The vending machine helped facilitate the institutionalization of that most venerated America tradition, the coffee break. In fact the phrase was the 1952 invention of the Pan American Coffee Bureau. Supported by its $2 million a year budget, the bureau launched a radio, newspaper, and magazine campaign with the theme, “Give Yourself a Coffee Break–And Get What Coffee Gives to You.” The bureau gave a name and official sanction to a practice that had begun during the war in defense plants, when time off for coffee gave workers a needed moment of relaxation along with a caffeine jolt. The extraordinary ad blitz also was picked up as a straight news story. “Within a very short space,” Charles Lindsay, the manager of the bureau, wrote late in 1952, “the coffee-break had been so thoroughly publicized that the phrase had become a part of our language.”