"French" press-- a fraud, like "French" fries?

When Attilio Callimani, a Milanese designer, patented the modern “French press” in 1920, leading many to consider it an Italian invention, the real French press (the newspapers) boiled at the claim. Many coffee historians, in fact, trace the origins of the French press, or cafetière à piston, to the mid 19th Century.

In that era, coffee was often brewed by heating the water with the coffee already added, which kept the grounds at the bottom of the pot. One story has it that a Frenchman boiled the water and forgot to put in the coffee. When the coffee was now added, the grounds floated to the top. And since necessity for coffee is the mother of invention, the Frenchman plunged a piece of heavy linen down through the pot with a stick, separating the brewed coffee from the spent grounds et voilà: the birth of the French press.

According to William Harrison Ukers wrote in “All About Coffee,” published in 1922, “From the beginning, the French devoted more attention than any other people to coffee brewing,” The first French coffee maker appeared around 1800, Ukers claimed, and the first one made of glass followed 40 years later. Though Ukers’s encyclopedic work defined dozens of devices, it never mentioned the simple plunger-style vessel that we’ve come to call the French press.

That coffee maker wasn’t popular until after Ukers’s death, but the technology was around long before he wrote his book. In March 1852, a Paris metalsmith and a merchant created a device for “the filtering of coffee by means of a piston.” The patent described a rod attached to a piece of tin pierced with holes and sandwiched between two layers of flannel. The rod would be pressed by hand into a cylindrical vessel. “By lowering the piston,” the inventors wrote, “filtered coffee is obtained above it, perfectly clear.”

It is true, however, that the contraption didn’t start to become popular until the Italians perfected it. That same Milanese designer introduced a version in 1935 that had a spring that wrapped around the plunger discs to hold them flush with the cylinder.

A similar design spread through Europe in the 1950s. But it took a while for the gadget to make its way to the United States, and still longer for it to gain its current appellation. (Less than a decade ago, the Oxford English Dictionary defined the “French press” first and foremost as an exercise designed to “develop and strengthen the biceps.”)

Unlike French fries and French dressing, the French press likely did originate in France. But like fries and dressing, the French press is much more popular in America than in its native land. Over 3 million are sold each your in the U.S. of A.