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    Home » All About Coffee Beans » World's Best History of Coffee Timeline

    Coffee History / 1850-1900

    1850-1860

    1859 - A new coffee brewing machine called the Raparlier vacuum coffee pot is developed and includes an upper glass bowl that shows how much coffee has been brewed. A hemp filter placed between the compartments is inexpensive and disposed of between uses.

    1860-1870

    1860 - Cafe Central opens in Vienna and becomes a gathering place for the country's intellectual elite including Adolf Loos, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Anton Kuh.

    Until 1938 it was often called the Chess School since so many people played the game there including Russian revolutionary Leo Trotzky. Today the cafe remains popular, having been refurbished in 1986.

    1861 - Isabella Beeton writes, “It is true, says Liebeg, that thousands have lived without a knowledge of tea and coffee; and daily experience teaches us that, under certain circumstances, they may be dispensed with without disadvantage to the merely animal functions, but it is an error, certainly, to conclude from this that they may be altogether dispensed with in reference to their effects.”

    Beeton adds that, “It is a question whether, if we had no tea and no coffee, the popular instinct would not seek for and discover the means of replacing them.”

    1863 - Cafe Slavia opens in Prague, and today it remains a landmark and popular restaurant and cafe. Cafe Slavia is  located opposite the National Theatre and frequented by the capital city's acting community.

    In the past it was the often visited by such renown writers as Rainier Maria Wilke, Jaroslav Seifert (1984 Nobel Prize winner), and Franz Kafka. Dvorak and Smetana are among the renown composers who have frequented Cafe Slavia.

    1864 - The Burns coffee roaster is patented by New York's Jabez Burns and is the first machine that doesn't need to be moved away from the fire to discharge the beans after roasting. This was the beginning of modern roasting machines and Burns is considered the grandfather of roasting.

    1865 - James H. Mason patents the coffee percolator in the United States.

    1869 - A coffee plant disease known as coffee leaf rust first shows up on the coffee plants in Ceylon and proceeds to ruin most India coffee plantions and does widespread damage in Asia over the next decade.

    1869 - In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain writes that “Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. The cup is small, it is smeared with grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste.”

    The story goes on to say, “The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch deep. This goes down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way, and produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and coughing for an hour.”

    1870-1880

    1871 - Innovator John Arbuckle and his assistants invent a machine to fill, weigh, seal, and label paper packages of coffee. Arbuckle markets his Arbuckle Ariosa coffee from his New York factory, and the coffee is the first mass produced coffee product to be sold country wide.

    Arbuckle would become the world's largest coffee importer as well as America's largest shipper, owning every South American merchant ship.

    1872 - Selling bulk-roasted coffee to grocery stores in drums and sacks, James Folger founds J.A. Folger Coffee & Company after buying out his partners in Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills Company.

    After James passes away in 1889 the company is run by his son James A. Folger II and continues to grow rapidly. (See 1963.)

    1879 - In The Moral Instructor, Jesse Torrey writes, “Coffee, though a useful medicine, if drunk constantly will at length induce a decay of health, and hectic fever.”

    1880-1890

    1880s - The first caffeinated soft drinks are created.

    1880 - Australia's first coffee plantation is developed, encompassing five hundred acres between Cooktown and New South Wales.

    1880s - Ethiopia's Kingdom of Kaffa where the coffee plant originated produces about 55,000 kilograms of coffee beans.

    1880s - The coffee industry in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii suffers a severe setback due to the Reciprocity Treaty that took effect in 1876. Almost no coffee is exported.

    1880-1886 - Coffee consumption spreads widely in Ethiopia in part due to Emperor Menilek appreciating the beverage and also to Abuna Matewos, the head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, who helped convince the clergy that it was not a Muslim drink.

    1880 - Mark Twain writes in A Tramp Abroad, “After a few months' acquaintance with European ‘coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.”

    1881 - In The Appledore Cookbook, Maria Parloa writes, “Persons drinking coffee, as a general rule, east less, though coffee, and also tea, have little direct food value; but they retard the waste of the tissues, and so take the place of food.”

    1882 - The New York Coffee Exchange is established.

    1883 - The Buckeye Cookbook states that, “Physicians say that coffee without cream is more wholesome, particularly for persons of weak digestion. There seems to be some element in the coffee which combined with the milk, forms a leathery coating on the stomach, and impairs digestion.”

    1885 - The coffee roasting method of using natural gas to produce hot air becomes common.

    1887 - Coffee first arrives in Tonkin, Indo-China.

    1886 - Joel Cheek, a former grocer, names the coffee blend called “Maxwell House” after the Nashville, Tennessee hotel where it the popular blend.

    1890-1900

    1890 - World coffee prices rise steeply. In the Kona region on the Big Island of Hawaii this leads to significant new investments in the coffee industry by European and American investors.

    1890 - Cafe de Flore opens in Paris in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres district. The coffee house becomes a renowned meeting place of intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers of the day including Giacometti, Picasso, Apollinaire, and Hemingway, and this is where Simone de Beauvoir discussed the philosophy of existentialism with Jean-Paul Sartre. The cafe is still open today.

    1890s - The French Press coffee maker, then known as the plunger filter, is invented. A filter compartment is lowered into the hot water and then pulled up when the coffee has been properly brewed and before it can become too bitter. Some accounts say the French Press was not invented until the Italian Calimani developed it in 1933.

    1891 - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a physician and writer, opines in Over the Teacups that, “The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.”

    1893 - Coffee plants from Brazil are brought to Tanzania (Tanganyika) and Kenya where they are cultivated. This marked the end of the coffee plant's journey around the globe with a new varietal now being planted near its Ethiopian origins.

    1894 - Budapest's first coffee house opens and is called Cafe New York - by the turn of the century there would be more than 500 coffee houses in Budapest. Though it was destroyed in World War II, Cafe New York reopened  in 2006 with a wonderful effort to restore its former glory including frescos on the ceiling, ball lamps, and a gallery.

    1896 - Coffee takes hold in Queensland, Australia.

    1899 - There is an oversupply in the world coffee market causing coffee prices to plummet. Within one year, in the Kona Coffee growing region of the Big Island of Hawaii all of the large plantations fail and the coffee industry nearly disappears.

    The plantations are split up into small parcels of around ten acres and leased to coffee farmers, many of whom are Japanese immigrants (about four out of five Kona coffee farmers) who had initially come to the Islands to work on sugarcane plantations.

    This begins a new era of small farms in the Kona coffee industry. A typical lease required the farmers to give pay about $30 per hear plus part of the coffee crop. Some leases required the farmers to pay with half of their crop.

    Next see Coffee History / 1900-1950

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