The First Coffee Roaster, About 1400

When La Roque speaks of his father bringing back to Marseilles from Constantinople in 1644 the instruments for making coffee, he undoubtedly refers to the individual devices which at that time in the Orient included the roaster plate, the cylinder grinder, the small long-handled boiler, and fenjeyns (findjans), the little porcelain drinking cups.

The First Cylinder Roaster, About 1650

When Bernier visited Grand Cairo about the middle of the seventeenth century, in all the city's thousand-odd coffee houses he found but two persons who understood the art of roasting the bean.

About 1650, there was developed the individual cylinder coffee roaster made of metal, usually tin plate or tinned copper, suggested by the original Turkish pocket grinder. This was designed for use over open fires in braziers. There appeared about this time also a combined making-and-serving metal pot which was undoubtedly the original of the common type of pot that we know today.

There appeared in England about 1660, Elford's white iron machine (sheet iron coated with tin) which was "turned on a spit by a jack.[362]" This was simply a larger size of the individual cylinder roaster, and was designed for family or commercial use. Modifications were developed by the French and Dutch. In the seventeenth century the Italians produced some beautiful designs in wrought-iron coffee roasters.