Coffee: Instant

There are many possible claimants for maker of the first soluble coffee. In 1771 the British granted a patent for a “coffee compound,” and in the late nineteenth century a Glasgow firm invented Camp Coffee, a liquid “essence.” In 1900 the Tokyo chemist Sartori Kato made a version of instant coffee, as did the St. Louis roaster Cyrus Blanke with his Faust Instant Coffee in 1906 and, independently and simultaneously, the German-Guatemalan Federico Lehnhoff Wyld. In 1910 a Belgian named George Washington refined coffee crystals from brewed coffee, calling it G. Washington’s Refined Coffee, which was very popular with soldiers during World War I.