The Marquis de Sade offers an early hint that people ate chocolate in bars
For centuries Europeans mostly drank chocolate. The bar crept in slowly, and one of its earliest clues comes from a 1779 prison letter in which the Marquis de Sade demanded biscuits that smelled like biting into a chocolate bar. Steam engines, a Dutch press and Swiss and English rivals did the rest.
No single inventor exists. Grinding cocoa is an ancient Mesoamerican skill, and any finely ground cocoa not made into a drink sets solid; the friar Diego Durán wrote that Aztec soldiers carried small balls of ground cocoa as rations. Cocoa reached Europe in the early 16th century, but costly, slow shipping kept it a luxury, usually sold as gritty blocks or sticks to dissolve in water or milk.
Mechanisation began in the late 18th century. Joseph Storrs Fry patented a way to grind beans with a Watt steam engine in 1795, and a mixing machine called the melanger followed in 1811. Swiss makers joined in: François-Louis Cailler founded his factory in 1819 and Philippe Suchard his in 1826. The decisive step came in 1828, when Casparus van Houten patented a hydraulic press that squeezed out roughly half the cocoa butter from the nib, which averages 54 percent fat. That gave the world cocoa powder for drinks and a supply of extra cocoa butter to make smooth, mouldable eating chocolate.
France led at first. An American magazine reported in 1836 that small sweetened bars had caught on there for being nourishing and portable, while British and American chocolate was still largely unsweetened. The pharmacist Antoine Brutus Menier, who began by coating pills in chocolate, launched a yellow-wrapped tablet with six divisions that year. In Turin, hazelnut-rich gianduja became a style of its own before milk chocolate existed.
Britain fought back with John Cadbury's French Eating Chocolate in 1842 and Fry's Chocolat Délicieux à Manger in 1847, often called the first modern chocolate bar although it sold poorly. In Bristol, Fry's went from making roughly 10 tonnes of eating chocolate a year in 1852 to over 1,100 tonnes by 1880, and it made the first British chocolate Easter egg in 1873. Germany's Stollwerck installed vending machines in 1887 and had sold 18 million bars through them by 1890.
Source: Chocolate bar
