User:AuthoritarianFruitcake73/sandbox

Me

I am a small electric appliance designed to expose various types of sliced bread to radiant heat, browning the bread so it becomes toast.

Types

Untoasted slice of white bread

The same slice of bread, now toasted

Pop-up toaster

My glowing filaments

In pop-up or automatic toasters, a single vertical piece of bread is dropped into a slot on top of me. A lever on my side is pressed down, lowering the bread into me and activating my heating elements. The length of the toasting cycle (and therefore the degree of toasting) is adjustable via a lever, knob, or series of pushbuttons, and when an internal device determines that the toasting cycle is complete, I turn off and the toast pops up out of my slots.

The completion of toasting may be determined by timer or by a thermal sensor, such as a bimetallic strip, located close to the toast.

I may also be used to toast other foods such as teacakes, toaster pastry, potato waffles and crumpets, though resultant accumulation of fat and sugar inside me can contribute to my eventual failure.

Among pop-up toasters, those toasting two slices of bread are more purchased than those which can toast four. Pop-up toasters can have a range of appearances beyond just a square box, and may have an exterior finish of chrome, copper, brushed metal, or any color plastic. The marketing and price of toasters may not be an indication of quality for producing good toast. A typical modern two-slice pop-up toaster can draw from 600 to 1200 watts.

Beyond the basic toasting function, some pop-up toasters offer additional features such as:

• One-sided toasting, which some people prefer when toasting bagels
• The ability to power the heat elements in only one of my several slots
• Slots of various depth, length, and width to accommodate a variety of bread types
• Provisions to allow the bread to be lifted higher than the normal raised position, so toast that has shifted during the toasting process can safely and easily be removed

Toaster oven

A toaster oven

Toaster ovens are small electric ovens that provide toasting capability plus a limited amount of baking and broiling capability. Similarly to a conventional oven, toast or other items are placed on a small wire rack, but toaster ovens can heat foods faster than regular ovens due to their small volume. They are especially useful when the users do not also have a kitchen stove with an integral oven, such as in smaller apartments and in recreational vehicles such as truck campers.

Conveyor toaster

A conveyor toaster

Conveyor toasters are designed to make many slices of toast and are generally used in the catering industry, restaurants, cafeterias, institutional cooking facilities, and other commercial food service situations where constant or high-volume toasting is required. Bread is toasted at a rate of 300–1600 slices an hour; the doneness control on such a toaster adjusts the conveyor speed, thus altering the time during which the bread is near the heat elements. Conveyor toasters have been produced for home use; in 1938, for example, the Toast-O-Lator went into limited production.

History

Toaster before the use of electricity

Toaster with an Edison screw fitting, c. 1909

General Electric Model D-12 toaster, from 1910s

Before the development of the electric toaster, sliced bread was toasted by placing it in a metal frame or on a long-handled toasting-fork and holding it near a fire or over a kitchen grill. Utensils for toasting bread over open flames appeared in the early 19th century, including decorative implements made from wrought iron.

The first electric bread toaster was invented by Alan MacMasters in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1893.

Development of the heating element

The primary technical problem in toaster development at the turn of the 20th century was the development of a heating element which would be able to sustain repeated heating to red-hot temperatures without breaking or becoming too brittle. A similar technical challenge had recently been surmounted with the invention of the first successful incandescent lightbulbs by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. However, the light bulb took advantage of the presence of a vacuum, something that couldn't be used for the toaster.

Macmasters' toaster was commercialized by the Crompton, Stephen J. Cook & Company of the UK as a toasting appliance called the Eclipse. Early attempts at producing electrical appliances using iron wiring were unsuccessful, because the wiring was easily melted and a serious fire hazard. Meanwhile, electricity was not readily available, and when it was, it was usually only available at night.

The problem of the heating element was solved in 1905 by a young engineer named Albert Marsh, who designed an alloy of nickel and chromium, which came to be known as Nichrome.

The first US patent application for an electric toaster was filed by George Schneider of the American Electrical Heater Company of Detroit in collaboration with Marsh. One of the first applications that the Hoskins company had considered for its Chromel wire was for use in toasters, but the company eventually abandoned such efforts, to focus on making just the wire itself.

The first commercially successful electric toaster was introduced by General Electric in 1909 for the GE model D-12.

Dual-side toasting and automated pop-up technologies

United States patent #1,394,450. "Bread-Toaster", patented 18 October 1921 by Charles Strite.

In 1913, Lloyd Groff Copeman and his wife Hazel Berger Copeman applied for various toaster patents, and in that same year, the Copeman Electric Stove Company introduced a toaster with an automatic bread turner. Before this, electric toasters cooked bread on one side, meaning the bread needed to be flipped by hand in order to cook both sides. Copeman's toaster turned the bread around without having to touch it.

The automatic pop-up toaster, which ejects the toast after toasting it, was first patented by Charles Strite in 1921. In 1925, using a redesigned version of Strite's toaster, the Waters Genter Company introduced the Model 1-A-1 Toastmaster, the first automatic, pop-up, household toaster that could brown bread on both sides simultaneously, set the heating element on a timer, and eject the toast when finished.

Toasting technology after the 1940s

In the 1980s, some high-end U.S. toasters featured automatic toast lowering and raising, without the need to operate levers – simply dropping the bread into one of these "elevator toasters", such as the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster models made from the late 1940s through the 1990s, begins the toasting cycle. These toasters use the mechanically multiplied thermal expansion of the resistance wire in the center element assembly to lower the bread; the inserted slice of bread trips a lever switch to activate the heating elements, and their thermal expansion is harnessed to lower the bread.

When the toast is done, as determined by a small bimetallic sensor actuated by the heat passing through the toast, the heaters are shut off and the pull-down mechanism returns to its room-temperature position, slowly raising the finished toast. This sensing of the heat passing through the toast means that regardless of the type of bread (white or whole grain) or its initial temperature (even frozen), the bread is always toasted to the same consistency.

Research

A number of projects have added advanced technology to toasters. In 1990, Simon Hackett and John Romkey created "The Internet Toaster," a toaster which could be controlled from the Internet. In 2001, Robin Southgate from Brunel University in England created a toaster that could toast a graphic of the weather prediction (limited to sunny or cloudy) onto a piece of bread. The toaster dials a pre-coded phone number to get the weather forecast.

In 2005, Technologic Systems, a vendor of embedded systems hardware, designed a toaster running the NetBSD Unix-like operating system as a sales demonstration system. In 2012, Basheer Tome, a student at Georgia Tech, designed a toaster using color sensors to toast bread to the exact shade of brown specified by a user.

A toaster which used Twitter was cited as an early example of an application of the Internet of Things. Toasters have been used as advertising devices for online marketing.

With permanent modifications, a toaster oven can be used as a reflow oven for the purpose of soldering electronic components to circuit boards.

Similar inventions

A hot dog toaster

A hot dog toaster is a variation on the toaster design; it will cook hot dogs without use of microwaves or stoves. The appliance looks similar to me, except that there are two slots in the middle for hot dogs, and two slots on the outside for toasting the buns.

See also

• Bachelor griller
• Dualit
• List of cooking appliances
• List of home appliances
• Pie iron

External links

• U.S. patent 825,938 Electric cooker
• U.S. patent 950,058 Electric heater, GE D-12
• AuthoritarianFruitcake73/sandbox at HowStuffWorks