In the year 1924, Richard Harvey Wright was taking a meal in a Pullman diner. He was served a cup of hot water and a small individual bag of tea. Most men in a million would’ve brewed their tea, finished their meal, lit a cigarette or cigar and reached for a newspaper.
But Wright didn’t brew his tea. He took the tiny bag with its string and tag attached and instead of dipping the bag into the cup of hot water, he fingered the bag over and around and about until his mind’s eye envisioned a machine that could produce the bags, attaching the tag, filling the bag with tea and turning out a finished product untouched by human hands.
A well-conceived thought meant to him action. Richard didn’t have the time to develop a machine himself, but he knew a mechanical wizard of an inventor whom he thought could do it. John Thomas Dalton of Durham. When asked if he could develop the machine, Dalton said to Wright, “I can do it!”
And Dalton did create the Bull Durham bag stringing machine and the Wright’s Automatic Tobacco Packing Machine Company began supplying the tea packers’ market with machines for making and filling tea bags.
Acquired from the Durham Sun April 16, 1943 edition