"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
Albert Einstein, scientist
The cultivation of the coffee bean can be traced back to tenth-century Ethiopia. It was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century and the Americas in the mid- 1600s, after which it proved an extremely popular beverage. But preparing it correctly, brewed from ground coffee beans, could be time-consuming.
It was not until 1901 that a Japanese-American chemist named Satori Kato, using an earlier process he pioneered for making instant tea, created the world's first soluble instant coffee. Kato's coffee, which he called "Sanka," though initially bitter and pungent, was a concentrated solution made from coffee beans and water that was dehydrated leaving a powdery residue, which dissolves easily in hot water.
While living in Guatemala in 1909, Belgian-born chemist George C. Washington was the first to market mass-produced coffee with his "Red E Coffee" brand, after observing dried coffee forming on the spouts of coffee pots. It dominated the instant coffee market in the United States for the next thirty years.
Although coffee sales boomed in the United States in the 1920s due to prohibition, it was not until 1938 that the Brazilian government approached the Nestle Company for assistance in reducing its massive coffee surplus. Nestle developed a spray-dried process that resulted in a more palatable, dehydrated coffee using soluble carbohydrates.
