The first Espresso machine - Angelo Moriondo

For whole document with illustration go to.

https://coffeeandteaperceptionsandillusions.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/the-moriondo-patent-discovery-and-dr-sebastien-delprat-from-france-final-pdf.pdf

Coffee Floats Tea Sinks - my first book

Most of the stuff that was being written in the 60s and 70s was not very informative because I don’t think many people understood coffee very well, or if they did,    they were not writing about it. They treated coffee as some sort of secret    which, if you kept it to yourself, you could protect your business.  I was on a journey of discovery and as I tried to explain it to myself and write down for others to understand, a growing treasure chest of information    was being created in a disorganized way. It was time to put it all together and I began to write ‘Coffee Floats Tea Sinks’ which was a phenomenon that nobody  else seems to have noticed and yet it was at the heart of the brewing process for the two different products. It explained why coffee pots were tall and teapots were short. 

   I spent a lot of time in Europe trying to get information about patents from Italy, France, Germany, England and the United States. In Italy I went to the patent office in Rome but they couldn’t tell me very much – they wanted the number of the patent. When I asked how I could find the number of the patent I was told that they were all written in the book. Where was the book? ‘Sorry, it’s been stolen and we can’t tell you’. I took the train up to Munich to Zweibruckestrasse where the German patent office was and there I could find the numbers for the Italian patents. I went back to Rome and got photocopies of all the patents relating to Italian espresso machines. Some Italian companies did not even know their own original patents. They had never seen them.

I went to Paris to the Bibliotheque Nationale and copied down the numbers for all the patents about coffee that I wanted to see. Then I went 70 km north of Paris to Compiègne where all the French patents were kept in an atomic bomb proof structure. The man in charge was a huissier –the French guards. He brought up hundreds of patents and I sat there for a couple of days reading    the old handwritten French script with great difficulty and making very brief notes about each patent so that I could know which ones to come back for and examine in great detail. Each patent in the early days was accompanied by colourful drawings and I came back to photograph many of them. They initially    said that I had to use the official photographer and asked me for the numbers of the patents. I said it was around 200 and when they heard the number, they said I could do it myself. It would have tied up their photographer for weeks. Many of them had not been seen for over 100 years by anybody. Then I went back to the Munich patent office and read all the German patents. Then to London where I was able to check the English patents and then to New York for the American ones. I was lucky that I could speak French, German, Italian and Spanish as well as English.

It’s over 30 years ago so I cannot remember exactly but I believe that I found the Moriondo patent in the London patent office and I was amazed. It was obviously the forerunner of all the later espresso patents although it did not make one cup at a time – it made coffee in bulk using steam pressure which was served one cup at a time.

I would like to pay tribute to the research efforts of Dr. Sebastien Delprat of France who with incredible diligence discovered much more material about Moriondo. Dr. Sebastien Delprat is a research engineer in the field of material science micro and nanofabrication technologies and is part of the fundamental research department of the CEA (the biggest research institution in Europe.

Unfortunately the complete document with many illustrations cannot be shown on LinkedIn but I will give you a link to get it.

https://coffeeandteaperceptionsandillusions.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/the-moriondo-patent-discovery-and-dr-sebastien-delprat-from-france-final-pdf.pdf

What his research illustrates is that there is a wealth of information to be discovered. I well remember many years ago talking to the head of a museum in Istanbul, asking about the origin of coffee in Turkey, and being told that there is a wealth of information in the mountains of archives in the Turkish language written in Arabic script which hardly anybody can read today. \

Dr. Sebastian Delprat’s article on Moriondo:

 In search for the first Espresso machine

'Making coffee with steam pressure was well known in Europe in the 19th Century. The first person to make a commercial machine using the same principle was Angelo Moriondo of Turin, Italy.'

[i]Portrait of Angelo Moriondo, around 1900 (aged 50) 1[/i]\

[i]Advertisement for the Angelo Moriondo American Bar 1[/i]

 That happened to me few years ago, as I was writing the story of the Angelo Moriondo coffee machine, created in 1884.2 Moriondo is considered today as the father of the Expresso machine and consequently the starting point of the Espresso timeline (as a single dose, fast serving coffee). Its name only surfaced recently, when Ian Bersten exhumed his invention from Italian patent archives in his famous book,3 hence diminishing the merit of Bezzera and Pavoni who were up to then commonly cited as the fathers of the Espresso (mainly because of the 1906 Fiera di Milano picture mentioning the term for the first time). From this new perspective, they appeared to be largely inspired by the Moriondo machine, to say the least, with the important achievement of spreading the invention worldwide.?

Four years ago (the centenary year of Moriondo’s death), I tried to follow Ian Bersten’s steps, and found bits of Moriondo’s life, his famous family tree (the Moriondo and Gariglio chocolate factory), his [i]?Gran caffè Ligure?[/i], [Liguria is the area around Genoa] and traces of his invention in journals and exhibition reviews… but still no picture of the machine. At that time, the only additional proof of the machine’s existence was a patent drawing and an article from the [i]Gazzetta Piemontese[/i] posted by his grandson Angelo on Wikipedia.?

[ Angelo Moriondo, owner of Caffe Ligure shows his famous patented machine to make instantaneous coffee. This device was displayed for the first time at the 1884 show; received the first prize and was a great success; both for its goodness, for the instantaneity of its packaging; for its elegant form and the ease of operating the machine, that can operate in any public place. The machine, in addition to all its other advantages, offers an economy of 30%. Translation IB]

I found few things: a picture of Moriondo at the time of the invention, French patents, proofs that the machine was built in different versions but in very limited number (for the Gran Caffè Ligure and the American Bar in Torino). More interestingly, I found another machine patented by Moriondo in 1911 and articles showing that Moriondo continued his coffee activity up to his death in May 1914 (as a coffee roaster)… but still no pictures of the machine.

[i]?Galleria del Lavoro? at the 1898 Torino exhibition[/i] 

In fact, documents report that Moriondo machine versions appeared at different exhibitions: the 1884 and 1898 Esposizione Generale Italiana di Torino, plus the 1911 Esposizione Internazionale di Torino. I looked in detail at the rare pictures I could find of these events… but in vain.

My journey ended up with a peculiar discovery: a Spanish patent with almost the same title, showing a hybrid between the two Moriondo inventions but with no reference to him (deposited by José Molinari in 1894).? Again, no proof of the existence of this machine anywhere, but a stunning design, with an over-pressure valve, a manometer, a protected sight glass, portafilter for single or multiple doses, a system to fill the machine with water while under pressure and, above all, a boiler covered with wood and circled with metal belts, looking a bit like a wine barrel.

[i]The José Molinari machine from the 1894 Spanish patent N.15278[/i]

There are no traces of other Moriondo patents except the ones from 1884 and 1911. These are not showing or mentioning any wood cover. But in 1898, Angelo Moriondo was at the Torino exhibition in the ?Galleria del Lavoro? presenting a (new?) instantaneous coffee machine. Was Molinari (the name of a famous family of coffee roasters from Modena) a cheater or a partner?

[i]?Galleria del Lavoro? at the 1898 Torino exhibition[/i]

The answer came a few years later, with a document I bought from an auction site. I usually rely on digital documents but I had to get this one for real. The date is a bit difficult to decrypt but seems to be September 13th, 1913… just a few months before Moriondo’s death. I still remember the feeling of opening the envelope with the Italian stamp and discovering a piece of paper, more than 100 years old : a bill that certainly bears the hand writing of Angelo Moriondo himself. This feeling was as strong as finding a rare lever machine and bringing it home .

The most important part of the historical document is certainly the drawing of the ex.press machine called ?La Brasiliana?, the name of the machine patented in 1911 but with the exact wood design as the 1894 Spanish patent.

This really forms the missing link between Moriondo and Molinari, and the golden key for future discoveries. As I searched official exhibition pictures again, with this specific machine design in mind, a tiny corner in one of them struck my eye (middle height, extreme left side of the picture presented above).

Magnified, this tiny corner looks like this:

Could this blurry picture be the Moriondo stand exhibiting two coffee machines? The ?Galleria del lavoro?, where this picture was taken, is exactly where the stand was in 1898, but… how to be sure?

The precise drawing of the José Molinari patent, allowed me to make a 3D model of the machine, and here is the result:

From there, I compared it with the 1913 Moriondo bill illustration and the 1898 picture (the rest of the stand was created from other considerations, I’ll talk about it later):

 The two machines match so well that I’m now sure that this tiny part of the historical ?Galleria del Lavoro? picture is the first and only (?) picture of the Moriondo machine.

The first perhaps… and only?

Let me explain how I designed the second machine on the Moriondo stand… that’s where the story becomes a bit more esoteric and why you’ll never consider me as a sane person. ;-)

When, almost 3 years later, I wrote the story of Cimbali,? I made my own interpretation of the famous 1912 Giuseppe Cimbali picture in front of his first repair shop. I’m convinced that this picture reveals much more than Giuseppe himself: not for the other person on the picture (certainly one of his employees), but because of the background machines. My hypothesis is that these two machines were carefully chosen among the only and most prestigious machines of that time: to name them, a Bezzera (at the back) and a Moriondo machine (in front).

For the Bezzera, it is quite obvious, but for the Moriondo, one has to guess from the patent itself, to strongly feel it. That’s the frontier I crossed… and hence that’s where I took the model for the second machine on the stand. I designed it according to the 1885 Moriondo patent model, freely inspired by the Cimbali picture (in particular for the size proportion) and added below a ?Fornello ad alcool?, as the one used for heating and cooking at the time. A setup that should allow to heat up a boiler and serve ex.press coffees to visitors during the exhibition.

The installation of the second machine on the stand hence looks like this:

And here is the complete Moriondo stand compared to the original picture, as it was in 1898.

And now the same stand from the visitor’s point of view, as thousands  saw it in 1898:

Don’t you think it make sense… isn’t it as if you could touch it?

[Embedded Youtube video showing the 3D model of the stand]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddXFBhEruHI

                            I am now very confident of my conclusions.

 This is not only because this will make me the discoverer of not one but three Moriondo machine pictures, but also because it is a real lesson. It shows that the truth is often in front of our eyes… but requires some effort, a change in perspective, a mix of understanding and interpretation, to surface.

About my intuition about the Giuseppe Cimbali picture: it is pretty clear to me now that the machine beside him is a small Moriondo machine (because of its similarity with the second machine on the 1898 stand). This story is too good to be wrong. It transforms this scene into an acknowledgement to the godfather of the Ex.presso machines, from the creator of the brand that will become the world's largest coffee machine manufacturer 100 years later.

This is another picture that hundreds of people have seen without finding the treasure hidden in it.

 It’s even worse when part of the documents are systematically hidden… preparing this article, I just discovered that there is another side to the famous Cimbali picture, and it shows what could be another Moriondo machine!

That would make at least four different machines, maybe there are other ones hidden somewhere… maybe for real… ready to be found by open eyes.

References:

1.      Images from ? La Victoria Arduino, 100 anni di caffè espresso nel mundo ? (Franco Capponi, 2005).

2.      [url=https://goo.gl/9B4nPg]Ascenseur pour l’Ex.presso, episode 9[/url] and [url=https://goo.gl/8KdWZt]episode 10[/url]

3.      ?Coffee floats, tea sinks: through history and technology to a complete understanding?, (Ian Bersten, 1993.

4.      [url=https://goo.gl/6GEC8f] Ascenseur pour l’Ex.presso, episode 8[/url]

5.      [url=https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Moriondo]Angelo Moriondo Wikipedia page[/url]

6.      [url=https://goo.gl/xEUxKm] Ascenseur pour l’Ex.presso, episode 11[/url]

7.      [url=https://goo.gl/znz49i] Ascenseur pour l’Ex.presso, episode 24[/url]