The Tea Bag Was Invented by Accident

In 1908, a New York tea merchant named Thomas Sullivan was looking for a cheaper way to send tea samples to his clients. Instead of the traditional small tin, he packaged the loose leaves into hand-sewn silk pouches and mailed them out.

His customers, expecting tin samples, didn't know what to do with these strange little bags. So they did the obvious thing: they dropped the whole pouch into a pot of hot water and let it steep. When they wrote back to Sullivan asking why the silk was so fine — too fine, in fact, to release the leaves properly — he understood, almost too late, what he had stumbled onto.

**The early adoption.** Sullivan switched the silk for cheaper gauze, then for paper, and a global industry was born. By the 1920s, the tea bag was standard in American restaurants. By the 1950s, Lipton's 'flo-thru' bag had crossed the Atlantic, and by the 1960s, even Britain — once the most stubbornly loose-leaf country in the world — was buying more tea in bags than in tins.

**The pyramid bag, 1996.** PG Tips introduced the pyramid-shaped tea bag in 1996, claiming it gave the leaves more room to expand. It does, marginally — but the leaves inside are still mostly fannings and dust. The pyramid is more about marketing differentiation than brewing improvement.

**Today.** Roughly 96% of the tea consumed in the UK is in bags. Most of those bags contain what we now politely call 'broken orange pekoe fannings,' the granular dust that survives the grading process. A fast brew, a quick fix, and a taste so familiar that most British drinkers no longer know it's a 20th-century invention.

None of this would have happened if Thomas Sullivan had sent his samples in a slightly bigger box.