Hermann Sielcken typified German efficiency raised to the nth power. He was a colossus of commerce with the military alertness of a Bismarck. His mental processes were profound, and his vision was far-reaching. He was a resourceful trader, an austere friend, a shrewd and uncompromising foe. Physically, he was a big man with a bull neck and black, piercing eyes. His policy in coffee was one of blood and iron. He brooked no interference with his plans, and he was ruthless in his methods of dealing with men and governments. Usually silent and uncommunicative, occasionally he exploded under stress; and when he did so, there was no mincing of words. He knew no fear. Newspaper criticism annoyed him but little; and he had a kind of contempt for the fourth estate as a whole, although he knew how to use it when it suited his purpose. He avoided the limelight, and never courted publicity for himself. Socially he was a princely host; but few knew him intimately, except perhaps in his native Germany.
Sielcken's widow was married in New York, February 11, 1922, to Joseph M. Schwartz, the Russian baritone of the Chicago Opera Company.
The Story of John Arbuckle
John Arbuckle, for nearly fifty years the honored dean of the American coffee trade, pioneer package-coffee man, some time coffee king, sugar merchant, philanthropist, and typical American, came from fine, rugged Scotch stock. He was the son of a well-to-do Scottish woolen-mill owner in Allegheny, Pa., where he was born, July 11, 1839. He often said he was raised on skim milk. He received a common school education in Pittsburgh and Allegheny. He and Henry Phipps, the coke and steel head, are said to have occupied adjoining desks in one of the public schools, Andrew Carnegie being at that time in another grade of the same school. He had a strong bent for science and machinery; and, although he chose the coffee instead of the steel business for his career, the basis of his success was invention. He also attended Washington and Jefferson College at Washington, Pennsylvania.[348]
The Arbuckle business was founded at Pittsburg, in 1859, when Charles Arbuckle, his uncle Duncan McDonald, and their friend William Roseburg, organized the wholesale grocery firm of McDonald & Arbuckle. One year later John Arbuckle, the younger brother of Charles Arbuckle, was admitted to the firm, and the firm name was changed to McDonald & Arbuckles. McDonald and Roseburg retired from the firm a few years later, leaving the business in the hands of the two youthful, hopeful, and energetic brothers, who under the firm name of Arbuckles & Co., soon made their firm one of the important wholesale grocery houses in Pennsylvania. Although little thinking at the time that their greatest success was to be achieved in coffee, and that a new idea of one of the partners—that of marketing roasted coffee in original packages—would make their name familiar in every hamlet in the country, yet the first two entries in the original day-book of McDonald & Arbuckles record purchases of coffee.
Prior to the sixties, coffee was not generally sold roasted or ground, ready for the coffee pot. Except in the big cities, most housewives bought their coffee green, and roasted it in their kitchen stoves as needed. John Arbuckle, having become impressed with the wasteful methods and unsatisfactory results of this kitchen roasting, had already begun his studies of roasting and packaging problems, studies that he never gave up. How, first to roast coffee scientifically, and then to preserve its freshness in the interval between the roaster and the coffee pot, continued to be an absorbing study until his death. The range of his work may be illustrated by reference to his first and his last patents. In 1868, he patented a process of glazing coffee, which had for its object the preservation of the flavor and aroma of coffee by sealing the pores of the coffee bean. Thirty-five years later, he patented a huge coffee roaster in which, more closely than in any other roaster, he felt he could approach his ideal of roasting coffee—that ideal being to hold the coffee beans in suspension in superheated air during the entire roasting process, and not to allow them to come in contact with a heated iron surface.
By 1865, John Arbuckle had satisfied himself that a carefully roasted coffee, packed while still warm in small individual containers, would measurably overcome the objections to selling loose coffee in a roasted state. So in that year (1865), although not without the misgivings of his elder brother, and even in the face of the ridicule of competitors, who derided the plan of selling roasted coffee "in little paper bags like peanuts", Arbuckles & Co. introduced the new idea, namely, roasted coffee in original packages. The story of the development of that simple idea, which soon spread from coast to coast, and of how it laid the foundations of a great fortune, is one of the romances of American business.
Although Osborn's Celebrated Prepared Java Coffee, a ground-coffee package, first put on the New York market by Lewis A. Osborn, and later exploited by Thomas Reid in the early sixties, appears to have been the original package coffee, much of the fame attached to the name of Arbuckle comes from its association with the Ariosa coffee package, which was the first successful national brand of package coffee. It was launched in 1873. The Ariosa premium list (premiums have been a feature of the Arbuckle business since 1895) includes a hundred articles. Almost anything from a pair of suspenders or a toothbrush, to clocks, wringers, and corsets may be obtained in exchange for Ariosa coupons.
The common belief that the name Ariosa was made up from the words Rio and Santos (said to be the component parts of the original blend) is erroneous. It was arbitrarily coined, though it is not known what considerations prompted it. One story has it that the "A" stands for Arbuckle, the "rio" for Rio, and the "sa" for South America.
Early in the seventies, the great business opportunities of New York City had attracted the two brothers, and a branch was established in New York in charge of John Arbuckle, the main business in Pittsburg being left in the care of his brother Charles. The growth of the New York branch soon made it necessary for Charles Arbuckle to leave the Pittsburg business in charge of trusted employees, and to come to New York. In time, the coffee business of the New York house overshadowed the grocery lines; and the latter were abandoned there, so that the entire energy of the firm in New York might be devoted to the coffee business, which thenceforth was operated under the firm name of Arbuckle Bros. The Arbuckle coffee business, which began with a single roaster in 1865, had eighty-five machines running in Pittsburg and New York in 1881.