THE EVOLUTION OF COFFEE APPARATUS Page 7

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.

Early French Coffee-Roasting Machines
1—Delephine's coke machine. 2—Bernard's machine, 1841. 3—Circlet for same. 4—Postulart's gas machine

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.

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.

BATTERY OF CARTER PULL-OUT MACHINES IN AN EARLY AMERICAN PLANT

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."

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" 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."