Word: schlumbohm
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Often, esthetics enters usefulness by the back door. The late Dr. Peter Schlumbohm used the chemical principle of filtration to make the trim Chemex coffeemaker, then simply placed a disk of filter paper inside a circular housing to make a new kind of fan. Spun by a motor, the rippling paper edges cast air through the rim by centrifugal force. A ban vivant of the first order, Schlumbohm made a rapid, but esthetic, champagne cooler just because he felt bachelors should not be caught short when unexpectedly entertaining women...
Died. Peter Schlumbohm, 66, jovial German-born U.S. chemist who believed that "a coffeepot should not be a steam engine," in the early 1940s invented the simple Chemex coffeemaker that gently filtered the coffee and made him rich; of a heart attack; in Manhattan...
...Schlumbohm's pride & joy is Chemex, a glass coffeemaker that looks like an angular hourglass. Dr. Schlumbohm, who drinks six cups of coffee a day, invented it because he was sick of bad coffee. Said he: "With this, even a moron can make good coffee...
Beautilities. But Dr. Schlumbohm's gadgets are not for morons only. Nor are they cheap. His dozen-odd household appliances, which are the only inventions he manufactures, look like no utensils in the ordinary kitchen, have been frequently exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art. He thinks this only natural because "If you make a thing as simple and efficient as possible, it is bound to be beautiful." And, he has also found, highly profitable. His sales of Chemex ($3.50 to $12) reached $200,000 last year. His Tubadipdrips ($7.50 and $9.50) and Tempots ($135) should boost this year...
They would be much higher except that Dr. Schlumbohm abhors Big Business, feels "it is handicapped by inertia, conservatism, and carload mentality." When he gets tired of a product he stops making it, invents a new one. He has no big factory. He farms out the actual manufacturing to such companies as Corning Glass and Alcoa, pays eight girls to assemble the parts of his Fahrenheitor products in the small loft. He has drawn up and filed the 300 patents he holds in three languages (Dr. Schlumbohm thinks it takes about 1,000 inventions to produce a dozen profitable products...