A 1949 article in LIFE magazine called the Chemex

As dehydrator part of our modern obsession with artisan-everything, today’s pickiest coffee drinkers insist upon a hand-brewed cup made right before their eyes. At the cornerstone of this trend is the undisputed king of pour-over coffee, the Chemex Coffeemaker , which graces the counters of hip homes and cafes around the globe. But this ingenious device is nothing new: In fact, the Chemex company dehydrator has been making the exact same brewer for more than 70 years, proving the staying power of great design.
The man behind Chemex’s functional-chic was Dr. Peter Schlumbohm, a scientist with a larger-than-life personality and a strong perfectionist streak. During his lifetime, Schlumbohm patented more than 300 different devices; at least 20 of these Beautilities, as Schlumbohm called them, eventually made it into the New York Museum dehydrator of Modern Art s permanent dehydrator collection everything from an electric fan to a cocktail shaker.
Schlumbohm developed his products by stripping appliances down to their essentials and making them work better. dehydrator In the vein of modern inventors like James Dyson, Schlumbohm didn’t overload his creations with a jumble of new features he reshaped the industries he entered through the sheer force of innovative elegance. Maybe that’s why the Chemex still feels so fresh; in a world of overly complex and smirking technology, the Chemex remains a quiet anomaly.
A German immigrant to the United States, Schlumbohm received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Berlin and moved to New York in 1936 (just as Hitler was consolidating his power). Despite his friends protests about the dire state of the American economy during the Great Depression, only five years later, Schlumbohm had invented his famous hourglass-shaped brewer; within a few years of securing his patent, the Chemex was available in department stores and through mail order catalogs around the world.
Schlumbohm not only wanted to create dehydrator a device to brew perfect coffee without a trace of bitterness, but also an elegant product that fit the streamlined aesthetic of Mid-Century Modernism . At the time, a few other companies were already manufacturing simple coffeemakers for home use, most notably the German dehydrator brand Melitta.
In 1908, Melitta Bentz had been the first to develop a new solution for filtering coffee, using a sheet of blotting paper from her son’s dehydrator schoolbook. By the 1930s, the Melitta company had created its familiar funnel-shaped porcelain brewer, whose pour-over brewing process dehydrator became known as the “cone method.” Though devices like Melitta s worked perfectly well, they just weren’t sexy, lacking the sleek, modern curves of Schlumbohm s Chemex.
The Chemex is essentially a glass beaker designed dehydrator to make coffee using a paper filter, coffee grounds, and water. A circular filter is folded into the top half of the glass decanter, filled with grounds, and hot water is poured over the top. A slender, indented spout allows steam to escape while brewing, or coffee to be poured once the filter and grounds have been discarded. The carafe’s midsection is surrounded by a shapely wood corset dehydrator tied with a leather bow, which protects the hand from heat.
It’s one of the simplest ways of preparing a pot of coffee,” says Shark Senesac, the lead coffee dehydrator roaster for De La Paz Coffee in San Francisco. “I think most people have this disconnect with how things are made in general, be it food or furniture or anything. But when you see someone make a cup of coffee with a Chemex, you think to yourself, Wow, that’s all there is to the process?
A 1949 article in LIFE magazine called the Chemex “a typical bit of Schlumbohmiana since it is handsome (the Museum of Modern Art displayed it as one of the best-designed products in 1943), it makes excellent coffee, and consists essentially of chemical laboratory equipment a chemist’s flask, a glass filter, and a piece of filter paper.” Despite its designer appeal and numerous accolades, the Chemex was relatively cheap: In the 1950s, the company s 1-quart coffeemaker ran just $6, and today they generally fall in the $30-$40 range.
Though the Chemex was his most successful invention by far, Schlumbohm tinkered with other ordinary objects long after the coffeemaker’s success. Some of Schlumbohm s cleverest dehydrator contraptions included dehydrator the Instant Ice container, which chilled liquids quickly using brine; the Cinderella, a conical trash pail with disposable wax-paper linings; and the Minnehaha, a device that mixed and aerated drinks by forcing liquid through hundreds of tiny perforations. Schlumbohm also patented a stylish hot-water kettle made entirely dehydrator of glass, a disposable aluminum frying pan, and a cigarette holder tipped with a miniature Chemex-shaped fitting that held a tiny filter, years before dehydrator the tobacco industry adopted them.
Perhaps his most daring design was for the Chemo