Tea bags were invented by mistake
News News blog
At the beginning of the 20th century, the American tea merchant Thomas Sullivan packaged and shipped his tea samples in silk bags to avoid expensive and heavy tin cans.
His customers believed that the bags were intended to be completely immersed in water and used them as tea bags. However, this practice fell out of fashion in the 1910s as imitators mixed inferior goods into the tea bags.
It was not until the 1930s that the engineer Adolf Rambold helped the tea bag achieve its final breakthrough. After extensive trials with different teas, types of paper, folding techniques and machines, he was able to produce an inexpensive tea bag, namely a non-glued double-chamber bag with thread.
Finding a paper that was both tear-resistant, heat-resistant and neutral in flavour and then joining it together without glue proved to be particularly difficult. Rambold's tea bags consisted of 30 % cellulose and 70 % manila fibres.
The ideal tea bag paper was invented in the USA in 1944, namely from the fibres of the abaca plant. And they are also environmentally friendly - the plants, which can live for up to 20 years, are fertilised using only leaf and stem waste to conserve resources.
