The Unremarkable Sugar Cube

In the early 1800s, sweetening your tea was a complicated affair. To the cone-shaped loaf of refined sugar you'd bought from your grocer, you'd take a sugar nipper—a pair of sharp-edged cast-iron pincers—to twist off a fist-sized chunk. If you were cooking, you’d then shave it down into powder, but for beverages, it was much easier—if not tidier—to simply dunk the chunk in your drink, let it dissolve to your taste, then fish it out and let dry for the next cup of tea. In the 1840s, progress was made when Juliana Rad, who was married to the head of a sugar refinery in Moravia, cut a finger while chopping sugar. She complained to her husband, perhaps while waving her bandaged hand: why not make units of sugar that would come perfectly sized for one cup of tea? Jakub Krystof Rad’s innovation was to use a press to make the cubes, and he soon presented a box of them to his wife. He patented this specialized press in 1843.