1453 : The Ottoman Turks introduce coffee to Constantinople.

1475 : Kiva Han, the world's first coffee shop, opens in Constantinople.

1511 : A four verse poem to coffee is written in Mecca.

1554 : Constantinople opens two coffeehouses.

1600 : Europeans added chocolate to their coffee.

1600 : The first coffee mill is created in London.

1615 : Venice introduces coffee to Europe.

1668 : Coffee replaces beer as New York's City's favorite breakfast drink.

1668 : Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse opens in London. This popular haunt of merchants and maritime insurance agents becomes Lloyd's of London, the world's best-known insurance company.

1670s : Dorothy Jones of Boston becomes the first American coffee trader after acquiring a license to sell coffee.

1680s : Adding milk to coffee becomes popular after a French physician recommends cafe au lait for medicinal purposes.

1680s : William Penn purchases a pound of coffee in New York for $4.

1683 : After the Polish-Habsburg army liberates Vienna from the second Turkish siege in 1683,, Franz Georg Kolschitzky, a Viennese who had lived in Turkey, recognizes abandoned sacks of "dry black fodder" as coffee. The Polish king Jan III Sobieski grants the sacks to Kolschitzky who opens central Europe's first coffee house and later refines the brew by filtering out the grounds.

1683 : The first Parisian cafe opens. Before then, coffee in Europe was only sold by street vendors.

1689 : France's King Louis XIV adds sugar to coffee and starts a trend.

1715 : Venetian coffee shop merchants tout coffee through leaflets, the first known example of advertising for coffee shops.

1716 : Berlin opens its first coffee house.

1721 : Brazil begins to cultivate coffee plants, using seedlings smuggled from Paris.

1727 : Bach writes his coffee cantata.

1732 : Venice boasts over 200 coffee shops.

1763 : Britains's tea tax not only led to the "Boston Tea Party," it led Americans to switch from tea to coffee, as an expression of freedom.

1773 : To preserve the country's wealth, Prussia's Frederick the Great tries to block green coffee imports. After a public outcry, he backs down.

1775 : A U.S. wholesale coffee roasting company begins business. This same year marks the first U.S. newspaper ad featuring coffee.

1790 : A prototype espresso machine is created in France.

1822 : The manual coffee grinder becomes commonplace among affluent North Americans.

1850 : Joel Cheek, a former grocer, names his popular coffee blend "Maxwell House," in honor of the Nashville hotel that serves it.

1870 : Harry Fenn, American author, is acclaimed after publishing Picturesque Palestine, including drawings such as the nearby depiction of a Jerusalem

1886 : The vacuum pack's invention allows roasted coffee to be preserved.

1898 : The fate of local roasting shops and coffee mills is sealed when Hills Bros. begins packing roasted coffee in vacuum tins.

1900 : Chicago chemist Satori Kato invents the first soluble "instant" coffee.

1901 : The first commercial espresso machine is manufactured in Italy.

1906 : George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala, creates Red E Coffee, the first mass-produced instant coffee, after he notices a powdery substance forming on the spout of his silver coffee carafe.

1906 : Melitta Bentz, a Dresden housewife, uses paper taken from her son's notebook to filter out unwanted residues.

1938 : Nestle invents freeze-dried coffee after Brazil asks it to create a use for the county's coffee surpluses. Nescafe is first introduced in Switzerland.

1946 : Achilles Gaggia perfects the espresso machine in Italy.

1971 : Starbucks opens its first store in Seattle's Pike Place public market.