Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

22 THE COCOA AND CHOCOLATE INDUSTRY and were generally adepts in the art of mixing con-fections, for a confection originally was an unpleasant medicine made palatable by the use of sugar and aro-matic substances. When Dr. Joseph Fry began to make chocolate in 1728, having secured a valuable patent from Walter Churchman, the whole of the work was done by manual labour. A chocolate factory was built at Steinhunde by Prince Wilhelm von der Lippe in 1765, and the firm of Lombart, “ la plus ancienne chocolaterie de France,” was founded in 1760, but apparently, in both of these factories, the whole of the chocolate-making was done by hand. Cacao beans are by no means easy to grind, and the introduction of water power to drive the miil must have been a great step forward. Messrs. Fry had their famous “ water engine ” at Castle Mills, Bristol, and Dr. James Baker had his on the Neponset River, U.S.A. By about 1770 Watt had perfected his steam engine, and in 1795 Messrs. Fry made a further step towards mass production by erecting one of these powerful engines, the first in Bristol, for what the chroniclers of the time described as the “ trifling object of grin ding chocolate.” The price of chocolate was lowered during this Century ; for example, that produced by Walter Church-man’s patented process in 1730 could be sold, the plain kind at 5s. a 1b. and that with vanilla at 6s. a 1b. High excise duties continued to hamper the trade. In the Humble Memorial of Joseph Fry, 1776, he States that not only do cacao beans pay 10s. per cwt. duty, but the chocolate obtained from them pays 2s. 3d. a 1b. He adds that “ smuggling is vastly increased in Bristol by a desperate Gang of Villains ” and that the smuggled chocolate was daily hawked about the streets of Bristol, Bath, Salisbury, Worcester, and Birmingham. With such high duties levied upon it,