Over 400 billion cups of espresso coffee are consumed throughout the world each day, with 80 billion in Italy alone. The success of Italy’s traditional espresso coffee started 110 years ago with the invention of the espresso machine.
Engineer and inventor from Milan, Luigi Bezzera, presented the first Moka five years later at the Milan Expo in 1906, allowing coffee lovers to prepare their own cup of espresso in minutes. The patent for the miracle machine was soon sold to Desiderio Pavoni, a small firm in Milan that started to mass produce the coffee maker, at the time, making one a day. Over the years, engineer Bezzera redesigned the machine several times, and in 1940, the firm Gaggia introduced the first piston-driven machine (in which the piston pulls heated water from the reservoir and into a small chamber where it is forced into a filter of ground coffee by the lowering of the piston.)
The Italians who immigrated in the twentieth century helped bring the espresso maker to the countries in which they settled, such as Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Today, Italian espresso makers are sold across the world.
