w 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."

[Illustration: THE ORIGINAL BURNS ROASTER, 1864]

He early saw the pr