In 1849, Apoleoni Pierre Preterre, of Havre, was granted an English patent on a coffee roaster mounted on a weighing apparatus to indicate loss of weight in roasting and automatically stop the roasting process. At the same time he secured an English patent on a vacuum percolator, not unlike Durant's of 1827.
In 1849 also, Thomas R. Wood, of Cincinnati, was granted a United States patent on a spherical coffee roaster for use on kitchen stoves. It attained considerable popularity among housewives who preferred to do their own roasting. ([See 6, page 630.])
In 1852, Edward Gee secured a patent in England on a coffee roaster fitted with inclined flanges for turning the beans while roasting.
C.W. Van Vliet, of Fishkill Landing, N.Y., was granted a United States patent in 1855 on a household coffee mill employing upper breaking and lower grinding cones. He assigned it to Charles Parker of Meriden, Conn. In 1860–61 several United States patents were granted John and Edmund Parker on coffee grinders for home use.
In 1862, E.J. Hyde, of Philadelphia, was granted a United States patent on a combined coffee-roaster and stove fitted with a crane on which the roasting cylinder was revolved and swung out horizontally for emptying and refilling. This machine proved to be a commercial success. Benedickt Fischer used one in his first roasting plant in New York. It is still being manufactured by the Bramhall Deane Company of New York.
| A Globular Stove Roaster of 1860 | Hyde's Combined Roaster and Stove |
In 1864, Jabez Burns, of New York, was granted a United States patent on the original Burns coffee roaster, the first machine which did not have to be moved away from the fire for discharging the roasted coffee, and one that marked a distinct advance in the manufacture of coffee-roasting apparatus. It was a closed iron cylinder set in brickwork. ([See illustration, page 635.])
Jabez Burns had been a student of coffee roasting in New York for twenty years before he produced the machine that was to revolutionize the coffee business of the United States. He had brought with him from England a knowledge of the trade in that country, where he first began his business training by selling Java coffee at fourteen cents and Sumatra at eleven cents to hotels, boarding-houses, and private families.
Up to the time of the Civil War, the contrivances employed for roasting coffee in every case necessitated the removal of the roasting apparatus—whether pan, globe, or cylinder—from the fire. The process of causing coffee to discharge from the end of the roasting cylinder at the pleasure of the operator while the cylinder was still in motion was new; and the double set of flanges to produce this effect, and at the same time, during the process of roasting, to keep the coffee equally distributed from end to end of the cylinder, was new. Some one suggested this last improvement was simply an Archimedean screw placed in a cylinder, but Mr. Burns replied: "It is a double screw, a thing never suggested by the Archimedean screw. It is, in fact, a double right and left augur, one within the other, firmly secured together and also to the shell or cylinder, and when the cylinder revolves the desired result is obtained—the idea being entirely original."
Mr. Burns had watched the development of the coffee business from the time when the preparation of coffee was largely confined to the home, where the approved roasting implements were hot stones, or tiles, iron plates, skillets, and frying pans. Some of these were still in use twenty years after he produced his first machine; and he often said that coffee evenly roasted by such methods was just as good as if done by the best mechanical device ever invented. He also said: "Coffee can be roasted in very simple machinery. Some of the best we ever saw was done in a corn popper. Patent portable roasters are almost as numerous as rat traps or churns."