ropist, and
administrator. He was known as Count Rumford, a title bestowed on him by
the Pope. Rumford's invention was first given to the public in London in
1812. He has gained great credit for his device, because of an elaborate
essay that he wrote on it in Paris under the title of _The excellent
qualities of coffee and the art of making it in the highest perfection_,
and that he caused to be published in London in 1812. It was a simple
percolator pot provided with a hot-water jacket, and was a real
improvement on the French drip or percolator coffee pot invented by De
Belloy, but not at all unlike Hadrot's patented device. Count Rumford,
however, was a picturesque character, and a good advertiser. He is
generally credited with the invention of the coffee percolator; but
examination of his device shows that, strictly speaking, the De Belloy
pot was just as much a percolator, and apparently antedated it by about
six years.

[Illustration: THE ORIGINAL FRENCH DRIP POT

_Cafetiere a la_ De Belloy]

De Belloy employed the principle of having the boiling water drip
through the ground coffee when held in suspension by a perforated metal
or porcelain grid. This is true percolation. Hadrot did the same thing
with the improvements noted above. Count Rumford in his essay admits
that this method of making coffee was not new, but claims his
improvement was. This was to provide a rammer for compressing the ground
coffee in the upper or percolating device into a definite thickness,
this being accomplished by providing the perforated circular tin disk
water-spreader that rested on the ground coffee with four projections,
or feet, that kept the spreader within half an inch of the grid holding
the powder in suspension and free from "agitation."

His argument was that two-thirds of an inch of ground coffee should be
leveled and compressed into a half-inch thickness before the boiling
water was introduced. Practically the same result was achieved in the De
Belloy and Hadrot pots, also provided with water-spreaders and pluggers,
but the same mathematical exactitude in the matter of the depth of the
ground coffee before the percolation started was not assured. De
Belloy's spreader did not have the projections on the under side upon
which Count Rumford laid such stress. Then there was the hot-water
jacket, which was an improvement on Hadrot's hot air bath. Inventors
that followed Rumford have made light of the importance that he attach