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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.