1806 Napoleon declares France self-sufficient and promotes chicory over coffee.

1850 James Folger arrives in San Francisco during the Gold Rush and makes his fortune from coffee.

1864 American Jabez Burns invents an efficient, self-dumping roaster.

1869 Coffee rust fungus, hemileia vastatrix, appears in Ceylon and soon wipes out the East Indies coffee industry.

1871 John Arbuckle opens a coffee factory in New York and makes millions from his pre-roasted, packaged, and branded Ariosa coffee.

1878 Caleb Chase and James Sanborn form Chase & Sanborn.

1881 The New York Coffee Exchange opens.

1892 Joel Cheek invents Maxwell House Coffee blend in Nashville, Tennessee.

1900 Hills Brothers introduces vacuum-packed canned coffee. Tokyo chemist Sartori Kato introduces instant coffee; it is sold the following year at the Pan American Exposition.

1901 Italian Luigi Bezzera invents first commercial espresso machine.

1906 In Bremen, Germany, Ludwig Roselius patents Kaffee Hag, the first decaffeinated coffee. In France, it is called Sanka (from sans caffeine).

1908 German housewife Melitta Bentz makes a coffee filter using her son's blotting paper.

1911 The National Coffee Roasters Association is founded; it later becomes the National Coffee Association.

1918 The U. S. Army requisitions all of G. Washington's instant coffee for troops in World War I.

1920 Prohibition of alcohol enacted in USA, making coffee and coffeehouses even more popular.

1938 Nestle introduces Nescafe, an improved instant coffee, just before World War II. Maxwell House follows with its instant brand.

1946 U.S. per capita coffee consumption reaches 19.8 pounds.

1960 The Colombian Coffee Federation debuts the character of Juan Valdez, the humble coffee grower, with his mule.

1965 Boyd Coffee introduces the Flav-R-Flo brewing system, pionerring the filter and cone home brewer.

1966 Dutch immigrant Alfred Peet opens Peet's Coffee in Berkeley, California, at what is considered the beginning of the specialty coffee revolution.

1970 Italian Luigi Goglio invents a one-way valve to let coffee de-gas without contact with oxygen.

1971 Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker open Starbucks in Seattle.

1975 The Black Frost in Brazil decimates the coffee harvest, leading to high prices over the next two years.

1982 The national charter for the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) is created; specialty coffee companies are invited to join as "charter members."

1987 Howard Schultz buys Starbucks and begins to turn it into a worldwide specialty coffee chain.

1988 In the Netherlands, the Max Havelaar seal certifies Fair Trade coffee. Transfair USA follows suit in 1999.

2006 Specialty coffee accounts for 40% of the U. S. retail coffee market.

2007 The 25th anniversary of the founding of the Specialty Coffee Association of America is celebrated. Coffee is the world's second most valuable legal traded commodity, after oil.