Episode notes
Peter Schlumbohm was a German chemist who arrived in the United States in the 1930s and died in 1962 at 66 with around 300 patents, from cocktail shakers to a refrigerated garbage can. He called his philosophy beautility, the belief that a perfectly engineered object would be beautiful on its own. In 1941 he founded the Chemex Corporation in Chicopee, Massachusetts, to fix the American morning cup, which percolators ruined by cycling boiling water through the grounds again and again.
The Chemex is an hourglass flask inspired by the Erlenmeyer flask, built for a single pass of water through the grounds. Its thick bonded paper filter traps most coffee oils and the cholesterol-raising compound cafestol, and its instructions call for a grind like kosher salt and water at 93 to 96 degrees Celsius. Schlumbohm then added a turned wooden collar tied with a leather thong, warming a lab instrument for the home. The Illinois Institute of Technology named it one of the best designed products of modern times in 1958, and it entered MoMA's permanent collection.
- The three-layer side of the folded filter must face the spout so the spout stays open as an air vent.
- If the thin side collapses into the spout, trapped air creates a seal that stalls the brew.
- In Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love, James Bond makes his breakfast coffee in a Chemex.
- It appeared in the Paul Newman film Harper and in Mary Richards's apartment on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
- Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and its film adaptation also used a Chemex to signal a stylish New York apartment.