Small Home Gazette, Winter 2019

History Brief: Tea Dance, Anyone? 

In the 1920s, people went to afternoon “tea dances,” where they danced the Charleston and the tango and drank tea—hot or iced, and sweetened. By this time, Americans were brewing most of their tea in bags, but this wasn’t always the case.

The tea bag was an accidental American invention. In 1908, a New York merchant named Thomas Sullivan started to send tea samples to his customers in small silk bags, intending the leaves be emptied into teapots for brewing in the traditional manner. Instead, some mistakenly put the entire bag into the pot. It worked, but customers informed Sullivan that the silk weave was too fine to allow the hot water to circulate freely through the bag.

So Sullivan developed bags made of gauze—the first bag purposefully made for tea leaves. By the 1920s, tea bags were made commercially and widely accepted in the U.S. Made first from gauze and later from paper, they came in two sizes: a larger bag for the pot and a smaller one for the cup.

An early feature we still value today is the string with the tag on the end that makes removing the bag easier.