Some history of toaster.

The Story:
Retrieved from The Great Idea Finder. www.ideafinder.com
Electric toasters have been in existence for less than 100 years. Yet, people have been consuming bread for the past 6,000 years, and people have been toasting bread since the time of the Romans. Toasting bread makes it crunchier and preserves it, an especially important characteristic for early civilizations. Before the advent of the electric toaster, bread was toasted over an open fire with the help of a variety of simple tools. Toasting bread does more than just preserve it, of course, it changes its nature; bread becomes sweeter, crunchier and the perfect surface on which to spread all sorts of things.

The toaster represents the crest of one wave of technological innovation, it began with a huge effort to electrify the nation. Once homes were wired this created a demand for household appliances, one of which was the toaster.

Even after electricity was introduced to homes across America, the electric toaster was still not a feasible invention. Because the surface of toast needs to be heated to temperatures above 310 degrees Fahrenheit, electric toasters must contain wires with the ability to reach very high temperatures without becoming damaged or starting a fire. Such a wire would have many uses, aside from application to an electric toaster. Therefore, many companies strove to discover it. By March of 1905, an engineer named Albert Marsh discovered that an alloy of nickel and chromium, known as Nichrome, had the properties of the sought after wire.

Shortly after Marsh's discovery, an employee of the American Electric Heater Company named George Schneider applied for a patent for his version of the electric toaster. In the next several years, there were already several people and companies working to develop their own versions of the toaster.

There must have been a number of prototype electric toasters made by companies and garage inventors alike in these early years, but it wasn't until 1909 that the first successful electric toaster was produced. In July, 1909, Frank Shailor of General Electric submitted his patent application for the D-12, considered the first commercially successful electric toaster.

Lloyd Copeman and his wife, Hazel, were window-shopping one day in 1913 and they were looking at an electric toaster displayed in a store window. The normal way a toaster worked at the time was to place the bread on a rack facing the heated electric coils. When the bread was toasted on one side, it was flipped by hand for the toasting of the other side. The story goes that Hazel, turned to her husband and said, “Lloyd, couldn’t you invent a toaster that would automatically turn the toast?” There must be some truth to this as the toaster patent was issued to Hazel B. Copeman in 1914. This was the first toaster that allowed the toast to be “turned” without touching the bread. It was called the “Automatic ” toaster. The Copeman's, both Hazel and Lloyd were issued five toaster related patents during 1914.

Many companies who wished to produce electric toasters were forced to pay royalties to Copeman or find a different way to “turn the toast”. Some swung the toast around in little baskets. Another toaster carried the bread past the heating elements on a little conveyer belt, toasting it as it traveled along.

As with the electric stove, the first Westinghouse toasters were identical in every way to the Copeman toaster other than carrying the Westinghouse name and the words “Copeman Patents” on the nameplate.

In the decade following the invention of the toaster, toasters sparked a great deal of public interest, and a variety of toaster models were produced. During World War I, a master mechanic in a plant in Stillwater, Minnesota decided to do something about the burnt toast served in the company cafeteria. To circumvent the need for continual human attention, Charles Strite incorporated springs and a variable timer, and filed the patent for his pop-up toaster on May 29, 1919. He intended the device would be sold to the restaurant trade.

Charles P. Strite, born in Minneapolis, MN, received patent on October 18, 1921 for the bread-toaster. That same year Strite formed the Waters Genter Company to manufacture his toaster and market it to restaurants. Receiving financial backing from friends, Strite oversaw production of the first one hundred hand-assembled toasters, which were shipped to the Childs restaurant chain.

In 1926, using a redesigned version of Strite's toaster, the first automatic pop-up toaster was introduced by the Waters-Genter Company, which was eventually acquired into the Edison electric empire The amazing device was called the "Toastmaster," and bearing a triple-loop logo inspired by its heating elements, it heralded the modern age of kitchen appliances. The name and the logo endure in the 21st century, having survived many corporate transitions to itself become the name of the corporation. By the end of 1926 Charles Strite's Toastmaster was available to the public and was a huge success.

The next major breakthrough for the toaster came in 1928. Prior to then, the local bakery sold bread in loaves. But Otto Frederick Rohwedder, an inventor changed the history by creating the presliced-loaf and sealed-bag process. The Continental Baking Company altered the course of bread forever in 1930 when it introduced sliced Wonder Bread. Sales were slow at first as suspicious consumers were slow to accept a pre-sliced bread, but convenience overruled apprehension and soon everyone wanted sliced Wonder Bread on their dinner table.

By 1933, only five years after the bread slicer's introduction, American bakeries were turning out more sliced than unsliced bread. This gave a boost to another new invention: Charles Strite's spring-loaded, automatic, pop-up toaster which had been languishing on the shelves since 1926. With Rohwedder's standardized slices on the market, Strife's invention suddenly made sense. The automatic (pop-up) toaster becomes a standard in American households

The Charles Strite home toasters produced in 1926 are not very different from the toasters that can be found in many homes today. By the 1960's, the toaster was common enough and cheap enough that they were available to virtually every middle class family in America. By the 1980's the slots of toasters grew, enabling bagels and wider bread to be toasted. Additionally, heat-resistant plastic and microchip controls were used in the making of the toaster, making it even more economical and efficient than ever before.