Kiwiana

We discovered a bit of Kiwiana with our introduction to the Thermette. This is a wood-burning portable kettle that was invented in 1929 in New Zealand by John Hart. It was adopted by the NZ Army and issued to its soldiers during world war II. Many of them were stationed in North Africa where it was nicknamed the Benghazi Boiler. Since then, Kiwi families have taken it on road trips and picnics because it is so easy to "boil a brew" for tea, coffee, hot chocolate, or even just for hot water to clean up with.
Our colleague, Dale, couldn't believe we'd never hear of it, so she brought hers to work to show us.

Of course, nothing doing but what we had to try it out. Dale explained how it works while Hamish, another colleague, fired it up with just a few twigs we found lying around.

One of the reasons it works so well is that it is hollow! It is actually a water jacket around a chimney. You can feed the fuel down the chimney and the windier it is the better.

In just a few minutes we had flames shooting out the chimney, and a couple minutes later, we had hot water spewing out the spout.

We had our coffee cups ready with instant coffee and Dale proudly poured out the water If you look closely, you can see the ground behind her through the middle of the Thermette. How cool is that?

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