Fresh Pressed

The Fresh Pressed iHorn is made from a Coleman Model 4a gas fired iron made between 1929 and 1948.  The standard color was “cool blue” but it also came in chrome, green and red.  The founder of the company was William Coffin Coleman, who was schoolteacher in Kansas and later entered the University of Kansas Law School. Shortly before receiving his degree, however, Coleman ran out of money, and he became a traveling typewriter salesman. While in a coalmining town in Alabama, he noticed the intense white glow of a lamp in a drugstore window. Coleman immediately saw the lamp as an important step forward.  Coleman arranged to sell this new type of lamp, but he met with little success because of a prior salesman’s misrepresentations.  Unable to sell his lamps, Coleman hit upon the idea of leasing them for $1 per week and servicing them himself. If the lamps failed, the customer did not have to pay. Revenues skyrocketed. Ultimately Coleman purchased the rights to the lamp and the Coleman company took off.  During World War I, the United States declared his lamps essential and Coleman made over one million lamps for the military and American Farmers.   The company was not entirely successful in developing new products and markets. During the late 1920s, Coleman made a line of waffle irons, coffee percolators, toasters, and electric irons. Coleman could not, however, compete with Westinghouse Electric Corporation and General Electric Company and withdrew these product lines quickly. However, the Coleman stove was the innovation prompted by WWII.  By the 1960’s camping was the craze and Coleman’s profits were one fire. 

 The Fresh Pressed iHorn was a wrinkle in the success of the Coleman Company, but a practical attempt at market penetration and America’s appetite for home goods and convenience.  No starch required.