Non-electric toasters 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. From the 16th century onward, long-handled forks were used as toasters, "sometimes with fitment for resting on bars of grate or fender."
Wrought-iron scroll-ornamented toasters appeared in
Scotland in the 17th century. Another wrought-iron toaster was documented to be from 18th-century England. The bar-gate toaster or lark spit also appeared in the 18th century. Utensils for toasting bread over open flames appeared in America in the early 19th century, including decorative implements made from wrought iron. File:Brödrost - Hallwylska museet - 86976.tif|Toasters before the use of electricity File:D12cord.jpg|Toaster with an
Edison screw fitting, File:General Electric Model D-12 toaster, 1910s.jpg|General Electric Model D-12 toaster, from 1910s
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 that 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 could not be used for the toaster. The first stand-alone electric toaster, the Eclipse, was made in 1893 by Crompton & Company of Chelmsford, Essex. Its bare wires toasted bread on one side at a time. 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 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.
Dual-side toasting and automated pop-up technologies #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 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, began 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 radiating off 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 radiating off 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.
Toasting technology from the 1990s to the present Several projects have added advanced technology to toasters. In 1990, Simon Hackett and John Romkey created "The Internet Toaster", a toaster that could be controlled by 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 that 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 to solder electronic components to
circuit boards. == Similar inventions ==