19th Century Tea Patents

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

19th Century Tea Patents
By William I. Lengeman III

I’ve been writing about tea gadgets at this fine site for a while now, and not so long ago I began writing a regular monthly feature on the topic – with a side of offbeat tea-related news tossed in for good measure. Yes, I do run across enough tea gadgets in a month’s time to allow me to write a regular column. That’s a lot of gadgets.

Which is nothing new, really. As I wrote in an earlier article, one of the first tea-related patents in the United States was for a device with a rather fancy name but that was essentially just a teapot. But as I skimmed through the patent office files for tea stuff patented prior to 1900, it became apparent that the problem of what to do with tea leaves was one of the main issues inventors of the day...

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Cuisinart TEA-100 PerfecTemp Programmable Tea Steeper