Angelo Moriondo was born in Turin on June 6, 1851, into a family of luxury makers: his grandfather founded a liqueur company, and his father Giacomo, with Angelo’s uncle Agostino and a cousin, founded the chocolate firm Moriondo and Gariglio. Angelo bought the Grand Hotel Ligure in Piazza Carlo Felice and the American Bar in the Galleria Nazionale on Via Roma, and ran into the same daily bottleneck as every venue of the era: steeped coffee took around ten minutes, far too slow for a crowded lobby. With a mechanic named Martina building under his supervision, he developed a bulk brewer that used separate supplies of pressurized boiling water and steam to push water through a bed of coffee.

The machine debuted at the 1884 General Expo of Turin and won a bronze medal, and on May 16, 1884, Moriondo was granted a six year patent for the economic and instantaneous preparation of coffee. He updated it that November, registered it in Paris in October 1885, and patented each later improvement, yet he never built a factory or licensed the design. Instead he kept a handful of hand built machines inside his own hotel and bar as an exclusive draw. When he died in Marentino on May 31, 1914, the innovation had stayed in his own establishments, and later inventors such as Luigi Bezzera and Desiderio Pavoni put their names on machines sold worldwide.

• Coffee historian Ian Bersten credits it as the first machine to control steam and water separately as they passed through the coffee.
• It was a high capacity batch brewer for a busy hotel, not a single cup espresso maker.
• Filing foreign patents in the 1880s meant hiring lawyers, drafting schematics, and navigating foreign bureaucracy.
• Moriondo treated exclusivity itself as advertising: to taste the coffee, customers had to walk through his doors.
• Google marked his 171st birthday with a worldwide Doodle on June 6, 2022.