Tea-bags

Consider the lowly tea-bag. Whoever thought up its design deserves admission into the hall of fame for ingenuous inventions.

The little bag itself is made out of a type of porous paper, much like the rice paper that as kids we used to build our balsa wood model airplanes with. This bag is made in such a way that it has two compartments, not exactly mutually exclusive, but separated by a neat double fold at the base. The finely crushed tea leaves, enough to produce one cup of strong, and two cups of weak, tea, are contained in equal measures within the two compartments, which were designed to allow water to flow through, and thus offer the leaves greater exposure to the hot liquid, so as to produce a richer brew.

The bag is folded over neatly at the top, neatly as in the manner of a gift parcel, and the fold is held by a tiny metal staple. (I am sure that you could not find a staple gun in the stationery store that handles such tiny staples.) Besides holding the bag close, this staple also encloses a short cotton thread. At the opposite end of the thread is a small printed label, in the case of the yellow Lipton's tea-bag the label is on a lightweight card, and in the case of some Chinese tea-bags it might be thinner paper. This label is held to the thread by another staple, so two staples per each two-compartment tea-bag.

The yellow Lipton label bears the words "Lipton", "Yellow Label Tea", "Finest Blend", and "Quality No.1", quite a lot of advertising in a ¾ inch by ¾ inch area.

But that's not what is really remarkable about the tea-bag label. Where at the top it is attached to the thread that is attached to the tea-bag by a staple, at the bottom the same string is neatly secured in a tiny slit cut into the label, so that when you pick up the tea-bag, the thread, which measures about 3 ½ inches in length, does not fall free, but acts as a secure belt around the bag, running from pole to pole like a meridian of longitude. You then gently take the thread out of the slit, hold it at the label end, with the tea-bag dangling like a pendulum, and place the bag in a tea-cup.

Now we come to the true ingenuity of the design. I repeat, whoever thought up the tea-bag must be one of the world's great inventors, to share space in the pantheon with Leonardo, Edison, Bell and their ilk. That little slit at the base of the tea-bag label serves a dual purpose. We have already described the first.

How often we have run into a situation like this — we take a tea-bag and place it in a cup, with the thread and label hanging over the cup's rim, we then pour hot, preferably boiling, water into the cup, and suddenly the weight of the water drives the string and the label into the cup. It then becomes a messy business to extricate the hot, wet thread and soggy label from the quickly brewing tea. Nobody wants to add milk and sugar to tea with a label floating in it.

Now, this is how the tiny slit in the label comes into play.

Before you add the hot water, you wind the thread through the ear of the tea-cup, once, to anchor it, and then you slip the thread back into the little slit in the label, and voilá, the label and thread remain firmly secured and will not be sucked in when you pour hot water into the tea-cup.

You see what I mean by ingenuity. This humble tea-bag has it in spades.