if you want to understand the birth of
espresso if you want to understand
really where it came from then I think
one particular work of Leonato Capello
is a really great place to start he was
an Italian born artist working in Paris
from the early 1900's until the end of
the 1930s and he's considered to be the
father of modern poster advertising he's
famous for his work with gems Arno
Campari and others but it's his work in
1922 for Victoria Arduino that I think
is a particular interest let me explain
the original espresso patent goes back
to 1884 and belongs to Angelo moreand o
of Turin he set out to solve an age-old
problem with coffee it takes a long time
to brew typically to brew faster you'd
need to grant finer but their water has
a difficult time getting through the bed
of coffee his innovation was to leverage
steam pressure to press the water
through the grounds to be able to brew a
little quicker
he never commercialized his patent but
it was built on later first in 1903 by
Luigi bets era and then later by
desiderio Pavoni both of whose names
live on in the world of espresso
machines
I bet Sarah's design introduced key
innovations and while he built a few
machines he didn't have the money to
commercialize them but Pavoni did I've
only bought the patents in 1903 and
refined it further again and the two men
would end up collaborating in 1906 at
the Milan Faire they showcased their
inventions to the world introducing what
they called cafe espresso it really was
the perfect word Coffee expressed pushed
out from the machine but done so at
speed this innovation really marked the
beginning of the espresso machine
industry other manufacturers would
quickly appear including Pierre Torres
EO Arduino who had come to commission
cap yellows poster which I think
captures so much of early espresso there
are two things that I think are
particularly interesting about the
poster
it's coming at the end of the age of
steam but it's absolutely leveraging the
idea that steam equals speed the train
really was the perfect visual metaphor
this was coffee all about speed coffee
brewed so quickly you could grab a cup
from the side of a moving train this is
why espresso in the early days succeeded
it was all about speed but look again
there's one more small detail in this
poster that I think is worth noting what
the machine is brewing is very different
to what we would think of as espresso
today it's brewing small cups of filter
coffee something that all espresso
machine instead at the time this was not
a new recipe this was not a new type of
drink this innovation was about small
cups of filtered coffee at speed as
persons look feel and recipe would
really stay the same until the big
innovation in 1948 mostly credited to
Akili Gaggia that's the moment where
pressure transformed espresso into being
a whole new category a whole new drink
but that's a subjective
capi a nose poster for victory Arduino
is so common that it's become cliche
something you look at but don't really
even see anymore
but I think it's fascinating what exists
in the details and what it tells us
about the birth of espresso