Parham Gallery, the only gallery devoted exclusively to tea pots in the United States, buys, sells, and appraises antique and exotic teapots. The tea ball, or tea egg as it is called in Europe, evolved during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a perforated metal ball-shaped container in which tea leaves are placed. The ball is immersed in boiling water so the tea can steep without the leaves escaping into the water. The earliest tea balls were sized to make a pot of tea.
Today there are both pot and cup size tea balls.
The most recent evolution of the tea ball is the perforated tea spoon which takes only one hand to fill and empty. A tea press is a tea pot that is cylindrical in shape and usually made of glass. The pot has a plunging apparatus attached to the lid which is designed to force the tea leaves to the bottom of the pot and stop infusion. After the tea is finished, the lid and plunger are removed and the tea leaves discarded. Centuries ago the inventive Chinese, who created the earliest banking system with coins and paper bank notes, found that their currency had no value when trading with people in far away Mongolia and Tibet.