All About Coffee

by William H. Ukers

BATTERY OF CARTER PULL-OUT MACHINES IN AN EARLY AMERICAN PLANT

In 1841, Claude Marie Victor Bernard, of Paris, was granted a French patent on a coffee roaster, which was an improvement designed to bring the roasting cylinder and the fire in closer contact. This was accomplished, to quote the quaint language of the inventor, by applying movable legs and "by superimposing a sheet iron circlet around the edge of the furnace to get double the quantity of heat and it presents so much advantage that it has seemed to me worthy of being patented." ([See 4, page 627.])

But the French were only toying with the roaster, because roasting in France was not yet a separate branch of business, as it had become in England and the United States, where keen minds were already at work on the purely commercial coffee-roasting machine. The application of intensive thought in this direction was destined to bear fruit in America in 1846, and in England in 1847.

French inventive genius continued to occupy itself with coffee making, and in the invention of Edward Loysel de Santais, of Paris, in 1843, produced the first of the ideas that were later incorporated in the hydrostatic percolator for making "two thousand cups of coffee an hour"[363] at the exposition of 1855, and that has since been improved upon by the Italians in their rapid-filter machines. It should be noted that Loysel's 2,000 cups were probably demi-tasses. The modern Italian rapid-filter machine produces about 1,000 large coffee cups per hour.

James W. Carter, of Boston, was granted a United States patent in 1846 on his "pull-out" roaster; and this was the machine most generally employed for trade roasting in America for the next twenty years. Carter did not claim to have invented the combination of cylindrical roaster and furnace; but he did claim priority for the combination, with the furnace and roasting vessel, of the air space, or chamber, surrounding it, "the same being for the purpose of preventing the too rapid escape of heat from the furnace when the air chamber's induction and eduction air openings or passages are closed."

The Carter "pull-out," was so called because the roasting cylinder of sheet iron was pulled out from the furnace on a shaft supported by standards, to be emptied or to be refilled from sliding doors in its "sides." It was in use for many years in such old-time plants as that of Dwinell-Wright Company, 25 Haverhill Street. Boston; by James H. Forbes and William Schotten in St. Louis; and by D.Y. Harrison in Cincinnati.

The picture of a roasting room with Carter machines in operation, reproduced here, recalled to George S. Wright, the present head of the Dwinell-Wright Company's business, the scene as he saw it so many times when, as a boy of ten or twelve, he occasionally spent a day in his father's factory. "The only difference I notice," he wrote the author, "is that, according to my recollection, there was no cooler box to receive the roasted coffee, which was dumped on the floor where it was spread out three or four inches deep with iron rakes and sprinkled with a watering pot. The contact of water and hot coffee caused so much steam that the roasting room was in a dense fog for several minutes after each batch of coffee was drawn from the fire."

A.E. Forbes also thus recalled the Carter machine in his father's factory in St. Louis in 1853, when he used to help after school; and sometimes ran the roasters, after 1857:

It was barrel shaped, having a slide the full length of one side to fill and empty. A heavy shaft ran through the centre, resting on the wall of the furnace at the rear end and on an upright about eight feet from the front wall. The fire was about sixteen to eighteen inches below the cylinder and of soft coal. The cylinder was not perforated, the theory being to keep the vapors from escaping.[364] This of course was erroneous. The color of the smoke bursting from the edge of the slide was our medium of telling when the roasting process was nearing completion, and often the cylinder was pulled out and opened for inspection several times before that point was reached. When just right, the belt was shifted to a loose pulley, stopping the cylinder, which, was pulled off the fire. A handle was attached to the shaft, the slide drawn, and the coffee was dumped into a wooden tray which had to be shoved under the cylinder. The coffee was stirred around in the tray until cool enough to sack.