Frank Hardart

[1] Frank Hardart Sr. was born as Franz Anton Hardardt in the Bavarian community of Sondernheim, today an urban district of Germersheim, in the Palatinate (at that time a part of the Kingdom of Bavaria) in 1850, the son of Jakob Franz Hardardt II and Franziska Katharina, née Mainzer.

[1] In 1876, Hardart bought a one-way ticket to Philadelphia, with the idea of introducing New Orleans' French-drip coffee to a new market.

He met and married a young Irishwoman named Mary Bruen and in 1886, they moved to Philadelphia to continue Hardart's dream of introducing a new cup of coffee to the masses.

"Horn got only one answer: three words, scribbled on a scrap of paper, stuffed in an envelope with a boarding house return address on it.

Horn & Hardart's success grew as they opened lunchrooms on busy street corners in commercial areas of Philadelphia.

But it wasn't until Hardart traveled to Berlin in 1900 to find out more about the German version, called "automats," that their own business changed.