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Italian Industrialist Passes Away, Has His Ashes Interred in His Company’s Most Famous Design

You undoubtedly recognize this object:

However, unless you got an “A” in History of Industrial Design 101, you may not know the story behind it. Here it is.

If you wanted an espresso in early-20th-Century Italy, you put your hat on and tramped down to your local coffee bar. They had these fancy, expensive steam-driven machines that created the pressure required to make the delicious black stuff. Working-class people never had espresso in their own kitchens because there was no way to make one.

That began to change in the 1930s, when an Italian metalworker named Alfonso Bialetti reportedly had a Eureka moment at home. According to William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa’s “Deconstructing Product Design: Exploring the Form, Function, Usability, Sustainability, and Commercial Success of 100 Amazing Products”:

While watching his wife do laundry, Alfonso Bialetti observed the workings of their primitive washing machine: a fire, a bucket, and a lid with a tube coming out of it. The bucket was filled with soapy water, sealed with the lid, and then brought to a boil over the fire, at which point the vaporized soapy water was pushed up through the tube and expelled on to the laundry. Bialetti imagined a similar mechanism for coffee, one in which a lower chamber filled with boiling water would force steam up through coffee grounds and then condense in an upper chamber.

Bialetti envisioned the process going like this:

The enterprising Bialetti began working with inventor Luigi di Ponti to create a series of prototypes. It was decided that this percolator would be made from aluminum, as stainless steel was hard to come by due to an Italian embargo (thanks, Mussolini). The Moka Express device that they created was ready by 1933, enabling working-class folk to make espresso in their own kitchens, and the octagonal-in-cross-section form would become iconic.

Not for a while, though. While Bialetti managed to move 70,000 units before World War II put a damper on things, it wasn’t until his son, Renato, took over that the Moka really took off.

Renato was a marketing genius. After being handed the reins to his father’s company in 1946, he began a billboard marketing blitz across Italian cities for the Moka. In the early ‘50s he then commissioned artist Paul Campani to create a logo and mascot that became known as L'omino coi baffi, “The little man with the moustache,” and had it emblazoned on both the product and the ads. (The cartoon man was either based on Alfonso or Renato, depending on whom you listen to.) 

Here’s a Moka Express TV commercial of the era:

Sales took off and the Moka Express line was eventually expanded into a multitude of sizes. Incredibly, the original design lasted for seven decades before eventually being tweaked, and some 330 million have been sold to date. The Bialetti company itself also expanded, growing into today’s Bialetti Industrie S.P.A., a global kitchenware giant.

Renato Bialetti passed away last week, aged 93. His children, following his wishes according to Quartz, had him interred within an urn shaped like an extra-large Moka Express.

Image via ABC

Note: Some publications credit Luigi di Ponti with the invention of the Moka. We’re going to stick with the MoMA and the New York Times’ assessment that Alfonso Bialetti was the guy.