Tea Bags
Legend
has it that the first tea bag was invented in 1904, when the American
tea trader Thomas Sullivan sent some samples in small silk sacks to his
clients who found this new bagged tea very practical to prepare tea.
Tea
falsifications via colouring or blending with other plant substances
and the re-use of tea leaves took over until the entrepreneur John
Horniman, a Brit, found a solution for these bad habits, which rewarded
him with a fortune. He sold tea in sealed paper bags with his name as a
guarantee.
However, he used glue to stick the paper bags
shut. Hence, the tea tasted like glue or like paper. When cotton tea
bags were used, the tea tasted mouldy.
When the consumers started being better off at the beginning of the
20th century, they demanded a better solution for making tea than using
two tea pots. Hence, tea was packed in special cotton bags which were
also called pompadour in colloquial language. The name comes from the
small, ball-like handbags which were worn by the ladies of this time
when going to a ball.
During the First World War, the round balls were called
tea bombs. Since the tea could not unfold entirely, the water was
coloured brown, but the fine aroma of the tea leaves was not released.
A
young engineer from the Tea House Teekanne in Dresden, Adolf Rambold,
experimented with tea varieties, paper, folding techniques and machines
until he succeeded in creating a cheap tea bag. He developed the tea
packing machine Constanta.
The tea packing
machine created a tea bag from an approximately 15cm long, rectangular
piece of paper. For this, a tube is folded so that the paper edges meet
in the middle and can be folded together. Then the machine fills each
end of the tube with tea. In the middle of the tube, some of the paper
is left empty which is then creased in such a way that two chambers are
created. The longer chamber is folded over the shorter one and clipped
together with a metal clip. Hence, a dual-chamber tea bag is created
entirely without glue. Modern machines can produce up to 400 pieces a
minute! Teekanne alone can produce more than 10 million tea bags a day
in their factory in Düsseldorf.
However, the
tea bags, too, were abused. The tea trader put the tea dust, which was
collected on the bottom of the tea containers, into the tea bags and
also used other low-quality ingredients. Hence, the tea bag again
received a bad reputation, but due to its practicality, it could not be
banned from the market.
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