If you were British, you would not need to ask this.

Being compelled to wait two minutes more to boil a kettle for a cuppa would be enough to provoke an armed rebellion.

Not even sure I'm kidding.

Why not just keep the water warm in an electric samovar?

Typical British teabag tea -- the stuff we consume in quantity -- is brewed with water just off the boil, and consumed often pretty quickly afterwards because cold milk gets added.

(Or it goes into a teapot for brewing, and again needs to be just off the boil for that)

Given that we can boil a kettle for a mug's worth of tea in not much more than half a minute, there's no reason to use them, I think.

And to follow up on this thread because a similarity occurred to me in another reply, we do use samovar-type things (electric tea urns) in other contexts (ad hoc and mobile catering), but that is about brewing the tea itself within the vessel and it requires both a different kind of tea and a noticeably different kind of scale (simultaneous volume). You do sometimes see those in company canteens though.

Most Americans drink substantially more coffee than tea, which is why we have a purpose built appliances for making coffee, and have had those for decades.

The reason Americans don't have a super fast boiling kettle is that very few Americans WANT a very fast boiling kettle for large portions of water. If an American wants a cup of tea, two minutes or less in the microwave is sufficient. I don't care if you think that's bad, because I want a cup of tea, not some elitist purity contest.

Errr... we have those too. Though we get our coffee trends from Australia and New Zealand.

And tea in the UK has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with elitism. The very opposite: tea serves the same function as coffee does in the USA, cutting across all class and status.

In fact the kind of tea you drink in the USA tends towards being what people here would call "posh" tea, because you drink the more unusual, expensive stuff as infrequent drinkers. Most of what we drink is robust and cheap.

Americans find our tea to be the same way we find your coffee: a distinct culture and taste that is acquired, not instantly loved.

(We'll leave it to the Aussies and New Zealanders to talk to you about your coffee; they came over and fixed ours.)

But I am reminded that it is foolish to try to convey a point in a humorous way on Hacker News. I am also reminded that you guys low-key hate us.

Well you have to remember the UK is the nation that fit kettles in Tanks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel

People like to joke about this but the reason it's called a "boiling vessel" and not a "Tea maker" is because it's incredibly useful other than just making tea, to the point that the US has also added them to many modern vehicles.

On demand hot water, from the safety of your combat vehicle, is a genuine war innovation on the same level as canned food. Especially now that combat vehicles are aiming towards having more robust electrical systems makes it trivial to implement. Hot water means hot food, means warmth on a cold day, means sterilizing sketchy water sources without chemical tablets, means you don't have to light a visible fire to make your coffee, means you keep morale way higher. Your troops are now cleaner, better fed, happier, more motivated.