The coffee plant is native to Ethiopia, but the first evidence of coffee beans being turned into a beverage comes from fifteenth-century Yemen. The fashion for this black, bitter drink spread across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, reaching Europe in the late sixteenth century. Although hand-operated spice mills had been in use since the 1400s, coffee beans continued to be ground using the more basic technology of mortar and pestle, or by millstones. Even as late as 1620, when the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America on the Mayflower, all they brought with them for grinding coffee was an adapted mortar-and-pestle device.
In the 1660s a certain Nicholas Book, ‘living at the Sign of the Frying Pan in St Tulies Street’ in London, publicized himself as the only man known to make mills that could grind coffee to powder, but he was not necessarily the inventor of the machine he manufactured. The first US patent for a coffee grinder was issued in 1798 to Thomas Bruff of Maryland, who, when he was not grinding coffee, was Thomas Jefferson’s dentist.
From William Hartston; The Things that Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything; Atlantic Books; 2011