Vacuum coffee makers are a tiny segment of the coffee maker market. These off center, hour-glass shaped machines look like escapees from a high school chemistry lab. The top chamber contains coffee, the bottom water. When the water is heated, it shoots up into the top chamber, mixes with the grounds and drips back into the lower chamber. They are a pain to clean, though the two chambers are made of unbreakable polycarbonate.
While coffee percolators in particular were seemingly locked into an extremely traditional design vocabulary, vacuum coffee makers were able to have a more diverse expression, since the colonial coffee pot was not a practical form for this type of device, which required two fully separate chambers joined in an hourglass configuration. Interest in this method revived around 1914-1916 with the increasing popularity of the 'Silex' brand, based on models developed by Massachusetts housewives Ann Bridges and Mrs. Sutton. Their use of Pyrex solved the problem of fragility and breakability that had made this type of machine commercially unattractive. The popularity of glass and Pyrex globes was reinforced during the Second World War, since aluminum, chrome, and other metals used in traditional percolators became restricted in availability.
While coffee percolators in particular were seemingly locked into an extremely traditional design vocabulary, vacuum coffee makers were able to have a more diverse expression, since the colonial coffee pot was not a practical form for this type of device, which required two fully separate chambers joined in an hourglass configuration. Interest in this method revived around 1914-1916 with the increasing popularity of the 'Silex' brand, based on models developed by Massachusetts housewives Ann Bridges and Mrs. Sutton. Their use of Pyrex solved the problem of fragility and breakability that had made this type of machine commercially unattractive. The popularity of glass and Pyrex globes was reinforced during the Second World War, since aluminum, chrome, and other metals used in traditional percolators became restricted in availability.
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Last Updated: Sep 2009
Last Updated: Sep 2009
What are Vacuum Coffee Makers?
The sleek and simple forms attracted positive attention from design critics influenced by functionalism of the Bauhaus, and the exigencies of wartime design. Science's influence as a motif in post-war design was felt in the manufacture and marketing of coffee and coffee-makers. Consumer guides emphasized the ability of the device to meet standards of temperature and brewing time, and the ratio of soluble elements between brew and grounds. The industrial chemist Peter Schlumbohm expressed the scientific motif most purely in his 'Chemex' coffeemaker, which from its initial marketing in the early 1940's used the authority of science a sales tool, describing the product as 'the Chemist's way of making coffee', and discussing at length the quality of its product in the language of the laboratory: "the funnel of the CHEMEX creates ideal hydrostatic conditions for the unique...Chemex extraction." Schlumbohm's unique brewer, a single Perspex vessel shaped to hold a proprietary filter cone, resembled nothing more than a piece of laboratory equipment, and became wildly popular in the technology-obsessed 1950's household.
