The Tea Bag Was Patented Years Before Its Famous Accident

The kettle clicks off, a mug waits on the kitchen counter, and a small paper bag on a string goes in with a soft plop. A few minutes later it is fished out by its little tag, and that is that. It is such an ordinary gesture that it is hard to believe anybody ever had to invent it. Somebody did, and the story usually told about how it happened is only half right.

The story everyone repeats

Around 1908, the tale goes, a tea merchant in New York wanted a cheap way to send samples to his customers, so he packed them in small silk bags. The customers were supposed to empty the bags into a teapot. Some did not. They put the whole thing into the pot, liked the result, and the tea bag was born by accident. The UK Tea & Infusions Association, the British tea trade's own body, tells it this way and adds a nice detail: the customers then told him that the mesh of the silk was too fine, so he switched to gauze, and those gauze sachets were the first tea bags made on purpose.

What people often get wrong

The accident makes a lovely story, but it was not the beginning. On 26 August 1901, about seven years earlier, two women from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, filed a patent for what they called a tea-leaf holder. It was granted on 24 March 1903 as United States patent 723,287, and anyone can still read it. It describes a small pocket of open-mesh cotton fabric with a flap. You put in enough leaves for one cup, fold the flap down, set the pocket in the cup and pour boiling water over it.

There was nothing accidental about it. The patent explains the problem plainly: tea was made by the potful, and a large part of what was not drunk straight away had to be thrown away. The pocket was meant to make one fresh cup at a time and to stop the leaves floating about in the drink, while the mesh let the water pass freely and act on them. That is a tea bag in everything but name. What the patent cannot tell us is whether the pockets were ever sold in any number, or whether the merchant in New York had heard of them. So the fair version is this: the idea was worked out on purpose in Milwaukee, and it caught on, perhaps quite separately, through a happy misunderstanding in New York.

1. 26 August 1901 Two women in Milwaukee file a patent for a tea-leaf holder
2. 24 March 1903 The patent is granted
3. Around 1908 A New York merchant sends out tea samples in silk bags
4. 1920s Gauze bags are made commercially in the United States
5. 1953 Tetley brings the tea bag to Britain
6. 2007 Tea bags make up 96 per cent of the British market

How the bag won over the teapot

In the 1920s gauze bags were being produced commercially in the United States. Later they were made of paper and came in two sizes, a larger one for the pot and a smaller one for the cup, and the hanging string and the decorated tag had arrived as well. Britain took longer. Shortages of materials held things up for years, and it was 1953 before Tetley drove the tea bag into British shops. Even then the country was in no hurry: in the early 1960s bags had less than 3 per cent of the British market. By 2007 they had 96 per cent.

Part of the appeal, the association says, was simply that nobody had to empty a teapot of wet leaves any more. Which is very nearly what the two inventors in Milwaukee had been after all along: less waste, less fuss and one good fresh cup. They were just a few decades early, and nobody had to make a mistake to see what their idea was for.