A pressure cooker is a sealed cooking vessel that uses high-pressure steam to cook food faster than conventional boiling. The French physicist Denis Papin built the prototype, which he called the steam digester, in 1679 and presented it to the Royal Society of London in 1681. The device can cook food in roughly a quarter to a half the time of conventional boiling while using less energy, and it is especially useful at high altitude, where lower atmospheric pressure otherwise makes ordinary boiling inadequate for proper cooking; commercial development of the pressure cooker followed much later, in Stuttgart, Germany in 1864 and under a Spanish patent in 1918.
Facts
SignificancePapin demonstrated the steam digester to the Royal Society of London in 1681, a presentation that helped establish pressurized steam cooking as a subject of serious scientific interest rather than a curiosity. 1 FAQs
If Denis Papin built the first pressure cooker in 1679, why was it hailed as a new invention in the 1910s?
Papin's steam digester had been forgotten, so Crook's home-sized cooker looked new until a 1918 magazine report corrected the record.
The idea had largely been forgotten. Around 1910 the inventor Zeno E. Crook founded The Pressure Cooker Company in Denver, Colorado, and sold an aluminum cooker sized for home use to communities in the Colorado high country, where it suited high-altitude cooking. Many of those communities welcomed it as a marvelous new invention until 1918, when Popular Science Monthly reported that the invention was more than 200 years old.
Connections
In Field
Source Pressure Cooker (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Invented By
Source Pressure Cooker (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Pressure Cooker (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationHistory section
In 1681 Papin presented his invention to the Royal Society of London as a scientific study; he was later elected as a member.
Invented By: Denis Papin, Lead section
The prototype of the modern pressure cooker was the steam digester invented in the seventeenth century by the physicist Denis Papin.
In Field: Mechanical Engineering, Introduction
A pressure cooker is a sealed vessel used for cooking food with the use of high pressure steam and water or a water-based liquid, in a process called pressure cooking.
View the Source Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.