story starts with canals, which were 60 times more efficient than wagons for transporting goods when they were introduced in the late 18th century. The year 1793 is better remembered for the execution of Louis XVI in Paris, but in London investors may have been more focused on the canal crash that followed the frenzy of 1792. Still, the new form of transport remained disruptive, and over the following three decades an IPO boom funnelled about $20bn of today's money into the construction of watery highways.
The euphoria ended with the completion of the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1825. Canal stocks went on to lose about two-thirds of their value as train tracks spread across the land. By contrast, railway stocks more than quadrupled between 1827 and 1845. They halved over the following five years, but rose again to become easily the most important sector on the stock exchange - accounting for half the UK and over 60 per cent of the US market by 1900.
Some investors must have benefited, but Emile Zola's 1890 novel L'argent is a mordant account of how rail mania also exposed private investors to profiteers. An aptly timed dramatisation in 2009 by the immersive theatre company Shunt encouraged the public to toss plastic balls to each other across a gigantic board table - a neat parody of the bidding process involved in stock-market speculation.
The 20th century brought rival technologies: cars and airplanes. But what's interesting is that since about 1970 - the year when Penn Central Transportation became the largest bankruptcy in US history - railways have performed rather well. A dollar invested in US railways in 1900 would have turned into $62,019 by the end of 2014, compared to $10,436 for roads and just $7,194 for airlines.
Nationalisation in 1948 means we have no comparable time series for UK rail stocks. But Mrs Munt in EM Forster's Howards End - who urged her adventurous nieces to keep invested in the Nottingham and Derby Railway rather than "Foreign Things, which always smash" - may have been onto something. Sectors seen as serial underperformers have a way of staging recoveries. The resurgence of the UK-listed engineers over the past decade is another example.
Of course, there's a good reason for that: declining industries attract a discount. That has two results. First, dividends are more generous in proportion to the stock price - the yield is higher - which compounds over time into a strong performance. Second, if the decline levels off or even reverses, the shares rerate. The S&P 500 Railroads index now trades on an earnings multiple of 20 - a premium to the wider market on 18 times.
Which brings us back to booze. One reason why alcohol has outperformed may be that it has long attracted the disapproval of ethical investors. The academics speculate that the Temperance Movement depressed the share prices of alcohol companies, boosting their yield and hence returns (dividends have accounted for 87 per cent of UK stock-market returns since 1900). Tight regulation may also have elevated the barriers to entry required for businesses to thrive.
There is no equivalent time series in the US because of Prohibition in the 1920s. But the top-performing sector there since 1900 tells a similar story: tobacco stocks have turned a dollar into an astonishing $6.3m. These figures tell us little about future returns, sadly. But they are a reminder that, for long-term investors, dividends and disrepute beat disruption.
