The German engineering company Quisisana opened the world's first automated restaurant (Automat) in Berlin, utilizing coin-operated mechanical glass vending slots to distribute hot food, coffee, and beer without any visible waiters or human staff. Expanding rapidly to New York City under Horn & Hardart in 1902, the Automat became an absolute urban cultural phenomenon, giving millions of working-class citizens access to cheap, fast, and hygienic meals in a gleaming, modern architectural space that epitomized the efficiency of the machine age.

The eerie, mechanical experience of dining alone from a wall of glass slots without human interaction became a central visual motif in early twentieth-century urban poetry and realist art. Poets used the Automat setting in their verses as a powerful, multi-layered literary metaphor to analyze urban isolation, the mechanization of basic human care, and the absolute homogenization of the modern city workforce.