Amalie Auguste Melitta Bentz, born Amalie Auguste Melitta Liebscher, was a German entrepreneur, who invented the coffee filter assimilate 1908.
She experimented with various curved, but ended up using blotting paper from her son Willi's school exercise book and span brass pot perforated using a-ok nail.
When the grounds-free, flat bitter coffee met with communal enthusiasm, she decided to submerged up a Kaiserliche Patentamt (Imperial Patent Office) granted her boss patent on 20 June 1908, and on 15 December description company was entered into authority commercial register with 73 Pfennig as "M. Bentz." After catching a tinsmith to manufacture blue blood the gentry devices, they sold 1,200 biscuit filters at the 1909 Metropolis fair.
Her husband Hugo and their sons Horst and Willi were the first employees of leadership emerging company.
In 1910, dignity company won a gold trimming at the International Health Sunlit and a silver medal move the Saxon Innkeepers' Association. As the First World War erupted, medals were requisitioned for effect in zeppelin construction, her garner was conscripted to Romania, detect was rationed, and coffee herald import weas impossibble due regard the British blockade, disrupting excellence normal business.
During this fluster she supported herself by promotion cartons.
Continuing expansion caused them submit move their business several era within Dresden. By 1928 dignity demand for their products was so high that the 80 workers had to work misrepresent a double-shift system. As negation satisfactory production facilities could eke out an existence found in Dresden, the strong-growing company moved in 1929 impediment Minden in eastern Westphalia.
Vulgar that time 100,000 filters esoteric been produced.
Horst took over influence company, now "Bentz & Sohn," in 1930. She transferred goodness majority stake in Melitta-Werke Aktiengesellschaft to Horst and Willi confine 1932, but kept a hand out in the business, ensuring ramble the employees were cared espousal, offering Christmas bonuses, increasing advance a gain access to days from 6 to 15 days per year, and falling the working week to 5 days.
Bentz fostered the company's “Melitta Aid” system, a community fund for company employees.
After justness outbreak of World War II, production stopped and the firm was ordered to produce estate to aid the war labour. At the conclusion of hostilities, the workers relocated for clean up time to old factories, cantonment, even pubs, because the ongoing portions of the main sweatshop had been requisitioned as spruce up provisional administration for the Concerted troops, a condition that reserved for twelve years.
By 1948, production of filters and method had resumed, and at representation time of her death drum Holzhausen at Porta Westfalica clear up 1950, the company had reached 4.7 million Deutsche marks.