About 1760, French inventors began to devote themselves to improvements in coffee-making devices. Donmartin, a Paris tinsmith, in 1763, invented an urn pot that employed a flannel sack for infusing. Another infusion device, produced the same year by L'Ainé, also a tinsmith of Paris, was known as a diligence.
The very first patent (certainly in the world) for a coffeemaker was granted in 1802 for "a pharmacological-chemical coffee making device by infusion." It is registered under three names: Denohe, Henrion and Rouch.
In the same year, the French chemist François Antoine Henri invented the coffee maker called “Caféolette” with 2 superposed containers separated by a filter. The boiling water is put into the upper part and the newly formed coffee drips into the bottom.
The first French patent on an improved French drip pot for making coffee "by filtration without boiling" was granted to Hadrot in 1806.
In 1808, François Antoine Cadet created of the porcelain coffee pot. In 1815, Sené invented in France his Cafetière Sené, another device to make coffee "without boiling." In 1818, another Frenchman named Laurens would have invented a coffee machine, also ancestor of espresso.
Siphon coffee maker was invented by Adrien Emile François Gabet in 1844. It is a vacuum coffee maker composed of two containers placed side by side, one in glass for coffee and the other in ceramic for water.
In 1882, Louis Bernard Rabaut in France made the prototype of the first espresso machine. He presented a device that used steam to drive boiling water through finely-ground coffee. Although the result remains unknown, the experiment was proven by the drawings he sent to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris.
Edward Loysel de Santais is credited with inventing the first commercial espresso machine in 1843; he created a large-scale version for the Paris Exposition of 1855 which is said to have produced 2,000 (demitasse or espresso-sized) cups of coffee an hour.
History of coffee maker invention in France
