The espresso machine is a remarkable invention that seems to encapsulate so many different eras all at once. At the 1906 Milan World Fair, visitors were stunned by the great chrome pillars which boasted steam power like never seen before.

Perhaps even more incredible than the invention of espresso is that machines have continued to evolve decade after decade. During the 1960s, the launch of models like the Faema E61 became almost instantaneously iconic and helped to define a true product of its time.

Today, the espresso machine is the heart of any café, and has most definitely asserted its significance in the global coffee industry. Now more than ever, espresso machines are some of the most incredibly technologically advanced pieces of equipment in coffee shops – so how did we get to this point?

To find out, I spoke to Kent Bakke, founder of the Bakke Coffee Museum, and Scott Guglielmino, Global Product Manager at La Marzocco.

You may also like our article on how espresso machine automation can help improve barista workflow.

The power of steam: How espresso solved a problem

For many around the world, espresso is synonymous with coffee. But this wasn’t always the case.

As the global industry grew during the 1800s, more and more coffee houses started to open – which quickly became some of the most important social spaces for political, business, and intellectual discussion at the time. 

Methods for preparing coffee, however, had largely remained unchanged since its discovery. Most people placed roasted ground coffee into a cloth filter or sack and boiled it in a large pot.

Although this practice isn’t exactly time consuming, there was growing demand to prepare and serve coffee more quickly as its popularity soared. In his extensive blog on the history of espresso, writer and ‘Baristorian’ Sebastien Delprat described how in France in 1832, inventors developed a machine which used a remote steam generator to “push water through the apparatus holding the ground coffee between two grids and a metallic tile”.

While the principles of espresso brewing are inherent to this design, the volumes of coffee produced by this machine were anything but. The machines could produce as many as 20,000 cups in “15 to 21 minutes using 150kg of coffee”, but staff then had to portion out these enormous batches.

An idea, however, had been sparked – and another European country would then revolutionise the coffee industry forever.

Italy takes the lead in espresso machine design

As new commercial brewing solutions first began to emerge, there were still many questions about people could serve hot and fresh coffee. The industrial era gave way to widespread urbanisation, and rail travel and other forms of mechanised transportation massively increased the pace of life. Essentially, more and more people started to prioritise convenience – a continuing trend even today.

Italian Angelo Moriondo was the first person to seriously address this gap in the market. In 1884, he was granted a patent for “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage”. Only blueprints and a few photographs exist of his prototype machine – which were brought to light by the work of Sebastien and author Ian Bernsten in his 1993 book Coffee Floats, Tea Sinks.

Moriondo’s machine consisted of a large boiler (heated to between 1.5 and 2 bar) that pushed water through a large bed of ground coffee ground on demand. A rare postcard from the late 1800s depicts a barista (who is probably one of the world’s first) standing proudly beside it.

The coffee was referred to as “café instantaneo” rather than espresso and, as per the postcard, was sold for 7 cents per cup or 70 cents per litre. 

Although Moriondo’s prototype wasn’t a true espresso machine, he laid the groundwork upon which the next fifty years of history would be written.

How espresso took off

Fast forward to Milan at the turn of the 20th century, and Italian Luigi Bezzera patented the first-ever commercial espresso machine: the Tipo Gigante. Bezzera’s machine made some significant alterations to Moriondo’s designs – including groupheads and portafilters.

Desiderio Pavoni purchased the patent in 1903 and made further additions to the machine: a pressure release valve and, crucially, a steam wand to utilise the built-up pressure and steam inside the machine’s boiler. Sebastien’s research tells us that because he was an owner of multiple cinemas and cafés, Pavoni was able to launch large-scale production of these machines.

Three years later, Bezzera and Pavoni introduced the world to the Tipo Gigante and the caffeé espresso it produced at L’Esposizione Internazionale del Sempione (or World Fair) in Milan. 

Scott Guglielmino is the Global Product Manager at La Marzocco and Marketing Director at La Marzocco US. He points out that while the 1906 Milan World Fair was a seminal moment in espresso culture, “these early machines were producing a different beverage than espresso”.

As the pressure produced by the boilers was so low, we can assume the coffee extracted was more similar to a moka pot than espresso.

“When you look at the baskets for these machines, they are almost 100mm in diameter with very big holes,” he tells me – which suggests that doses were relatively high and the required grind size would have been much more coarse.

Competitors start to emerge

Kent Bakke is the former CEO at La Marzocco and founder of the Bakke Coffee Museum in Seattle, Washington – a collection of espresso machines and coffee equipment that document the history of the industry.

“I have a book from 1927 that describes coffee preparation using these vertical or column-shaped machines,” he explains. “We know the extraction was about 45 seconds, but I don’t know how this coffee would have tasted a hundred years ago.”

Following the launch of the Tipo Gigante, espresso as we know it today started to emerge. In the decades leading up to the Second World War, a number of espresso pioneers (many of them still present in the industry today) scrambled to develop their own machines.

“There were a lot of new companies emerging,” Kent says. “Victoria Arduino and La Cimabli launched in the early 1900s, and La Marzocco in 1927. It was still very much a growing industry.”

Looking specifically at Victoria Arduino, an iconic marketing campaign (which depicted a person brewing espresso while hanging onto the back of a train) helped to showcase the technological evolution of espresso.

In 1939, Giuseppe Bambi of Florence’s La Marzocco filed a patent for an espresso machine with a horizontal boiler – the first of its kind.

Scott explains that this was a huge milestone in espresso machine design. Previous multiple groupheads were arranged around the column-shaped boiler, which didn’t particularly help to optimise workflow.

The outbreak of WW2, however, brought espresso machine production to a standstill. During the war, Bambi’s patent for the horizontal boiler expired. But post-1945, it quickly became an industry standard.

The birth of the modern espresso machine

Many would agree that the espresso machine revolution happened immediately after the end of World War Two. The addition of piston levers profoundly changed the nature of espresso brewing, and ultimately gave us the drink we know today. 

Achille Gaggia is largely responsible for this work. He discovered that instead of using steam pressure to pump water, the boiler can force water into a cylinder. From here, a barista operates a spring-piston lever to force water through a bed of coffee – which is where the term “pulling a shot” comes from.

The lever group mechanism achieved several key things:

• The size of an espresso became standardised, as the capacity of the cylinders on lever groups was around 30ml of water
• Brewing pressure dramatically increased from 1.5 to 2 bar to 8 to 10 bar
  • This led to the remarkable discovery of crema, which Gaggia referred to as “caffe creme” because the resulting coffee “was of such quality that it produced its own cream”.

“There was so much emphasis on design with these early lever machines – it was almost like inventing a new beverage,” Kent says. “It also opened up the idea of having a machine on a bar in front of customers to attract people to come in and see how baristas made drinks.

“With the economic boom, a lot of coffee bars opened up and people were getting out and had a new place to go that wasn’t just a restaurant or a bar,” he adds. “Vertical espresso machines were certainly present and popular in other parts of Europe before WW2, but Gaggia made a concerted effort to spread its lever espresso machines across the continent.” 

Italy and beyond

Italian expats in bigger cities like London, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, and Melbourne widely embraced new espresso machine technology. In turn, coffee house culture was also quick to place espresso machines at the centre of cafés – and they became hubs for the counterculture movements of the 1950s.

The world over, demand for coffee had soared, and more and more people were drinking espresso. However, the lever machine’s golden age was short-lived. Just as the vertical boiler had already become a thing of the past, lever mechanisms were quickly seen as a “problem” to be resolved.

“If you’re working on these machines constantly, especially without a heat exchanger, they get too hot,” Kent says. “We had to take portafilters and put them in a bucket of water between shots, otherwise they would burn the coffee.”

Levers were also considered a health and safety hazard for baristas. There was a higher risk of repetitive strain injury when using these machines, but also because the mechanism would often suddenly spring back once the levers were pulled.

The answer to these problems, Kent explains, was a hydraulic pump system. This included a large piston that was raised and lowered with cold water using pressure from the machine’s plumbing.

Hydraulic espresso machines quickly took off in parts of Italy, and remained popular well into the 1970s. But the future was electric – and espresso machines were about to change forever once again.

The espresso machine goes electric

At the beginning of the 1960s, the arrival of the electric pump changed the coffee industry forever. The first machine to feature this technology was the landmark Faema E61, which included a motorised volumetric pump to provide a steady 9 bar of pressure.

“In the US, companies used pumps to carbonate soft drinks,” Kent explains. “Faema realised it could use the same system to pump water at high and constant pressures. So while hydraulic systems still persisted, the rotary vane pump quickly became the norm, and it’s more or less what we still use today.”

The name, design, and mechanics of the E61 also capture the spirit of the 1960s, similar to Bezzera and Pavoni’s machines at the start of the century. Kent explains the “61” refers to the year of its manufacture, while the “E” supposedly references the solar eclipse which was visible from Italy the same year. With the Space Race well underway at the time, fascination with the solar system had even extended to espresso machine design.

The electric pump wasn’t the only addition to the espresso machine during this period, however. Dual boiler systems allowed baristas to control temperature much more effectively as they didn’t have to extract espresso and steam milk using the same boiler.

Consistency is king

Even today in 2024, consistency is one of the most important aspects of espresso preparation and includes many different variables, such as:

• Distribution and tamping techniques
• Dose, yield, and extraction time
• Temperature and pressure profiling
• Flow rate and pre-infusion

By the late 1980s, digital temperature controllers (or PID systems) were a staple of espresso machines. While these systems are small in size, their role in espresso extraction is huge. This technology meant that for the first time ever, baristas could precisely control temperature to change coffee flavour – effectively foreshadowing many of the changes to come in the future.

As the third wave of coffee emerged, the focus on precision and consistency only increased. Although the basic principles of espresso machine technology were much the same as they had been since the 1970s, features had become incredibly advanced.

In addition to controlling temperature, baristas could regulate pressure and flow rate, and machines included integrated timers and scales. These intuitive features allowed baristas to programme machines in more ways than ever before, and open up a whole new world of coffee flavour and aroma.

So what’s next?

Specialty coffee is constantly evolving – including espresso machines. With the emergence of the prosumer market, we’ve seen home espresso machines also become so much more advanced. But what else lies ahead?

“When you look back at lever machines, people knew they didn’t quite work and that there was something better out there,” Scott says. “Future development and technology is about what features are going to make machines easier to use, coffee taste better, and the barista’s job more streamlined.”

He uses the example of touch screens – a common feature in today’s espresso machines – to elaborate. 

“There’s a good argument for touch screens because it’s easier to programme variables,” he says. “However, almost every touch screen has a very finite lifespan and is part of a planned obsolescence.”

This is also true for boilerless technology, as complex parts can quickly wear out from rusting or depositing of minerals. However, with growing concerns about machine energy efficiency and sustainability, Scott believes there needs to be more progress if we want to understand the future of the espresso machine.

Tradition vs. innovation

Kent, meanwhile, says factors like pressure, temperature and flow rate “are part of the brewing process, and therefore unlikely to ever change”, but technology used to manage and control them is another matter. 

“People are even making cold-extracted espresso,” he says. “To me, that’s a very different beverage, but the traditional espresso machine won’t go out of style.”

It’s still important to recognise that more and more manufacturers have started to include groundbreaking technology that allows baristas to prepare pour over and filter coffee using espresso machines – something we haven’t seen before until just a few years ago.

It seems the sky’s the limit when it comes to the future of the espresso machine. While most of its centuries-old technologies and features still remain, machines have evolved to become something entirely new and different since the 1880s.

Espresso will always be one of the most beloved and popular coffee beverages in the world. We owe a lot to the pioneers of the technology that has allowed us to experience a truly unique drink.

Enjoyed this? Then read our article on Italy’s love affair with espresso.

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