Czech sugar inventions

Sugar cube

In the territory of the present-day Czech Republic, when it was part of the Austrian Empire, Mr. Jacob Christoph Rad, the Austrian-born director of the Czech sugar factory in Dačice, invented cube sugar.

At that time, sugar was sold only in large homols, which, despite their elegant shape, were very difficult to cut. His wife Juliana Radová led a rich social life and served sugar with tea or coffee very often. She once injured her finger while cutting it. She went to her husband with a bandaged finger and told him that he could think of something smaller. And so, in 1841, the sugar cube press was made. In the press, the sugar was compressed and dried for 12 hours. After drying, the cubes were ready for packaging. His wife received her first sugar cube only a few months after her injury.

He hoped to grow his production of sugar cubes, so he applied for a license to produce it and patent approval. On January 23, 1843, he received the so-called “imperial privilege”, which was a kind of precursor to the patent. He subsequently sold the patent to his employer, the sugar refinery in Dačice. The Dačice sugar factory began to market the cubes under the name ‘Thee-Zucker’. There were 250 cubes in a package resembling a box of Chinese tea. The sugar cube quickly spread all over the world and Rad’s authorship was soon forgotten. Ninety years later, historians have irrefutably confirmed it, mainly thanks to a patent.

The Czech Republic incorporated this groundbreaking invention into its campaign for the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Czech scientists, artists and sportsmen played with the sugar cube in a spot with the slogan “We will sweeten Europe”.

Diffusion technique

The actual founder of the Czech sugar industry was Karel Weinrich, who established a large sugar factory in 1831 on his estate in Dobrovice in the Mladá Boleslav region. There he introduced a number of innovations, both his own and adopted. Probably the most important of these was that the beet was leached instead of being pressed or centrifuged.

The second decisive invention in this field came in 1864. It was made by Julius Robert, the owner of the sugar factory in Židlochovice, which his father had founded there. He had already been trying to improve the leaching of beet pulp, but it was his son who developed diffusion (essentially controlled leaching using diffusion and osmosis of sugar molecules).

Julius Robert’s diffusion technique spread throughout Europe soon afterwards.

In 1867, Mr. František Goller, then manager of the sugar factory in Poděbrady, designed knives with triangular blades for cutting beet pulp, which improved the diffusion process.

Saccharometer

Mr. Karel Josef Napoleon Balling, professor of chemistry at the Prague Polytechnic and grand master of fermentation chemistry, constructed a practical saccharometer in 1839 to determine sugar in solution. This (and his other results) made it easier to control the efficiency and quality of production.

The epuration process

The fantastic period of the Czech sugar industry begins in May 1863 in the Prague sugar factory in Vysočany, where its manager Hugo Jelínek and the owner Bedřich Frey do for the first time the clarification (purification of beet juice with lime milk) and carbonation (removal of excess lime from the juice using carbon dioxide) at the same time and in a common tank. The inventors then brought together two hundred local and foreign experts to see for themselves the quality of the sugar produced that way. The brochure published by Hugo Jelinek in 1864 further encouraged the development of this new method. The Frey-Jelinek carbonation process spread rapidly throughout Europe.

Improved iron filter presses

In 1864, Mr. Čeněk Daněk constructed robust iron filter press for the filtration of sugar juices, replacing the earlier flimsy wooden ones.

Washing machine with stone picker

The first washing machine with a stone picker was designed by Gustav Hodek in 1872 in his sugar factory in Pětipsi near Žatec. This device was later perfected by Mr. Josef Bromovský at the Daňek Machine Works company, and further improved during the 20th century.

Progressive prelimming of diffusion juice

In 1928, Prof. Dr. Ing. Josef Vašátko, DrSc. was appointed head of the Research Institute of Chemical Technology and was given the research task of investigating the interaction of lime and non-sugar beet juices. His work resulted in the discovery of the principle of optimal clarification. He patented this solution together with Prof. Jaroslav Dědek in l933. This optimal clarification procedure allows to achieve a good clarification of the raw juice and to significantly improve the filterability of the juice of the first carbonation. Since the campaign of year 1935/36, the procedure known as progressive prelimming has been the basic step in the epuration of raw juice. This procedure has withstood decades of practice and is still used today.