CREAM SEPARATION 57 



that a patent was granted in France in 1874 to the 

 Company of Fives Lille for a system of continuous 

 centrifugal decantation. Prandtl ^ displayed a con- 

 tinuous separator at Frankfort-on-the-Main. It did 

 not attract much attention because of the great power 

 needed to operate it. A Danish engineer, Winstrup,^ 

 succeeded in improving the old intermittent bucket 

 method in 1876. In 1877 Lefeldt and Lentsch^ of 

 Schoenigen, Germany, placed on sale four continuous 

 separators with a capacity of 110 to 600 pounds of whole 

 milk an hour. It is interesting to know that the Lefeldt 

 and Lentsch patent covered the introduction of new 

 milk into the machine back of the cream wall, so that 

 the cream line would not be disturbed by the new milk 

 roughing up the surface. It seems that P. L. Kimball 

 of the Vermont Farm Machine Company was granted 

 a patent in 1896 on a similar method of introducing milk 

 into the bowl, and later, in 1903, a patent was issued 

 to him after improvement had been made. Also in 

 1877 Houston and Thompson, teachers in the high school 

 of Philadelphia, filed an application for a patent for 

 the continuous method of separating cream from skimmed- 

 milk. This patent was granted in 1881. Again the year 

 1877 is noted, for Carl Gustof Patrik DeLaval, a young 

 Swedish engineer, invented a continuous-flow cream 

 separator. The commercial manufacture of the DeLaval 

 machine was begun in 1878. 



44. When and where the first separators were made 

 and sold. — In Europe the first centrifugal cream 

 separators were made and sold by Lefeldt and Lentsch of 



1 Pleischmann, W., The Book of the Dairy, p. 120, 1896. 

 'McKay, G. L., and Larson, C, Principles and Practice of 

 Buttermaking, p. 130, 1906. 



