Opening a convenient pack of Lipton’s black tea and submerging it in legendary dining hall cups have become so rote that the mere thought of drinking tea implies tea bags. No matter how desirable and functional this item is, however, the tea bag was invented accidentally in 1908 by a New York tea merchant named Thomas Sullivan. In packaging samples of tea in small silken bags, he created a universal commercial product that almost everybody uses and recognizes today. At the time, his customers assumed the silken bags were another version of metal infusers, and thus were the ones bringing this clever packaging technique to fame. Sullivan later used gauze sachets instead of silken ones and purposefully created the new and improved tea bag in 1920. With this fortunate series of events, the tea bag has dramatically changed people’s drinking habits.
