Pressure Cooker

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.