Owing to the hustle bustle of daily life, the amount of free time available keeps decreasing as the free offers keep expiring and the bill amounts keep prospering. This is where automation comes into play. This is why there are so many home appliances being manufactured to allow people more time to do other things.

Americans consume over 4 billion cups of coffee every year. It is a chief beverage. Coffee has some great effects, and coffee drinking experience is great when it is prepared carefully, but who really has the time? And in this hectic atmosphere, along comes the automatic coffee maker.

It would be foolish to search for a modern kitchen that has all the other amenities, that provide home and kitchen automation, yet not find an automatic coffee maker, especially if the house belongs to a java lover.

What is interesting is that, an automatic coffee maker is not some technological masterpiece that was invented a few years ago. Believe it or not, they have been around since the nineteenth century. People have been using automatic coffee makers for quite a long time. These coffee makers use the same working principles as modern automatic coffee makers, but using means they are more primitive. Like the drop coffee maker. This gadget uses the methods involve in drip-brew and percolating coffee making processes, and combines them with water, heated with the aid of electricity to make coffee without any further manual action.

One of the earliest automatic coffee makers was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century and it is known as the percolator. The percolator uses force that can be natural, as in gravity, or produced artificially with steam. The water is thus forced to mix up with the coffee beans in order to extract their flavor. Once this has gone on for long enough, the coffee beans are allowed to either settle down or they are removed to keep the coffee flavored water that you are interested in anyway.

The vacuum brewer is one more example of an automatic coffee maker. The vacuum brewer has got two chambers, one on top of the other. The bottom one is filled with water and the top one is filled with coffee beans. This contraption is then placed over a heating source like a stove or a heater. The heat causes the water to evaporate and expand, and it rises into the upper chamber as steam. And steam, being hot and all, mixes in with those coffee beans and forces them to release their flavor containing chemicals. This goes on till the bottom chamber is completely free of water, all of it having evaporated to the upper part. Then the heat is turned off. The bottom chamber cools and creates a kind of vacuum that sucks down the coffee flavored water, from the upper part. Voila, coffee is ready!

Modern automatic coffee makers don't deviate too much except that the vacuum is more perfect and temperature can be controlled with digital displays to get it just right.