Mexico. In Mexico, the natives have a custom peculiarly their own. The roasted beans are pounded to a powder in a cloth bag which is then immersed in a pot of boiling water and milk. The vaquero, however, pours boiling water on the powdered coffee in his drinking cup, and sweetens it with a brown sugar stick.

Among the upper classes in Mexico the following interesting method obtains for making coffee:

United States. In no country has there been so marked an improvement in coffee making as in the United States. Although in many parts, the national beverage is still indifferently prepared, the progress made in recent years has been so great that the friends of coffee are hopeful that before long it may be said truly that coffee making in America is a national honor and no longer the national disgrace that it was in the past.

Left, copper pot with wooden handle and iron legs designed to stand in the coals—Center, glass-globe pot, for stove use, enclosed in felt-lined brass cosey—Right, hand-made hammered-brass kettle for stove use]

Already, in the more progressive homes, and in the best hotels and restaurants, the coffee is uniformly good, and the service all that it should be. The American breakfast cup is a food-beverage because of the additions of milk or cream and sugar; and unlike Europe, this same generous cup serves again as a necessary part of the noonday and evening meals for most people.

One effect of prohibition has been to lead many hotels to feature their coffee service, bringing back the modern type of coffee room illustrated above]

The important and indispensable part that sugar plays in the make-up of the American cup of coffee was ably set forth by Fred Mason,[372] vice-president of the American Sugar Refining Co., when he said:

Since prohibition, the average citizen is drinking one hundred more cups of coffee a year than he did in the old days; and a good part of the increase is attributed to newly formed habits of drinking coffee between meals, at soda fountains, in tea and coffee shops, at hotels, and even in the homes. In other words, the increase is due to coffee drinking that directly takes the place of malt and spirituous liquors. There have come into being the hotel coffee room; the custom of afternoon coffee drinking; and free coffee-service in many factories, stores, and offices.

In colonial days, must or ale first gave way to tea, and then to coffee as a breakfast beverage. The Boston "tea party" clinched the case for coffee; but in the meantime, coffee was more or less of an after-dinner function, or a between-meals drink, as in Europe. In Washington's time, dinner was usually served at three o'clock in the afternoon, and at informal dinner parties the company "sat till sunset—then coffee."

In the early part of the nineteenth century, coffee became firmly intrenched as the one great American breakfast beverage; and its security in this position would seem to be unassailable for all time.

Today, all classes in the United States begin and end the day with coffee. In the home, it is prepared by boiling, infusion or steeping, percolation, and filtration; in the hotels and restaurants, by infusion, percolation, and filtration. The best practise favors true percolation (French drip), or filtration.

Steeping coffee in American homes (an English heirloom) is usually performed in a china or earthenware jug. The ground coffee has boiling water poured upon it until the jug is half full. The infusion is stirred briskly. Next, the jug is filled by pouring in the remainder of the boiling water, the infusion is again stirred, then permitted to settle, and finally is poured through a strainer or filter cloth before serving.

When a pumping percolator or a double glass filtration device is used, the water may be cold or boiling at the beginning as the maker prefers. Some wet the coffee with cold water before starting the brewing process.

For genuine percolator, or drip coffee, French and Austrian china drip pots are mostly employed. The latest filtration devices are described in chapter XXXIV.

The Creole, or French market, coffee for which New Orleans has long been famous is made from a concentrated coffee extract prepared in a drip pot. First, the ground coffee has poured over it sufficient boiling water thoroughly to dampen it, after which further additions of boiling water, a tablespoonful at a time, are poured upon it at five minute intervals. The resulting extract is kept in a tightly corked bottle for making café au lait or café noir as required. A variant of the Creole method is to brown three tablespoonfuls of sugar in a pan, to add a cup of water, and to allow it to simmer until the sugar is dissolved; to pour this liquid over ground coffee in a drip pot, to add boiling water as required, and to serve black or with cream or hot milk, as desired.

In New Orleans, coffee is often served at the bedside upon waking, as a kind of early breakfast function.

The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 served to introduce the Vienna café to America. Fleischmann's Vienna Café and Bakery was a feature of our first international exposition. Afterward, it was transferred to Broadway, New York, where for many years it continued to serve excellent coffee in Vienna style next door to Grace Church.

The opportunity is still waiting for the courageous soul who will bring back to our larger cities this Vienna café or some Americanized form of the continental or sidewalk café, making a specialty of tea, coffee, and chocolate.

The old Astor House was famous for its coffee for many years, as was also Dorlon's from 1840 to 1922.

Members of the family of the late Colonel Roosevelt began to promote a Brazil coffee-house enterprise in New York in 1919. It was first called Café Paulista, but it is now known as the Double R coffee house, or Club of South America, with a Brazil branch in the 40's and an Argentine branch on Lexington Avenue. Coffee is made and served in Brazilian style; that is, full city roast, pulverized grind, filtration made; service, black or with hot milk. Sandwiches, cakes, and crullers are also to be had.

One of New York's newest clubs is known as the Coffee House. It is in West Forty-fifth Street, and has been in existence since December, 1915, when it was opened with an informal dinner, at which the late Joseph H. Choate, one of the original members, outlined the purpose and policies of the club.

The founders of the Coffee House were convinced—as the result of the high dues and constantly increasing formality and discipline in the social clubs in New York—that there was need here for a moderate-priced eating and meeting place, which should be run in the simplest possible way and with the least possible expense.

At the beginning of its career, the club framed, adopted, and has since lived up to, a most informal constitution: "No officers, no liveries, no tips, no set speeches, no charge accounts, no RULES."

The membership is made up, for the most part, of painters, writers, sculptors, architects, actors, and members of other professions. Members are expected to pay cash for all orders. There are no proposals of candidates for membership. The club invites to join it those whom it believes to be in sympathy with the ideals of its founders.

The method of preparing coffee for individual service in the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, which has been adopted by many first-class hotels and restaurants that do not serve urn-made coffee exclusively, is the French drip plus careful attention to all the contributing factors for making coffee in perfection, and is thus described by the hotel's steward:

C. Scotty, chef at the Hotel Ambassador, New York, thus describes the method of making coffee in that hostelry:

The coffee service at the best hotels is usually in silver pots and pitchers, and includes the freshly made coffee, hot milk or cream (sometimes both), and domino sugar.

Within the last year (1921) many of the leading hotels, and some of the big railway systems, have adopted the custom of serving free a demi-tasse of coffee as soon as the guest-traveler seats himself at the breakfast table or in the dining car. "Small blacks," the waiters call them, or "coffee cocktails," according to their fancy.

At the Pequot coffee house, 91 Water Street, New York, a noonday restaurant in the heart of the coffee trade, an attempt has been made to introduce something of the old-time coffee house atmosphere.

The Childs chain of restaurants recently began printing on its menus, in brackets before each item, the number of calories as computed by an expert in nutrition. Coffee with a mixture of milk and cream is credited with eighty-five calories, a well known coffee substitute with seventy calories, and tea with eighteen calories. The Childs chain of 92 restaurants serves 40,000,000 cups of coffee a year, made from 375 tons of ground coffee, and figuring an average of 53 cups to the pound.

The Thompson chain of one hundred restaurants serves 160,000 cups of coffee per day, or more than 58,000,000 cups per year.

Coffee Customs in South America

Argentine. Coffee is very popular as a beverage in Argentina. Café con léche—coffee with milk, in which the proportion of coffee may vary from one-fourth to two-thirds—is the usual Argentine breakfast beverage. A small cup of coffee is generally taken after meals, and it is also consumed to a considerable extent in cafés.

Brazil. In Brazil every one drinks coffee and at all hours. Cafés making a specialty of the beverage, and modeled after continental originals, are to be found a-plenty in Rio de Janeiro, Santos, and other large cities. The custom prevails of roasting the beans high, almost to carbonization, grinding them fine, and then boiling after the Turkish fashion, percolating in French drip pots, steeping in cold water for several hours, straining and heating the liquid for use as needed, or filtering by means of conical linen sacks suspended from wire rings.

The Brazilian loves to frequent the cafés and to sip his coffee at his ease. He is very continental in this respect. The wide-open doors, and the round-topped marble tables, with their small cups and saucers set around a sugar basin, make inviting pictures. The customer pulls toward him one of the cups and immediately a waiter comes and fills it with coffee, the charge for which is about three cents. It is a common thing for a Brazilian to consume one dozen to two dozen cups of black coffee a day. If one pays a social visit, calls upon the president of the Republic, or any lesser official, or on a business acquaintance, it is a signal for an attendant to serve coffee. Café au lait is popular in the morning; but except for this service, milk or cream is never used. In Brazil, as in the Orient, coffee is a symbol of hospitality.

In Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, very much the same customs prevail of making and serving the beverage.

Coffee Drinking in Other Countries

In Australia and New Zealand, English methods for roasting, grinding, and making coffee are standard. The beverage usually contains thirty to forty percent chicory. In the bush, the water is boiled in a billy can. Then the powdered coffee is added; and when the liquid comes again to a boil, the coffee is done. In the cities, practically the same method is followed. The general rule in the antipodes seems to be to "let it come to a boil", and then to remove it from the fire.

In Cuba the custom is to grind the coffee fine, to put it in a flannel sack suspended over a receiving vessel, and to pour cold water on it. This is repeated many times, until the coffee mass is well saturated. The first drippings are repoured over the bag. The final result is a highly concentrated extract, which serves for making café au lait, or café noir, as desired.

In Martinique, coffee is made after the French fashion. In Panama, French and American methods obtain; as also in the Philippines.

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Chapter XXXVI

PREPARATION OF THE UNIVERSAL BEVERAGE

The coffee drink has had a curious evolution. It began, not as a drink, but as a food ration. Its first use as a drink was as a kind of wine. Civilization knew it first as a medicine. At one stage of its development, before it became generally accepted as a liquid refreshment, the berries found favor as a confection. As a beverage, its use probably dates back about six hundred years.

The protein and fat content, that is, the food value, of coffee, so far as civilized man is concerned, is an absolute waste. The only constituents that are of value are those that are water soluble, and can be extracted readily with hot water. When coffee is properly made, as by the drip method, either by percolation or filtration, the ground coffee comes in contact with the hot water for only a few minutes; so the major portion of the protein, which is not only practically insoluble, but coagulates on heating, remains in the unused part of the coffee, the grounds. The coffee bean contains a large percent of protein—fourteen percent. By comparing this figure with twenty-one percent of protein in peas, twenty-three percent in lentils, twenty-six percent in beans, twenty-four percent in peanuts, about eleven percent in wheat flour, and less than nine percent in white bread, we learn how much of this valuable food stuff is lost with the coffee grounds[373].

Though civilized man (excepting the inhabitants of the Isle de Groix off the coast of Brittany) does not use this protein content of coffee, in certain parts of Africa it has been put to use in a very ingenious and effective manner "from time immemorial" down to the present day. James Bruce, the Scottish explorer, in his travels to discover the source of the Nile in 1768–73, found that this curious use of the coffee bean had been known for centuries. He brought back accounts and specimens of its use as a food in the shape of balls made of grease mixed with roasted coffee finely ground between stones.

Other writers have told how the Galla, a wandering tribe of Africa—and like most wandering tribes, a warlike one—find it necessary to carry concentrated food on their long marches. Before starting on their marauding excursions, each warrior equips himself with a number of food balls. These prototypes of the modern food tablet are about the size of a billiard ball, and consist of pulverized coffee held in shape with fat. One ball constitutes a day's ration; and although civilized man might find it unpalatable, from the purely physiological standpoint it is not only a concentrated and efficient food, but it also has the additional advantage of containing a valuable stimulant in the caffein content which spurs the warrior on to maximum effort. And so the savage in the African jungle has apparently solved two problems; the utilization of coffee's protein, and the production of a concentrated food.

Further research shows that perhaps as early as 800 A.D. this practise started by crushing the whole ripe berries, beans and hulls, in mortars, mixing them with fats, and rounding them into food balls. Later, the dried berries were so used. The inhabitants of Groix, also, thrive on a diet that includes roasted coffee beans.

About 900, a kind of aromatic wine was made in Africa from the fermented juice of the hulls and pulp of the ripe berries[374].

Payen says that the first coffee drinkers did not think of roasting but, impressed by the aroma of the dried beans, they put them in cold water and drank the liquor saturated with their aromatic principles. Crushing the raw beans and hulls, and steeping them in water, was a later improvement.

It appears that boiled coffee (the name is anathema today) was invented about the year 1000 A.D. Even then, the beans were not roasted. We read of their use in medicine in the form of a decoction. The dried fruit, beans and hulls, were boiled in stone or clay cauldrons. The custom of using the sun-dried hulls, without roasting, still exists in Africa, Arabia, and parts of southern Asia. The natives of Sumatra neglect the fruit of the coffee tree and use the leaves to make a tea-like infusion. Jardin relates that in Guiana an agreeable tea is made by drying the young buds of the coffee tree, and rolling them on a copper plate slightly heated. In Uganda, the natives eat the raw berries; from bananas and coffee they make also a sweet, savory drink which is called menghai.

About 1200, the practise was common of making a decoction from the dried hulls alone. There followed the discovery that roasting improved the flavor. Even today, this drink known as Sultan or Sultana coffee, café à la sultane, or kisher, continues in favor in Arabia. Credit for the invention of this beverage has been wrongfully given by various French writers to Doctor Andry, director of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. Dr. Andry had his own recipe for making café à la sultane, which was to boil the coffee hulls for half an hour. This gave a lemon-colored liquid which was drunk with a little sugar.

The Oriental procedure was to toast the hulls in an earthenware pot over a charcoal fire, mixing in with them a small quantity of the silver skins, and turning them over until they were slightly parched. The hulls and silver skins, in proportions of four to one, were then thrown into boiling water and well boiled again for at least a half-hour. The color of the drink had some resemblance to the best English beer, La Roque assures us, and it required no sweetening, "there being no bitterness to correct." This was still the coffee drink of the court of Yemen, and of people of distinction in the Levant, when La Roque and his fellow-travelers made their celebrated voyage to Arabia the Happy in 1711–13.

Some time in the thirteenth century, the practise began of roasting the dried beans, after the hulling process. This was done first in crude stone and earthenware trays, and later on metal plates, as described in chapter XXXIV. A liquor was made from boiling the whole roasted beans. The next step was to pound the roasted beans to a powder with a mortar and pestle; and the decoction was then made by throwing the powder into boiling water, the drink being swallowed in its entirety, grounds and all. It was a decoction for the next four centuries.

When the long-handled Arabian metal boiler made its appearance in the early part of the sixteenth century, the method of preparation and service had much improved. The Arabs and the Turks had made it a social adjunct, and its use was no longer confined to the physicians and the churchmen. It had become a stimulating refreshment for all the people; and at the same time, the Arabians and the Turks had developed a coffee ceremony for the higher classes which was quite as wonderful as the tea ceremony of Japan.

The common early method of preparation throughout the Levant was to steep the powder in water for a day, to boil the liquor half away, to strain it, and to keep it in earthen pots for use as wanted. In the sixteenth century, the small coffee boiler, or ibrik, caused the practise to be more of an instantaneous affair. The coffee was ground, and the powder was dropped into the boiling water, to be withdrawn from the fire several times as it boiled up to the rim. While still boiling, cinnamon and cloves were sometimes added before pouring the liquid off into the findjans, or little china cups, to be served with the addition of a drop of essence of amber. Later, the Turks added sugar during the boiling process.

From the first simple uncovered ibrik there was developed, about the middle of the seventeenth century, a larger-size covered coffee boiler, the forerunner of the modern combination brewing and serving pot. This was a copper-plated kettle patterned after the oriental ewer with a broad base, bulbous body, and narrow neck. After having poured into it one and a half times as much water as the dish (cup) in which the drink was to be served would hold, the pot was placed on a lively fire. When the water boiled, the powdered coffee was tossed into the pot; and, as the liquid boiled up, it was taken from the fire and returned, probably a dozen times. Then the pot was placed in hot ashes to permit the grounds to settle. This done, the drink was served. Dufour, describing this process as practised in Turkey and Arabia, says:

La Roque says:

Some of the Orientals afterward modified the early coffee-making procedure by pouring the boiling water on the powdered coffee in the serving cups. They thus obtained "a foaming and perfumed beverage," says Jardin, "to which we (the French) could not accustom ourselves because of the powder which remains in suspension. Nevertheless, clarified coffee may be obtained in the Orient. In Mecca, in order to filter it, they strain it through stopples of dried herbs, put into the opening of a jar."

Sugar seems to have been introduced into coffee in Cairo about 1625. Veslingius records that the coffee drinkers in Cairo's three thousand coffee houses "did begin to put sugar in their coffee to correct the bitterness of it", and that "others made sugar plums of the coffee berries". This coffee confection later appeared in Paris, and about the same time (1700) at Montpellier was introduced a coffee water, "a sort of rosa-folis of an agreeable scent that has somewhat of the smell of coffee roasted." These novelties, however, were designed to please only "the most nice lovers of coffee"; for ennui and boredom demanded new sensations then as now.

Boiling continued the favorite method of preparing the beverage until well into the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, we learn from English references that it was the custom to buy the beans of apothecaries, to dry them in an oven, or to roast them in an old pudding dish or frying pan before pounding them to a powder with mortar and pestle, to force the powder through a lawn sieve, and then to boil it with spring water for a quarter of an hour. The following recipe from a rare book published in London, 1662, details the manner of making coffee in the seventeenth century:

In England, about this time, the coffee drink was not infrequently mixed with sugar candy, and even with mustard. In the coffee houses, however, it was usually served black, without sugar or milk.

About 1660, Nieuhoff, the Dutch ambassador to China, was the first to make a trial of coffee with milk in imitation of tea with milk. In 1685, Sieur Monin, a celebrated doctor of Grenoble, France, first recommended café au lait as a medicine. He prepared it thus: Place on the fire a bowl of milk. When it begins to rise, throw in to it a bowl of powdered coffee, a bowl of moist sugar, and let it boil for some time.

We read that in 1669 "coffee in France was a hot black decoction of muddy grounds thickened with syrup."

Angelo Rambaldi in his Ambrosia Arabica thus describes coffee making in Italy and other European countries in 1691:

In 1702, coffee in the American colonies was being used as a refreshment between meals, "like spirituous liquors."

It was in 1711 that the infusion idea in coffee making appeared in France. It came in the form of a fustian (cloth) bag which contained the ground coffee in the coffee maker, and the boiling water was poured over it. This was a decided French novelty, but it made slow headway in England and America, where some people were still boiling the whole roasted beans and drinking the liquor.

In England, as early as 1722, there arose a conscientious objector to boiled coffee in the person of Humphrey Broadbent, a coffee merchant who wrote a treatise on the True Way of Preparing and Making Coffee[375], in which he condemned the "silly" practise of making coffee by "boiling an ounce of the powder in a quart of water," then common in the London coffee houses, and urging the infusion method. He favored the following procedure:

By 1760, the decoction, or boiling, method in France had been generally replaced by the infusion, or steeping, method.

In 1763, Donmartin, a tinsmith of St. Bendit, France, invented a coffee pot, the inside of which was "filled by a fine sack put in its entirety," and which had a tap to draw the coffee. Many inventions to make coffee sans ebullition (without boiling) appeared in France about this time; but it was not until 1800 that De Belloy's pot, employing the original French drip method, appeared, signaling another step forward in coffee making—percolation.

De Belloy and Count Rumford

De Belloy's pot was probably made of iron or tin, afterward of porcelain; and it has served as a model for all the percolation devices that followed it for the next hundred years. It does not seem to have been patented, and not much is known of the inventor. About this period, it was the common practise in England to boil coffee in the good old-fashioned way, and to "fine" (clarify) it with isinglass. This moved Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson), an American-British scientist, then living in Paris, to make a study of scientific coffee-making, and to produce an improved drip device known as Rumford's percolator. He has been generally credited with the invention of the percolator; but, as pointed out in a previous chapter, this honor seems to be De Belloy's and not Rumford's.

Count Rumford embodied his observations and conclusions in a verbose essay entitled Of the excellent qualities of coffee and the art of making it in the highest perfection, published in London in 1812. In this treatise he describes and illustrates the Rumford percolator.

Brillat-Savarin, the famous French gastronomist, who also wrote on coffee in his VI^me Meditation, said of the De Belloy pot:

Brillat-Savarin had something also to say on the subject of grinding coffee, his conclusion being that it was "better to pound the coffee than to grind it."

He refers to M. Du Belloy, archbishop of Paris, "who loved good things and was quite an epicure," and says that Napoleon showed him deference and respect. This may have been Jean Baptiste De Belloy, who, according to Didot, was born in 1709 and died in 1808, and, it is thought likely, was the inventor of the De Belloy pot.

Count Rumford was born in Woburn, Mass., in 1753. He was apprenticed to a storekeeper in Salem in 1766. He became an object of distrust among the friends of the cause of American freedom: and, on the evacuation of Boston by the Royal troops in 1776, he was selected by Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire to carry dispatches to England. He left England in 1802, and resided in France from 1804 until his death in 1814. In 1772, he had married, or rather, as he put it, he was married by, a wealthy widow, the daughter of a highly respectable minister and one of the first settlers at Rumford, now called Concord, New Hampshire. It was from this town that he took his title of Rumford when he was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1791. His first wife having died, he married in Paris, the wealthy widow of the celebrated chemist, Lavoisier; and with her he lived an extremely uncomfortable life until they agreed to separate.

In his essay on coffee and coffee making, Count Rumford gives us a good pen picture of the preparation of the beverage in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He says:

Count Rumford thought it a mistake to agitate the coffee powder in the brewing process, and in this he agreed with De Belloy. His improvement on the latter's pot is described in chapter XXXIV. He was a coffee connoisseur; and as such was one of the first to advocate the use of cream as well as sugar for making an ideal cup of the beverage. He refers, though not by name, to De Belloy's percolation method and says, "Its usefulness is now universally acknowledged."

A Few Definitions

Just here, in order to assure a better understanding of the subject, it may be well to clear up sundry misconceptions regarding the words percolation, filtration, decoction, infusion, etc., by the simple expedient of definition.

A decoction is a liquid produced by boiling a substance until its soluble properties are extracted. Thus the coffee drink was first a decoction; and a decoction is what one gets today when coffee is boiled in the good old-fashioned way—as "mother used to make it."

Infusion is the process of steeping—extraction without boiling. It is extraction accomplished at any temperature below boiling, and is a general classification of procedure capable of sub-division. As generally and correctly applied, it is the operation wherein hot water is merely poured upon ground coffee loose in a pot, or in a container resting on the bottom of the pot. In the strictest sense of the term, an infusion is also produced by percolation and filtration, when the water is not boiled in contact with the coffee.

Percolation means dripping through fine apertures in china or metal as in De Belloy's French drip pot.

Filtration means dripping through a porous substance, usually cloth or paper.

Percolation and filtration are practically synonymous, although a shade of distinction in their meaning has arisen so that often the latter is considered as a step logically succeeding the former. Accomplishing extraction of a material by permitting a liquid to pass slowly through it is in fact percolation, whereas filtration of the resultant extract is effected by interposing in its path some medium which will remove solid or semi-solid material from it. Coffee-making practise has in itself so applied these terms that each is considered a complete process. Percolation is thus applied when the infusion is removed from the grounds immediately by dripping through fine perforations in the china or metal of which the device is constructed.

True percolation is not produced in the pumping "percolators" in which the heated water is elevated and sprayed over the ground coffee held in a metal basket in the upper part of the pot, the liquor being recirculated until a satisfactory degree of extraction has been reached. Rather, the process is midway between decoction and infusion, for the weak liquor is boiled during the operation in order to furnish sufficient steam to cause the pumping action.

Filtration is accomplished when the ground coffee is retained by cloth or paper, generally supported by some portion of the brewing device, and extraction effected by pouring water on the top of the mass, permitting the liquid to percolate through, the filtering medium retaining the grounds.

Patents and Devices

From the beginning, the French devoted more attention than any other people to coffee brewing. The first French patent on a coffee maker was granted in 1802 to Denobe, Henrion, and Rauch for "a pharmacological-chemical coffee making device by infusion."

In 1802, Charles Wyatt obtained a patent in London on an apparatus for distilling coffee.

The first French patent on an improved French drip pot for making coffee "by filtration without boiling" was granted to Hadrot in 1806. Strictly speaking, this was not a filtering device, as it was fitted with a tin composition strainer, or grid. It was very like Count Rumford's percolator announced six years later, as will be seen by comparing the two in chapter XXXIV.

In 1815, Sené invented in France his Cafetière Sené, another device to make coffee "without boiling."

About the year 1817, the coffee biggin appeared in England. It was simply a squat earthenware pot with an upper, movable, strainer part made of tin, after the French drip pot pattern. Later models employed a cloth bag suspended from the rim of the pot. It was said to have been invented by a Mr. Biggin; and Dr. Murray, of dictionary fame, seems to have become convinced of this gentleman's existence, although others have doubted it and thought the name was of Dutch origin, the article having been first made for Holland. It has been suggested that, in all probability, the name came from the Dutch word beggelin, to trickle, or run down. One thing is certain, coffee biggins came originally from France; so that if there was a Mr. Biggin, he merely introduced them into England. The coffee biggin with which Americans are most familiar is a pot containing a flannel bag or a cylindrical wire strainer to hold the ground coffee through which the boiling water is poured. The Marion Harland pot was an improved metal coffee biggin. The Triumph coffee filter was a cloth-bag device which made any coffee pot a biggin.

In 1819, Morize, a Paris tinsmith, invented a double drip, reversible coffee pot. The device had two movable "filters" and was placed bottom up on the fire until the water boiled, when it was inverted to let the coffee "filter" or drip through.

In 1819, Laurens was granted a French patent on the original pumping-percolator device, in which the water was raised by steam pressure and dripped over the ground coffee.

In 1820, Gaudet, another Paris tinsmith, invented a filtration device that employed a cloth strainer.

In 1822, Louis Bernard Rabaut was granted an English patent on a coffee-making device in which the usual French drip process was reversed by the use of steam pressure to force the boiling water upward through the coffee mass. Caseneuve, of Paris, was granted a patent on a similar device in France in 1824.

In 1825, the first coffee-pot patent in the United States was granted to Lewis Martelley on a machine "to condense the steam and essential oils and return them to the infusion."

In 1827, the first really practicable pumping percolator, as we understand the meaning today, was invented by Jacques-Augustin Gandais, a manufacturer of plated jewelry in Paris. The boiling water was raised through a tube in the handle and sprayed over the ground coffee suspended in a filter basket, but could not be returned for a further spraying.

In 1827, Nicholas Felix Durant, a manufacturer of Chalons-sur-Marne, was granted a French patent on a "percolator" employing, for the first time, an inner tube to raise the boiling water for spraying over the ground coffee.

In 1839, James Vardy and Moritz Platow were granted an English patent on a kind of urn "percolator", or filter, employing the vacuum process of coffee making, the upper vessel being made of glass.

By this time, the pumping percolator, working by steam pressure and by partial vacuum, was in general use in France, England, and Germany. And then began the movement toward the next stage in coffee making—filtration.

About this time (1840), Robert Napier (1791–1876) the Scottish marine engineer, of the celebrated Clyde shipbuilding firm of Robert Napier & Sons, invented a vacuum coffee machine to make coffee by distillation and filtration. The device was never patented; but thirty years later, it was being made in the works of Thomas Smith & Son (Elkington & Co., Ltd., successors) under the direction of Mr. Napier, the aged inventor. The device consists of a silver globe, brewer syphon, and strainer, as illustrated. It operates as follows: a half-cupful of water is put into the globe, and the gas flame is lighted. The dry coffee is put into the receiver, which is then filled up with boiling water. This will at once become agitated, and will continue so for a few minutes. When it becomes still, the gas flame is turned down, and clear coffee is syphoned over into the globe through the syphon tube, on the end of which, as it rests in the coffee liquid, there is a metal strainer covered with a filter cloth.