Who Invented the Espresso Machine? Moriondo, Bezzera, Gaggia and the E61

Ask who invented the espresso machine and you'll get Moriondo. That's right as far as it goes, but it misses what you probably care about. The machine you weigh shots on owes more to a 1961 pump than to an 1884 patent, and the dates in between are messier than most timelines admit.

A word on sources. Much of this history comes from the companies involved, or from trade writers quoting them. We mark who says what. Where they disagree, we show both.

The timeline

Moriondo: the first patent

Moriondo gets the credit for the 1884 patent. He owned two cafés in central Turin, says Perfect Daily Grind's report on the MUMAC museum, and he developed several machines. It's a good reminder that the first person to patent a thing isn't always the one who changes how people drink. Gaggia's history credits the next name with taking the machine to business operators and the press.

Bezzera and Pavoni: the machine becomes a product

The US patent shows the shape of the idea in plain text. It describes a boiler feeding a delivery cock, which forces hot water or steam through a perforated diaphragm and a receptacle holding coffee for one cup. So each cup is brewed fresh. You can see the ancestor of a group head and a portafilter in that. What strikes us most is the assignment on that patent: to Desiderio Pavoni of Milan, in 1903. The man with the design and the man who would sell it were already linked on paper.

The sources tell this bit in different orders. Perfect Daily Grind's 2018 piece has Pavoni acquiring the patent and starting production in 1905. Its 2025 piece credits Bezzera's Tipo Gigante of 1906 as the first commercial machine. Both can be partly true, and we can't settle it from what we read.

These machines ran on steam pressure. Kent Bakke, the former La Marzocco CEO, tells Perfect Daily Grind they reached about 2 bar. So what they made wasn't what you'd call espresso today.

Gaggia: pressure from a piston

The moment crema shows up

Gaggia's history dates the “Lampo” patent to 1938 and a lever-driven piston to 1947, and credits that piston with better extraction and a natural layer of crema. That's the maker's account, so take the heroics lightly. Crema shows CO2, so freshness and roast. It says little about flavor. The picture is a generated close-up, not a historic shot.

What crema tells you

The dates shift depending on who you ask. Perfect Daily Grind's 2018 piece has Gaggia designing a lever machine in 1938 and selling the patent to Faema in 1948. Its 2025 piece places the first commercial lever machine in the 1950s, reaching 9 bar. Those aren't necessarily in conflict, since a patent, a design and a commercial product can be years apart. Our Gaggia overview picks up from there, and semi-automatic vs manual explains why lever machines still have their own category.

The E61: where the semi-automatic begins

This is the entry to remember. Writing for the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History, Jonathan Morris calls the Faema E61 of 1961 the “first commercially successful semi-automatic espresso machine”, and says it outsold every other coffee machine in Italy during the 1960s. His account has three changes:

• An electric pump replaced the manually operated lever.
• A heat exchanger inside the boiler warmed cold water drawn from an outside source. Earlier machines heated the brew water directly in the boiler, and this change allowed continuous delivery.
• A constant nine bars of pressure, which Morris describes as the standard parameter for Italian espresso today.

Those are the bones of today's definition. A semi-automatic is a pump-driven espresso machine in which you grind, dose and tamp the coffee yourself and start and stop the shot, while the machine supplies the water pressure and temperature. Our definition page goes further, and single and dual boilers explains what a heat exchanger does.

Perfect Daily Grind's report from MUMAC credits the design to Ernesto Valente. A US patent in Valente's name, filed in 1961 with an Italian priority date of 1960, describes a head that holds hot water in a chamber so the coffee can steep before full pressure arrives. That sounds a lot like the pre-infusion on modern machines. The patent doesn't mention the E61 by name, so we treat the link as likely and not as proven.

Nine bars, from a pump, since 1961.

The picture above is a generated scene of a bar after closing, not a historic photo. We have no period images on this site.

From the café to your counter

Two later steps explain most of what you pay for today. The La Marzocco GS, in the 1970s, had separate boilers for steam and hot water, according to Perfect Daily Grind. Dual boilers are that idea at home size. Digital temperature controllers, from the late 1980s, became common on most models, and that line leads to PID.

The standards came last. Italy's INEI specifies 9 bar ± 1 at the entry today, and that's why this site keeps repeating the number. The 15 or 20 bar on the box is what the pump can reach. Espresso is brewed at about 9 bar. Our page on the bar number has more.

What this means when you buy

Not much, directly, and that's fine. History won't choose a machine. But it does tell you what to pay attention to: stable pressure from a pump and stable temperature from a boiler. The rest is fit. If you've come for that part, our comparison of semi-automatic machines is the place to go, and the start page begins from what you drink.