Tubadipdrips & Tempots

In a narrow side street in lower Manhattan is a drab, recessed doorway that bears the legend: "Dr. Peter Schlumbohm. Walk One Flight Up." In a loft upstairs is a bright, orderly array of glass, aluminum, cork, plastics, cartons, and laboratory gimmicks. Off to one side is the rough-lumber worktable at which Dr. Schlumbohm, 50, a large (225 lbs.), hearty man with a bellowing laugh, has worked out 1,000 inventions. Last week he was fondling two newborn brain children: the Tubadipdrip, a combination coffeemaker-teamaker and cocktail mixer, and the Tempot, a combination fireless cooker-ice cream freezer-frozen food locker-foot bath-thermos chest-dishwasher-air conditioner and bachelor's chef. They will probably make their way without trouble in the commercial world, just like Dr. Schlumbohm's (rhymes with slum bum) other oddly named gadgets. Some of them:

P:Minnehaha, a cocktail mixer which lets cocktails breathe.

P:Cinderella, a conical garbage pail with custom-made wax-paper linings that looks like a trophy.

P:A frying pan that never needs to be washed.

P:A lidless, almost completely enclosed hot-water kettle which looks like an inverted mushroom.

But Dr. Schlumbohm's pride & joy is Chemex, a glass coffeemaker that looks like an angular hourglass. Dr. Schlumbohm, who drinks six cups of coffee a day, invented it because he was sick of bad coffee. Said he: "With this, even a moron can make good coffee."

Beautilities. But Dr. Schlumbohm's gadgets are not for morons only. Nor are they cheap. His dozen-odd household appliances, which are the only inventions he manufactures, look like no utensils in the ordinary kitchen, have been frequently exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art. He thinks this only natural because "If you make a thing as simple and efficient as possible, it is bound to be beautiful." And, he has also found, highly profitable. His sales of Chemex ($3.50 to $12) reached $200,000 last year. His Tubadipdrips ($7.50 and $9.50) and Tempots ($135) should boost this year's sales well over last year's $300,000.

They would be much higher except that Dr. Schlumbohm abhors Big Business, feels "it is handicapped by inertia, conservatism, and carload mentality." When he gets tired of a product he stops making it, invents a new one. He has no big factory. He farms out the actual manufacturing to such companies as Corning Glass and Alcoa, pays eight girls to assemble the parts of his Fahrenheitor products in the small loft. He has drawn up and filed the 300 patents he holds in three languages (Dr. Schlumbohm thinks it takes about 1,000 inventions to produce a dozen profitable products), writes his own advertisements with coined words like "beautility," does his own selling.

But No Tedium. He invents mainly because he loathes tedious labor. A Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Berlin, he invented his way around Europe (selling the patent rights to support himself), finally decided in 1935 to settle in the U.S. because "per unit of energy expended, the returns here are the greatest." But he has not succumbed to America's clock-punching bustle. He eats breakfast late, often does not get to his office till 5 p.m., often quits work at 6, always drinks a bottle of burgundy with dinner to drive out any traces of tedium. He never eats lunch, thinks it "the most godawful impediment to efficiency in this country." His only ambition, which he thinks he has achieved, is "to keep mentally well-shaved."

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