I recently started using a 50-year-old vacuum-seal flask that belonged to my Grandpa so that I don’t have to leave the dungeon as often to procure more caffeine. Besides looking totally awesome on my side desk, this thing still works like new, at least as far as I can tell — it’s older than I am.
Sir James Dewar’s original vacuum-seal flask. Image via the Royal Institute
Of course this got me to wondering how exactly vacuum-seal flasks, better known in household circles as Thermoses work, and how they were invented. The vacuum-seal flask is surprisingly old technology. It was first invented by Scottish chemist Sir James Dewar and presented to the Royal Institute in 1892. Six years later, he would be the first person to liquefy hydrogen and is considered a founding father of cryogenics.
At the time, liquefying gases was an expensive process, and it was important to keep them in a fluid state as long as possible. Sir Dewar’s flask consisted of two flasks separated by a near-vacuum that does much of the job of heat retention. Heat cannot travel through a vacuum, so the contents stay at-temperature for much longer than they would outside the flask.
These vessels have a ton of uses other than keeping your coffee hot or your tea iced. They are widely used throughout the industrial, scientific, and medical fields for everything from preserving bodily fluids and tissue to measuring electric power, recording the weather, and detecting an airplane’s rate of climb. Vacuum-seal flasks are a ..
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