Thomas Smith & Son (Elkington & Company, Ltd., successors) began to manufacture at Glasgow, Scotland, about 1870, the Napierian vacuum coffee machine which had been invented in 1840—but never patented—by Robert Napier of the celebrated firm of Clyde shipbuilders. This machine makes coffee by distillation and filtration. It employs a metal globe, and a brewer from which the coffee is syphoned over into the globe through a tube, around the strainer-end of which, as it rests in the coffee liquid in the brewer, there is tied a filter cloth. It is still being manufactured by Elkington & Company.
Napier's Vacuum Machine, 1840
Thomas Page, a New York millwright, began the manufacture of a pull-out coffee roaster similar to the old Carter machine, in 1868. Later, Chris Abele, who was foreman in the Page shop, succeeded to the business; and in 1882, he was granted a United States patent on an improvement on a coffee roaster similar to the original Burns machine (the patent had then expired) which he marketed under the name of Knickerbocker.
German Coffee Machinery
The Germans first began to show an active interest in coffee machinery in 1860. In that year, Alexius Van Gulpen, of Emmerich, produced a green-coffee grader; and later (1868), in partnership with J.H. Lensing and Theodore von Gimborn, began the manufacture of coffee-roasting machines. From this start there developed in Emmerich quite an industry in coffee-machinery building. In 1870, Alexius Van Gulpen introduced to the German trade a globular coffee roaster employing wood and coke as fuel and having perforations and an exhauster. Van Gulpen and von Gimborn are the two names most often met with in the development of German coffee-roasting machinery.
The first recorded German patent on a coffee roaster was issued to G. Tubermann's Son in 1877, for "a coffee burner with vertically adjusted stirring works." German patents were issued in 1878 to R. Muhlberg, of Taucha, for coffee roasters with movable partitions and "screw-shaped declining walls." Six roaster patents were issued to other inventors in 1878–79.
Peter Pearson, of Manchester, took out a German patent on a coffee-roasting apparatus in 1880. Fleury & Barker, of London, were granted a coffee-roaster patent in Germany in 1881.
After 1870, Van Gulpen devoted himself to the cylinder type of roaster, on which he obtained several patents. The partnership between Messrs. Van Gulpen, Lensing and von Gimborn was dissolved in 1906. They were succeeded by the Emmericher Maschinenfabrik und Eissengiesserei, and Van Gulpen & Co. Van Gulpen died in 1920. Among his inventions were a circular air fan to supply fresh air to the beans while roasting; a fire-dampening device; roasting and cooling exhausters; and a "withdrawable" mixer remaining inside the cylinder during the roasting process, but designed to be withdrawn at the end, discharging the contents with a jerk into a circular cooler. These improvements are featured in Van Gulpen & Co.'s latest Meteor machine. They make also the Typhoon and Comet machines, and a line of globular roasters.