Espresso machines with group heads are ubiquitous (at least in Australia), I don't know of any cafe here that makes espresso without an espresso machine of group head design.
Now I'm curious what cafes and coffee shops commonly used to make espresso before the innovation of the group head. Maybe they didn't serve espresso and only did drip/filter coffee instead?
Lots of commercially machines like slayer have a portafilter but that's where the similarity ends.
I wonder whether the elektra was based on the design of the machine we see there.
I see a fair number of articles like this. "Check out this awesome piece of history. I took a picture with my Motorola V300 with 0.3MP camera circa 2004, reduced it using shareware of questionable quality from VGA to CGA to save space and uploaded it to my website"
The only other people to buy one would be hotels or tycoons, and I don't think Italy had the same cultural cachet back then
One day, someone decided to mechanize this process, and attached it to a motor. The whole village gathered to watch the stunt, and my dad says the machine literally exploded from the speed.
No one was injured but parts of the machine could be found far away from the centre for a long time.
