Episode notes
George Constant Lewis Washington was born in May 1871 in Kortrijk, Belgium, to a Belgian mother and an English father, which made him a British subject until he became an American citizen in 1918. After a chemistry degree at the University of Bonn and marriage to Angeline in 1895, he arrived in New York around 1896 and started the George Washington Lighting Company in Jersey City, making kerosene gas mantles just as electric light took over. Around 1906 he went to Guatemala to try cattle ranching, where he supposedly noticed dried coffee powder on the spout of a silver pot. Back in New York he launched Red E Coffee in 1909 and incorporated the G. Washington Coffee Refining Company in Brooklyn in 1910.
He was not the first: David Strang in New Zealand and Satoru Kato had soluble coffee earlier, and his own Guatemalan physician, Federico Lehnhoff Wyld, developed a process at the same time. Washington's edge was mass production. His ads claimed the coffee aided digestion and did not cause wakefulness, and his company later sponsored The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on NBC. When the United States entered World War I, the War Department took his entire output, and soldiers called it a Cup of George. The fortune bought a Park Slope mansion, a Long Island estate full of exotic animals, and a federal tax fight.
- Military demand at the war's peak reached six times the national civilian supply.
- His 40 acre Washington Lodge had 18 bedrooms and the largest concrete pool in New York State.
- Brooklyn political bosses entered him in the 1920 South Dakota presidential primary, though he was ineligible.
- He lost a 1927 tax evasion case 2 to 1 over royalties routed to family members.
- He sold the company in 1943, the coffee was discontinued by 1961, and G. Washington's seasoning and broth is still sold.