Nescaf instant coffee was comercially introduced in Switzerland by the Nestl company, as it assists the Brazilian government in solving its coffee surplus problem. In 1881, Dr. Satori Kato of Japan presented the first instant coffee during the Pan-American World Fair. It was patented in 1903 in the U.S. Nestl improved the production process. Instant coffee is made with a blend of beans, mixed in a blending drum, roasted and ground, then brewed in huge percolators, sprayed into a heated stainless steel dryer to remove all water, and the coffee is packed as small granules.

In 1991, a University of Manchester scientist announced the finding a planet outside of solar system. Andrew G. Lyne of the University of Manchester subsequently retracted his claim for a planet around pulsar PSR 1829-10 at the Jan 1992 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta. He said that the modulation of radio waves coming from the pulsar was caused not by the presence of a planet but was in fact an artifact of the Earth's motion around the Sun. That possibility that had been considered but then discounted in earlier studies of the data. The first exoplanets (and were later confirmated) were announced in an article in Nature in 1992 by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail.