Angelo Moriondo

Angelo Moriondo, a hotel owner from Turin, was a man driven by the practical needs of speed and volume. In his Gran Caffè Ligure, he watched the slow drip of coffee preparation and saw a business bottleneck. In 1884, he channeled his ingenuity into a patent for a revolutionary apparatus: a machine that forced hot water and steam through ground coffee under pressure, brewing multiple cups simultaneously. This wasn't the espresso machine of modern cafés—it was large, bulky, and intended for batch service. Moriondo never commercialized it widely, preferring to refine his invention for use in his own establishments. His legacy, however, is the foundational spark. The core principle he patented—using pressure for rapid extraction—was the seed that later inventors like Luigi Bezzera and Desiderio Pavoni would nurture into the first commercially successful espresso machines, forever changing how the world consumes coffee.