The thermos flask
Until quite recently, a long journey in a car or a coach was usually accompanied by a Thermos vacuum flask filled with hot tea or coffee. They were the traveller's friend. And yet the vacuum flask was created to keep things cold." Colin Bisset - ABC Radio
The picture above is taken from the Thermos company website. It's a modern thermos flask but in a very traditional design. Sir James Dewar who invented the vacuum flask was Scottish - hence the Scottish tartan. And even though you can't see the car it's very landed gentry isn't it? Perhaps it's the combination of green fields and woods, gold and the red tartan. Clever anyway. Very evocative of a certain type of English life.
Why am I talking about thermos flasks? Well this is an inspiration from art thing - the art being this tiny but evocative illustration in my State Library diary. Sorry it's a bit blurry, but it was very small. On the other side of the spread is an old-fashioned picnic basket but I might save that for another day. The diary is art deco themed and I did try to find a better copy of this image but couldn't. I did find this one though which is also rather nice. Such neat straight lines in art deco. Love it.
So I went to the Thermos Company website to find out more. It's actually very informative. For I thought that it was such an old-fashioned thing that it might not have existed anymore, having been ousted from the business of keeping drinks, or soup, hot or cold by others in this day of insulated coffee cups, polystyrene mugs and drink bottles. But no the company is still going and indeed has a huge range of goods for sale - at least half of which are drink bottles and lunchboxes and kits for kids with various superhero, and other media tie-ins. Like the ones below:
They also have a large range of flasks and bottles for adults ranging from the aforesaid traditional tartan to this rather elegant stainless steel model.
But let's go back to the beginning and the Scot, Sir James Dewar, who was a scientist looking into cryogenics and needing a way to keep some of his chemicals cool. He eventually settled on the idea of putting one glass bottle inside another and extracting the air in between. It was successful and eventually led to being able to make liquid hydrogen. This is back in the 1890s.
In 1903 his glassblower Reinhold Burger and a business partner developed a flask that could be used in a domestic setting. It had a metal casing so that it was not as fragile. Nevertheless for many years until stainless steel interiors were substituted, there was always a danger of the glass breaking. I vaguely remember one of ours doing that. Burger and his partner ran a competition for a name and the winner suggested 'thermos' derived from the Greek 'thérmē' which is the Greek for heat.
For that's what thermos flasks mostly became famous for. Hot tea, coffee and chocolate and occasionally soup that you could take with you into the cold English countryside. Indeed I remember our first days at Croydon Film Society which had its screenings in the old Croydon Hall - an old weatherboard building with hardly any heating. Some of friends of ours would turn up in the winter with a blanket and a thermos of hot tea to keep them warm.
In 1906 an American businessman William H. Walker met Burger at an exhibition in Berlin and realised the potential of the thermos flask. And so he got the rights to manufacture and founded the American Thermos Bottle Company. Meanwhile in England Thermos Limited made a breakthrough by automating the glass filler process - no more glass blowers needed. They were canny with advertising too, these two companies. Below is a picture from a parade celebrating the end of WW1 for example.
In the 20s they branched out into vacuum containers to store all manner of things from medicines to soft drinks, and this innovation has continued to the present day. NASA used it to store some of their spaceship fuel for example. There have been mergers and alliances - one with Mattel who license out all those kids' products. But the basic idea remains the same.
These days there has been a proliferation of opportunities for hot and cold drink and food portable containers - from lunches at work and school to the healthy people who run and walk and go to the gym and can't be separated from their drink bottles and the unhealthy people who just have to have a hot coffee on their way to work - well anywhere really. To a certain extent the thermos flask has been supplanted by polystyrene coffee cups and plastic drink bottles, but as the world warms, more and more we shall be wanting to keep things cool - as the original was intended to do. It's one of those simple design things whose basic idea has hardly changed - just the outside look really, and some improved manufacturing processes.
