A coffee percolator was invented in Paris about 1806 by Benjamin Thompson, F.R.S., an American-British scientist, philanthropist, and administrator. He was known as Count Rumford, a title bestowed on him by the Pope. Rumford's invention was first given to the public in London in 1812. He has gained great credit for his device, because of an elaborate essay that he wrote on it in Paris under the title of The excellent qualities of coffee and the art of making it in the highest perfection, and that he caused to be published in London in 1812. It was a simple percolator pot provided with a hot-water jacket, and was a real improvement on the French drip or percolator coffee pot invented by De Belloy, but not at all unlike Hadrot's patented device. Count Rumford, however, was a picturesque character, and a good advertiser. He is generally credited with the invention of the coffee percolator; but examination of his device shows that, strictly speaking, the De Belloy pot was just as much a percolator, and apparently antedated it by about six years.
De Belloy employed the principle of having the boiling water drip through the ground coffee when held in suspension by a perforated metal or porcelain grid. This is true percolation. Hadrot did the same thing with the improvements noted above. Count Rumford in his essay admits that this method of making coffee was not new, but claims his improvement was. This was to provide a rammer for compressing the ground coffee in the upper or percolating device into a definite thickness, this being accomplished by providing the perforated circular tin disk water-spreader that rested on the ground coffee with four projections, or feet, that kept the spreader within half an inch of the grid holding the powder in suspension and free from "agitation."
His argument was that two-thirds of an inch of ground coffee should be leveled and compressed into a half-inch thickness before the boiling water was introduced. Practically the same result was achieved in the De Belloy and Hadrot pots, also provided with water-spreaders and pluggers, but the same mathematical exactitude in the matter of the depth of the ground coffee before the percolation started was not assured. De Belloy's spreader did not have the projections on the under side upon which Count Rumford laid such stress. Then there was the hot-water jacket, which was an improvement on Hadrot's hot air bath. Inventors that followed Rumford have made light of the importance that he attached to scientific accuracy in coffee-making; but it is interesting to note how many of the features of the De Belloy, Hadrot, and Rumford pots have been retained in the modern complex coffee machines, and in most of the filtration devices.
French inventors continued to apply themselves to coffee-roasting and coffee-making problems, and many new ideas were evolved. Some of these were improved upon by the Dutch, the Germans, and the Italians; but the best work in the line of improvements that have survived the test of time was done in England and the United States.
In 1815, Sené was granted a French patent on "a device to make coffee without boiling." In 1819, Laurens produced the original of the percolation device in which the boiling water is raised by a tube and sprayed over the ground coffee. The same year Morize, a Paris tinsmith and lamp-maker, followed with a reversible, double drip pot which was the pioneer of all the reversible filtration pots of Europe and America. Gaudet, another tinsmith, in 1820, patented an improvement on the percolator idea, that employed a cloth filter. By 1825, the pumping percolator, working by steam pressure and by partial vacuum, was much used in France, Holland, Germany, and Austria.
Meanwhile, it was common practise to roast coffee in England in "an iron pan or in hollow cylinders made of sheet iron"; while in Italy, the practise was to roast it in glass flasks, which were fitted with loose corks. The flasks were "held over clear fires of burning coals and continually agitated." Anthony Schick was granted an English patent in 1812, on a method, or process, for roasting coffee; but as he never filed his specifications, we shall probably never know what the process was. The custom of the day in England was to pound the roasted beans in a mortar, or to grind them in a French mill.
In 1822, Louis Bernard Rabaut was granted an English patent in which the French drip process was reversed by using steam pressure to force the boiling water upward through the coffee mass. Casseneuve, a Paris tinsmith, seems to have patented practically the same idea in France in 1824. Casseneuve employed a paper filter in his machine.
In America, a United States patent was granted in 1813 to Alexander Duncan Moore of New Haven on a mill "for grinding and pounding coffee." This was followed by a patent granted to Increase Wilson, of New London, in 1818, on a steel mill for grinding coffee.
In 1815, Archibald Kenrich was granted a patent in England on "mills for grinding coffee."
The coffee biggin, said to have been invented by a Mr. Biggin, came into common use in England for making coffee about 1817. It was usually an earthenware pot. At first it had in the upper part a metal strainer like the French drip pots. Suspended from the rim in later models there was a flannel or muslin bag to hold the ground coffee, through which the boiling water was poured, the bag serving as a filter. The idea was an adaptation of the French fustian infusion bag of 1711, and of other early French drip and filtration devices, and it attained great popularity. Any coffee pot with such a bag fitted into its mouth came to be spoken of as a coffee biggin. Later, there was evolved the metal pot with a wire strainer substituted for the cloth bag. The coffee biggin still retains its popularity in England.
While French inventors were busy with coffee makers, English and American inventors were studying means to improve the roasting of the beans. Peregrine Williamson, of Baltimore, was granted the first patent in the United States for an improvement on a coffee roaster in 1820. In 1824, Richard Evans was granted a patent in England for a commercial method of roasting coffee, comprising a cylindrical sheet-iron roaster fitted with improved flanges for mixing; a hollow tube and trier for sampling coffee while roasting; and a means for turning the roaster completely over to empty it.
The next year, 1825, the first coffee-pot patent in the United States was granted to Lewis Martelley of New York. It marked the first American attempt to perfect an arrangement to condense the steam and the essential oils and to return them to the infusion. In 1838, Antoni Bencini, of Milton, N.C., was granted a similar patent in the United States. Rowland, in 1844, and Waite and Sener, in their Old Dominion pot of 1856, tried for the same result, namely, the condensation of the steam in upper chambers.
The French meantime focused on coffee makers; and in 1827, Jacques Augustin Gandais, a manufacturer of plated jewelry in Paris, produced a really practicable pumping percolator. This machine had the ascending steam tube on the exterior. The same year, 1827, Nicholas Felix Durant, a manufacturer in Chalons-sur-Marne, was granted a French patent on a percolator employing for the first time an inner tube for spraying the boiling water over the ground coffee.
In 1828, Charles Parker, of Meriden, Conn., began work on the original Parker coffee mill, which later was to bring him fame and fortune.
The next year, 1829, the first French patent on a coffee mill was issued to Colaux & Cie. of Molsheim.
That same year, 1829, the Établissements Lauzaune, Paris, began to make hand-turned iron-cylinder coffee-roasting machines.
In 1831, David Selden was granted a patent in England for a coffee-grinding mill having cones of cast-iron.
The first Parker coffee-grinder patent for a household coffee and spice mill was issued in the United States in 1832 to Edmund Parker and Herman M. White of Meriden, Conn. The Charles Parker Company's business was founded the same year. In 1832 and 1833, United States patents were issued to Ammi Clark, of Berlin, Conn., also on improved coffee and spice mills for home use.
Amos Ransom, Hartford, Conn., was granted a United States patent on a coffee roaster in 1833.
The English began exporting coffee-roasting and coffee-grinding machinery to the United States in 1833–34.
1, 2—Improved French drip pots. 3—Persian design. 4—De Belloy pot. 5—Russian reversible pot. 6—New filter machine. 7—Glass filter pot. 8—Syphon machine. 9—Vienna Incomparable. 10—Double glass "balloon" device
Fig. 1—End elevation. Fig. 2—Front sectional view. Fig. 3—Front elevation, showing how the roasting cylinder was turned completely over to empty. Fig. 4—The examiner, or trier. Fig. 5—Tube (J) to be inserted in H of Fig. 6 to prevent escape of aroma
It was not until 1836 that the first French patent was issued on a combined coffee-roaster-and-grinder to François Réné Lacoux of Paris. The roaster was made of porcelain, because the inventor believed that metal imparted a bad taste to the beans while roasting.
In 1839, James Vardy and Moritz Platow were granted an English patent on a kind of urn percolator employing the vacuum process of coffee making, the upper vessel being made of glass. The first French patent on a glass coffee-making device, using the same principle, was granted to Madame Vassieux, of Lyons, in 1842. These were the forerunners of the double glass "balloons" for making coffee which later on, in the early part of the twentieth century, attained much vogue in the United States. They were very popular in Europe until the latter part of the nineteenth century.
In 1839, John Rittenhouse, of Philadelphia, was granted a United States patent on a cast-iron mill designed to handle the problem of nails and stones in grinding coffee. His improvement was intended to prevent injury to the grinding teeth by stopping the machine.
In 1840, Abel Stillman, Poland, N.Y., was granted a United States patent on a family coffee roaster having a mica window to enable the operator to observe the coffee while roasting. (See 10, page 630.)
In 1841, William Ward Andrews was granted an English patent on an improved coffee pot employing a pump to force the boiling water upward through the coffee, which was contained in a perforated cylinder screwed to the bottom of the pot. This was Rabaut's idea of nineteen years before. We find it again repeated in the United States in a machine which appeared on the New York market in 1906.
In 1841, Claude Marie Victor Bernard, of Paris, was granted a French patent on a coffee roaster, which was an improvement designed to bring the roasting cylinder and the fire in closer contact. This was accomplished, to quote the quaint language of the inventor, by applying movable legs and "by superimposing a sheet iron circlet around the edge of the furnace to get double the quantity of heat and it presents so much advantage that it has seemed to me worthy of being patented." (See 4, page 627.)
But the French were only toying with the roaster, because roasting in France was not yet a separate branch of business, as it had become in England and the United States, where keen minds were already at work on the purely commercial coffee-roasting machine. The application of intensive thought in this direction was destined to bear fruit in America in 1846, and in England in 1847.
French inventive genius continued to occupy itself with coffee making, and in the invention of Edward Loysel de Santais, of Paris, in 1843, produced the first of the ideas that were later incorporated in the hydrostatic percolator for making "two thousand cups of coffee an hour"[363] at the exposition of 1855, and that has since been improved upon by the Italians in their rapid-filter machines. It should be noted that Loysel's 2,000 cups were probably demi-tasses. The modern Italian rapid-filter machine produces about 1,000 large coffee cups per hour.
James W. Carter, of Boston, was granted a United States patent in 1846 on his "pull-out" roaster; and this was the machine most generally employed for trade roasting in America for the next twenty years. Carter did not claim to have invented the combination of cylindrical roaster and furnace; but he did claim priority for the combination, with the furnace and roasting vessel, of the air space, or chamber, surrounding it, "the same being for the purpose of preventing the too rapid escape of heat from the furnace when the air chamber's induction and eduction air openings or passages are closed."
The Carter "pull-out," was so called because the roasting cylinder of sheet iron was pulled out from the furnace on a shaft supported by standards, to be emptied or to be refilled from sliding doors in its "sides." It was in use for many years in such old-time plants as that of Dwinell-Wright Company, 25 Haverhill Street. Boston; by James H. Forbes and William Schotten in St. Louis; and by D.Y. Harrison in Cincinnati.
The picture of a roasting room with Carter machines in operation, reproduced here, recalled to George S. Wright, the present head of the Dwinell-Wright Company's business, the scene as he saw it so many times when, as a boy of ten or twelve, he occasionally spent a day in his father's factory. "The only difference I notice," he wrote the author, "is that, according to my recollection, there was no cooler box to receive the roasted coffee, which was dumped on the floor where it was spread out three or four inches deep with iron rakes and sprinkled with a watering pot. The contact of water and hot coffee caused so much steam that the roasting room was in a dense fog for several minutes after each batch of coffee was drawn from the fire."
A.E. Forbes also thus recalled the Carter machine in his father's factory in St. Louis in 1853, when he used to help after school; and sometimes ran the roasters, after 1857:
It was barrel shaped, having a slide the full length of one side to fill and empty. A heavy shaft ran through the centre, resting on the wall of the furnace at the rear end and on an upright about eight feet from the front wall. The fire was about sixteen to eighteen inches below the cylinder and of soft coal. The cylinder was not perforated, the theory being to keep the vapors from escaping.[364] This of course was erroneous. The color of the smoke bursting from the edge of the slide was our medium of telling when the roasting process was nearing completion, and often the cylinder was pulled out and opened for inspection several times before that point was reached. When just right, the belt was shifted to a loose pulley, stopping the cylinder, which, was pulled off the fire. A handle was attached to the shaft, the slide drawn, and the coffee was dumped into a wooden tray which had to be shoved under the cylinder. The coffee was stirred around in the tray until cool enough to sack.
The roaster man had to be a husky in those days to pick up a sack of Rio weighing about one hundred, sixty to one hundred, seventy-five pounds (not a hundred, thirty-two pounds, as now) and to empty it in the cylinder. We had no overhead hoppers.
1, 2—English charcoal machines. 3, 5, 8—American coal-stove roasters. 4—Remington's wheel-of-buckets (American) roaster, 1841. 6—Wood's roaster. 7—Hyde's stove roaster. 9—Reversible stove roaster. 10—Abel Stillman's stove roaster
Later we built in the rear and put in two cylinders of the Chris Abele type, having stationary fronts and filling and emptying from the front end. We still used soft coal, with the fire sixteen to eighteen inches under the cylinder.
We had other machines made locally from the Carter pattern. The idea of the tight cylinder was to keep out smoke, as well as to keep in the aroma. I think we were the first to use perforations, because I remember old Jabez Burns coming along after we put in one of his machines and remarking on it.... We had a kind of mechanical genius for engineer at that time (he also did the roasting) and he conceived the idea that we ought to get rid of the moisture in the roasting coffee because it would cook quicker. When the holes clogged up, he put in loose pieces of wire bent at the ends which shook as the cylinder revolved and kept the holes open. Another thing, he put a hole in the cylinder head and a stopper with a string on it so he could get out a few grains at a time to note the progress of the roasting—but he judged mostly by the smoke.
The cooling box was as I have described it, but later we put in a perforated false bottom which let out some chaff and small stones.
On our first watering, we pulled out the slide and dashed in a bucket of water, then closed the slide and let it revolve outside the furnace. This was hard on the cylinder, so later we used the sprinkling can and put on water sparingly.
Once we had a party that wanted to put in a soapstone lined roaster, and another near us named Salzgerber patented a superheated-steam roaster which was shaped like our modern milk bottle. This was covered with asbestos and worked on a central bearing so it could be depressed for emptying and elevated for filling. It did good work.
Mr. Forbes' recollections of the early days of roasting and selling coffee at retail in St. Louis are so illuminating, and paint so interesting a picture of the period that they are printed here to illustrate the conditions that prevailed generally at the time when the commercial roasting machine of the United States was being developed into the modern type. He says further:
Selling roasted coffee was uphill work, as every one roasted coffee in the kitchen oven. People were buying, say, at twenty cents. Our asking twenty-five cents "roasted" called for a lot of explanation about shrinkage, tight cylinders so the strength and flavor could not get away, etc.; while, when they roasted a pound in the oven the flavor scented the whole house, thus losing so much strength to say nothing of the unevenness of their roasts—part raw, part roasted, producing an unpleasant taste. An occasional burned roast at home helped some. They tell of a man who, going out in the back yard and kicking over a clod by accident, uncovered some burned coffee. He called to his wife and wanted an explanation. She acknowledged she had burnt it, and hid it so he would not scold. He said, "We had better buy it roasted in the future and avoid such accidents."
We roasted in the cellar. We had an elaborately polished Reed & Mann engine in one window, two brass hoppered mills in the other, and our boiler was under the sidewalk. We had a mahogany-top counter, oil paintings on the wall, and bin fronts of Chinamen, etc., done by the celebrated artist, Mat Hastings (now dead); so you see we started right.
The fight we had to introduce roasted coffee was fierce. Our argument was on the saving of fuel, labor, temper, scorched faces, and anything we could think of. We talked only three coffees, Rio, Java, and Mocha. When Santos began to come, it was hard to change them over from the rank Rio flavor to the more mild Santos. The latter they claimed did not have the rough taste. They missed it and longed for the wild tang of the Rio.
We did not import, but bought in New Orleans and from several local wholesale grocers. No one delivered. Shipments were f.o.b. St. Louis. Draying and packages were extra. Coffee was not cleaned or stoned, but was sold as it came from the sack. However, we did not use any very low grades then. If any one complained of the stones hurting their mills, we advised them to buy ground coffee, showing how it kept better ground as it was packed tight, whereas the roasted was looser and the air could get through it. It was fully a year or more before we began to sell in quantities to make it profitable. In roasting for others, we got a cent per pound; and after awhile, that became so much a business it paid all our expenses. We were the first to roast coffee by steam power west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains.
The tea department helped us to hold out until coffee got its hold on the public; for in those days every one used tea and insisted on having it good. Price was no object. How different now!
Five years later (1862) J. Nevison, an Englishman, drifted into town and opened at 85 North Fourth Street. He got out a very bombastic circular which caused us to put out the one I enclose (illustration, page 436). Then came a party named Childs; and after him, Hugh Menown, grand-uncle of the present Menown, of Menown & Gregory; and Mat Hunt; all passed over to the Great Majority. After the Civil War they multiplied pretty fast, coming and going until now we have nineteen roasting establishments in the city.
The late Julius J. Schotten also wrote the author as follows concerning the days of the Carter roaster and of the wholesale coffee-roasting business founded by William Schotten in 1862:
In the early days, every wholesale grocer was selling coffee; the wholesale grocer controlled ninety percent of the trade in the country. It did not pay the coffee roaster to have men on the road selling coffee in those days. Such being the case, seventy-five percent of the roasting done by the coffee roasters was job roasting, at one cent a pound.
In the beginning there were only two kinds of roasted coffee known to the trade in this section of the country (St. Louis) and of course one of these brands was "Rio"—the other; "Java". The former was a genuine Rio, but the Java was mostly Jamaica coffee.
Roasted coffee then was packed (for city trade) in five and ten pound packages, and this size package seemed to supply the wants of the ordinary grocer for a week. Occasionally a twenty-five pound package, and in a few instances as much as fifty pounds of one grade was sold at a time.
The class of customers the coffee roasters sold in those days were the smaller merchants; the larger stores, having their ideas as to quality, bought their coffees green. As they had very little sale for the roasted, they would send a half-sack, and sometimes a whole sack to have it roasted. It took a number of years to induce the larger grocers, and even the average grocers, to purchase their coffee already roasted.
Coffees were roasted in the old style, "pull-out" roaster cylinder. That is to say, it was necessary to stop the roaster and to pull out the cylinder to sample the coffee in order to know when to take the coffee off the fire. When the coffee was ready to take off, the cylinder was pulled out its entire length. It was then turned over and a slide nine inches wide, running the full length of the cylinder, was opened and the contents were dumped in the cooling box. When the coffee reached the cooling box, it took two men with hoes or wooden shovels to stir and turn it until it was properly cooled, there being no cooling arrangements then as we have nowadays.
At that time there were no stoning or separating machines; and as a bag of the ordinary green Jamaica coffee contained from three to five pounds of stones and sticks, it was necessary to hand-pick the coffee after it was roasted.
1—English adaptation of French boiler. 2—English coffee biggin. 3—Improved Rumford percolator. 4—Jones's exterior-tube percolator. 5—Parker's steam-fountain coffee maker. 6—Platow's filterer. 7—Brain's Vacuum, or pneumatic filter. 8—Beart's percolator. 9—American coffee biggin. 10—cloth-bag drip pot. 11—Vienna coffee pot. 12—Le Brun's cafetière. 13—Reversible Potsdam cafetière. 14, 15—Gen. Hutchinson's percolator and urn. 16—Etruscan biggin
After Carter, the next United States coffee-roaster patent was granted to J.R. Remington, of Baltimore, on a roaster employing a wheel of buckets to move the green coffee beans singly through a charcoal heated trough. It never became a commercial success. (See 4, page 630.)
In 1847–48, William and Elizabeth Dakin were granted patents in England on an apparatus for "cleaning and roasting coffee and for making decoctions." The roaster specification covered a gold, silver, platinum, or alloy-lined roasting cylinder and traversing carriage on an overhead railway to move the roaster in and out of the roasting oven; and the "decoction" specification covered an arrangement for twisting a cloth-bag ground-coffee-container in a coffee biggin, or applied a screw motion to a disk within a perforated cylinder containing the ground coffee, so as to squeeze the liquid out of the grounds after infusion had taken place.
The roaster has survived, but the coffee maker was not so fortunate. The Dakin idea was that coffee was injuriously affected by coming in contact with iron during the roasting process. The roasting cylinder was enclosed in an oven instead of being directly exposed to the furnace heat. The apparatus was provided also with a "taster," or sampler, the first of its kind, to enable the operator to examine the roasting berries without stopping the machine. As will be seen by referring to the picture of the model shown, the apparatus was ingenious and not without considerable merit. Dakin & Co. are still in existence in London, operating a machine very like the original model.
In 1848, Thomas John Knowlys was granted a patent in England on a perforated roasting cylinder coated with enamel.
It is to be noted in passing that this idea of handling the green bean with extreme delicacy, evidently obtained from the French, was never taken seriously in the United States, whose inventors chose to handle it with rough courage.
The first English patent on a coffee grinder was granted to Luke Herbert in 1848.
In 1849, Apoleoni Pierre Preterre, of Havre, was granted an English patent on a coffee roaster mounted on a weighing apparatus to indicate loss of weight in roasting and automatically stop the roasting process. At the same time he secured an English patent on a vacuum percolator, not unlike Durant's of 1827.
In 1849 also, Thomas R. Wood, of Cincinnati, was granted a United States patent on a spherical coffee roaster for use on kitchen stoves. It attained considerable popularity among housewives who preferred to do their own roasting. (See 6, page 630.)
In 1852, Edward Gee secured a patent in England on a coffee roaster fitted with inclined flanges for turning the beans while roasting.
C.W. Van Vliet, of Fishkill Landing, N.Y., was granted a United States patent in 1855 on a household coffee mill employing upper breaking and lower grinding cones. He assigned it to Charles Parker of Meriden, Conn. In 1860–61 several United States patents were granted John and Edmund Parker on coffee grinders for home use.
In 1862, E.J. Hyde, of Philadelphia, was granted a United States patent on a combined coffee-roaster and stove fitted with a crane on which the roasting cylinder was revolved and swung out horizontally for emptying and refilling. This machine proved to be a commercial success. Benedickt Fischer used one in his first roasting plant in New York. It is still being manufactured by the Bramhall Deane Company of New York.
In 1864, Jabez Burns, of New York, was granted a United States patent on the original Burns coffee roaster, the first machine which did not have to be moved away from the fire for discharging the roasted coffee, and one that marked a distinct advance in the manufacture of coffee-roasting apparatus. It was a closed iron cylinder set in brickwork. (See illustration, page 635.)
Jabez Burns had been a student of coffee roasting in New York for twenty years before he produced the machine that was to revolutionize the coffee business of the United States. He had brought with him from England a knowledge of the trade in that country, where he first began his business training by selling Java coffee at fourteen cents and Sumatra at eleven cents to hotels, boarding-houses, and private families.
Up to the time of the Civil War, the contrivances employed for roasting coffee in every case necessitated the removal of the roasting apparatus—whether pan, globe, or cylinder—from the fire. The process of causing coffee to discharge from the end of the roasting cylinder at the pleasure of the operator while the cylinder was still in motion was new; and the double set of flanges to produce this effect, and at the same time, during the process of roasting, to keep the coffee equally distributed from end to end of the cylinder, was new. Some one suggested this last improvement was simply an Archimedean screw placed in a cylinder, but Mr. Burns replied: "It is a double screw, a thing never suggested by the Archimedean screw. It is, in fact, a double right and left augur, one within the other, firmly secured together and also to the shell or cylinder, and when the cylinder revolves the desired result is obtained—the idea being entirely original."
Mr. Burns had watched the development of the coffee business from the time when the preparation of coffee was largely confined to the home, where the approved roasting implements were hot stones, or tiles, iron plates, skillets, and frying pans. Some of these were still in use twenty years after he produced his first machine; and he often said that coffee evenly roasted by such methods was just as good as if done by the best mechanical device ever invented. He also said: "Coffee can be roasted in very simple machinery. Some of the best we ever saw was done in a corn popper. Patent portable roasters are almost as numerous as rat traps or churns."
He early saw the practise of domestic roasting falling into disuse, as it was becoming possible to supply the consumer with roasted coffee for only a trifle more than in the green state, with all the labor and annoyance of roasting done away with—a talking point that John Arbuckle was quick to seize upon in his first Ariosa advertising.
In almost every town of any size there were concerns engaged in the roasting business. Within a few years, Burns machines were placed in all the principal roasting centers. Pupke & Reid in New York; Flint, Evans & Co., and James H. Forbes in St. Louis; Arbuckles & Co., in Pittsburgh; the Weikel & Smith Spice Co. in Philadelphia; Theodore F. Johnson & Co., in Newark; Evans & Walker in Detroit; W. & J.G. Flint in Milwaukee; and Parker & Harrison in Cincinnati, were among his first customers.
It is said that in 1845 there were facilities in and around New York to roast as much coffee as was then consumed in Great Britain. Steam power was being extensively used, and the roasting was done here for a large part of the country. The habit was to buy roasted coffee from the coffee and spice mills by the bag or larger quantity for country consumption; and the grocers and small tea stores, for local consumption, bought from twenty-five pounds upward at a time. This method cheapened the roasting of coffee to half a cent a pound; and then good profits could be made, for everything was cheap in those days. Even at that, it would have been impossible for each tea dealer to have roasted his own coffee for several times the amount, so the practise was generally adhered to all over the country.
Jabez Burns wrote in 1874:
It is preposterous to suppose that household roasting will be continued long in any part of this country, if coffee properly prepared can be had. This is demonstrated by the remarkable advances made in Pittsburgh and other places, where only a few years ago the sales were chiefly in green coffee. Now the amount roasted in Pittsburgh alone by those who make a business of it, exceeds the entire consumption of coffee of any kind in the United States fifty years ago. It will never pay for small stores to roast if the large manufactories will do the work well, and if they will not, small dealers will add proper machinery, and will eventually become strong competing dealers. By doing the work with proper care they will not only secure a reputation with large sales for themselves, but will command the roasting for other parties.
Until the Burns roaster appeared, coffee roasters were usually cylinders that revolved upon an axis; the other devices that were tried were not successful. Jabez Burns thus describes the first roaster he ever saw at Hull, England:
It consisted of a furnace, open at the top, and a perforated cylinder with a slide door. The axis, or shaft, of the cylinder had bearings on a frame which passed outside the furnace, while the cylinder went down into the fire pit, the top of which could be covered over. In this position it could be turned by means of a crank on the end of a shaft The only means of testing was by the escape of the steam or aroma, whichever predominated, passing out through the perforations at the top; but so expert was the operator and so quick to detect the aroma, that he seldom had to return the cylinder to the fire to produce a satisfactory roast. This man roasted fifty pounds or less in a batch for a number of retail stores.
Globes, consisting of two hemispheres, made of cast-iron and so arranged that they opened to fill and discharge, but operated substantially as above, only with the method of lowering into the fire changed somewhat, I have seen in use in Scotland in 1840. They were called French roasters.
In this country a few years ago the use of the long sheet-iron cylinder was almost universal, varying only in the method of placing the cylinder over the fire—some sideways on a track, others endwise, sliding on a long shaft or by turning on a crane, in either case causing considerable labor and loss of time, which often resulted in the hands of the inexperienced in more or less spoiling the batch of coffee.
From his expert knowledge of coffee and coffee-roasting problems, Jabez Burns quickly rose to a commanding position in the industry. He was a trade teacher and a trade builder. He had very definite ideas on roasting. He said:
The object of roasting is not attained until all the moisture (water of vegetation) is driven off. Roast properly—uniformly and sufficiently—and you will get all the aroma there is in the bean. Coffees of various kinds can not be roasted to a uniform color. Some will be of a light shade when sufficiently roasted while others will have to be roasted dark to develop the aroma. Therefore, appearance alone is not a proper test. Aroma-saving devices have had their day. Coffee is of no use unless the aroma is fully developed, and the more it is developed by roasting the better it is. What passes off in the roasting process can not be saved and is so small that if all of it in the country could be collected and freed of all foreign matter, it would not weigh an ounce.
Roast coffee over a slow fire so that it will be an hour before it has the color of roasted coffee, and, in contrast, produce in another batch of like quantity the same color in thirty minutes, and it will be found for all intended purposes, either to grind, sell or drink, that the latter will be, beyond all comparison, the best. Coffee should be roasted uniform and as quickly as possible, only it must not be scorched or spotted, otherwise it will have a bitter burned taste. If roasted properly it will very considerably increase its bulk and will be plump, swelled out and crisp; easily crushed in the hand or between the fingers.
In his Spice Mill Companion, published in 1879, Jabez Burns said further in regard to roasting:
All coffees do not roast alike; some will be a bright light color when done, and others will be dark before done. There are two infallible rules, which if properly appreciated and tried will prove to be practically useful. One is, when the aroma is sufficiently developed to produce a sharp, cutting, but aromatic sensation in the nose. Those who practice that way do not need to see the roast. The other rule is that when a berry is broken it is crisp and uniform in color inside and out. Those who are accustomed to this method may be good coffee roasters, albeit they may not have any nose at all. But we must state in this connection, that a man who has no smell and is color blind is not a fit candidate for the coffee roasting profession; and, moreover, we affirm that any person who can not roast coffee, so far as judgment is concerned, after a few trials, will never make a good operator.
In 1867, Jabez Burns was granted a United States patent on an improved coffee cooler, mixer, and grinding mill, or granulator. Another granulator patent was issued to him in 1872. Mr. Burns had also given the subject of cooling coffees considerable study, and his cooler was the result. He argued that it was necessary to cool quickly. Before his day, various methods had been employed, such as placing the coffee in revolving drums covered with wire cloth. Sometimes a draft of cold air was applied to the cooling drums, and the dirt and chaff blown through the wire cloth. It was also customary in wholesale establishments to blow cold air up through a perforated bottom, and this had been found effective when properly applied. The Burns idea was to cool by means of suction, causing a downward draft through the coffee and wire-cloth bottomed box, which was found to be more uniform and efficient for cooling purposes, as well as in controlling smoke, heat, and dust, which by this means could be blown out of the roasting room by any convenient outlet.
On the subject of grinding, likewise, Mr. Burns had reached some definite conclusions. The French and English lap and wall mills, the English steel mills, and the Swift mills were all used in the United States. Troemner's, the Enterprise, and others—to be mentioned later in chronological order—were extending their use in a retail way; but Jabez Burns confined his attention to a practicable mill for wholesale grinding establishments.
For manufacturing purposes, burstone mills were for many years exclusively employed, especially one first known as the Prentiss & Page, and later as the Page mill. There was a time when all the coffee establishments in New York sent their coffee to Prentiss & Page to be ground. Some of the places roasted by hand, others by horse power; and if by steam, it was limited, and they did not have enough to spare for grinding.
With the march of improvement, burstone mills went into the discard. The difficulty lay in finding men experienced in stone dressing to run them; and the demand grew for a better style of grinding than could be done in a mill out of face and balance. This demand was met in an altogether different style of machine, which for twenty-five years was well known as the Barbor mill. It was for improvements on this mill that Jabez Burns in 1867, 1872, and 1874 obtained his granulator patents.
The mill comprised cutters in the form of an iron roller running in near contact with a concave, also of iron, and a revolving cylinder provided with sieves, or screens, that received the ground material, rolled it over the wire surface, sifting out the fine and discharging the coarse automatically into the cutter, to be again manipulated until it was fine enough to pass through the meshes of the screen.
Jabez Burns patented an improved form of his roaster in 1881, and a sample-coffee roaster in 1883, before he died in 1888; and since that time his sons, who continue the business, have perfected a number of improvements and brought out new machines which will be referred to in chronological order.
James H. Nason, of Franklin, Mass., was granted a United States patent in 1865 on a percolator with fluid joints.
P.H. Vanderweyde, of Philadelphia, was granted United States patents in 1866 on a percolator and a continuous coffee-filtering machine.
Raparlier was granted a French patent on a pocket coffee-making device in 1867. In later years, his invention became very popular among French coffee drinkers. It was one of the early practicable forms of double-glass-globe filtration devices.
E.B. Manning of Middletown, Conn., was granted his first patent on a tea and coffee pot in 1868. Others followed in 1870 and 1876. In the latter year, John Bowman brought out the valve-type percolator which subsequently attained great favor in American households.
Thomas Smith & Son (Elkington & Company, Ltd., successors) began to manufacture at Glasgow, Scotland, about 1870, the Napierian vacuum coffee machine which had been invented in 1840—but never patented—by Robert Napier of the celebrated firm of Clyde shipbuilders. This machine makes coffee by distillation and filtration. It employs a metal globe, and a brewer from which the coffee is syphoned over into the globe through a tube, around the strainer-end of which, as it rests in the coffee liquid in the brewer, there is tied a filter cloth. It is still being manufactured by Elkington & Company.