Now a mid-20th century icon, the Goblin Teasmade – which first appeared in 1936 – was one of the first combination automatic tea-maker and alarm clocks to be commercially produced. Early models included a lamp as well as a kettle, and some are known to have had radioactive radium paint on their clock faces, which made them glow in the dark.
While other brands were manufactured (and in fact, crude automatic tea-makers had been developed since the 1890s) the Goblin – part of the British Vacuum Cleaner & Engineering Company founded by Hubert Cecil Booth, inventor of the vacuum cleaner – became the most established name in the market.
Goblin’s best-known models came in the 1960s with lamps built into a faux-art deco body. The Goblin Teasmade also became a ubiquitous prize on the Central Television gameshow Bullseye (1981 – 1993).
In the 1980s, the Goblin company was sold to Swan (who were still making Teasmades 40 years later), but the once-ubiquitous bedside servant had had its day.