All About Coffee (1922)
Benjamin Thompson, an American born British physicist and prolific inventor was said to not much like the taste of tea or alcohol, and preferred coffee’s flavor but didn’t much like the grounds frequently left over. Thompson, who became Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford after his return to England following the American Revolutionary War is an interesting character that will get his own post.
The Rumford coffee maker was the grandfather of the coffee percolator that I remember always being fired up in the morning at grandma’s house (she refused to have a modern coffee maker). Inspired the Turkish method of heating ground beans and water together, the Rumford coffee maker the pot, didn’t have a tube through which boiling water rises as part of a continuous cycle to make the coffee ever stronger like later percolators.
His invention was followed by an essay/pamphlet entitled “Of the Excellent Qualities of Coffee” which you can read for yourself on Google Books. There he extolls the virtues of coffee (the most valuable import into Europe), his new method, and the health benefits of coffee. In it, he also reviews several methods for percolation that would now be more likely understood as drip coffee.
He also invented what is known as the Rumford fireplace, a design still in use today.