THE EVOLUTION OF COFFEE APPARATUS Page 4

Coffee grinders were so common in France in 1720 that they were to be had for a dollar and twenty cents each. Their development by the French had been rapid from the original spice grinder. At first, they were known as coffee mills; but in the eighteenth century, roasters came to be known by that name. They were made of iron, retaining the same principle of the horizontal mill-stones—one of which is fixed while the other moves—that the ancients employed for grinding wheat. They were squat, box-shaped affairs, having in the center a shank of iron that revolved upon a fixed, corrugated iron plate. There was also the style that fastened to the wall. At first, the drawer to receive ground coffee was missing, but this was supplied in later types. Before its invention, the ground coffee was received in a sack of greased leather, or in one treated on the outside with beeswax—probably the original of the duplex paper bag for conserving the flavor.

The French brought their innate artistic talents to bear upon coffee grinders, just as they did upon roasters and serving pots. In many instances they made the outer parts of silver and of gold.

By 1750, the straight-line serving pot in England had begun to yield to the reactionary movement in art favoring bulbous bodies and serpentine spouts.

About 1760, French inventors began to devote themselves to improvements in coffee-making devices. Donmartin, a Paris tinsmith, in 1763, invented an urn pot that employed a flannel sack for infusing. Another infusion device, produced the same year by L'Ainé, also a tinsmith of Paris, was known as a diligence.

A complete revolution in the style of English serving pots took place in 1770, with a return to the flowing lines of the Turkish ewer; and between 1800 and 1900, there was a gradual return to the style of serving pot having the handle at a right angle to the spout.

English and French Coffee Grinders
Nineteenth century

In 1779, Richard Dearman was granted an English patent on a new method of making mills for grinding coffee. In 1798, the first American patent on an improved coffee grinding mill was granted to Thomas Bruff, Sr. It was a wall mill, fitted with iron plates, in which the coffee was ground between two circular nuts, three inches broad and having coarse teeth around their centers and fine shallow teeth at the edges.

De Belloy's (or Du Belloy's) coffee pot appeared in Paris about 1800. It was first made of tin; but later, of porcelain and silver—the original French drip pot. This device was never patented; but it appears to have furnished the inspiration for many inventors in France, England, and the United States. The first French patent on a coffee maker was granted to Denobe, Henrion, and Rouch in 1802. It was for a "pharmacological-chemical coffee-making device by infusion." Charles Wyatt obtained a patent the same year in London on an apparatus for distilling coffee. The De Belloy pot is illustrated on page 622.

In 1806, Hadrot was granted a French patent on a device "for filtering coffee without boiling and bathed in air." This use of the word filtering was misleading, as it was many times after in French, English, and American patent nomenclature, where it often meant percolation or something quite different from filtration. True percolation means to drip through fine interstices of china or metal. Filtration means to drip through a porous substance, usually cloth or paper. De Belloy's pot was a percolator. So was Hadrot's. The improvement on which Hadrot got his patent was to "replace the white iron filter (sic) used in ordinary filtering pots by a filter composed of hard tin and bismuth" and to use "a rammer of the same metal, pierced with holes." The rammer was designed to press down and to smooth out the powdered coffee in an even and uniform fashion. "It also," says Hadrot in his specification, "stops the derangement which boiling water poured from a height can produce. It is held by its stem a half inch from the surface of the powder so that it receives only the action of the water which it divides and facilitates thus the extraction which it must produce in each of the particles."

Eighteenth-Century Roaster
Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.

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.

The Original French Drip Pot
Cafetière à la De Belloy

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."