ANSWERS: 1
  • The best thing to happen to bread since. . .well, sliced bread, but the toaster was actually invented before sliced bread! Depends on who you ask though. . . Toasting bread began as a method of prolonging the life of bread. It was very common activity in Roman times, 'tostum' is the latin word for scorching or burning. The first electric toaster was invented in 1893 in Great Britain by Crompton and Co (UK) and re-invented in 1909 in the United States. It only toasted one side of the bread at a time and it required a person to stand by and turn it off manually when the toast looked done. Charles Strite invented the modern timer, pop-up toaster in 1919. Now about that sliced bread as an aside. . . Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the bread slicer, which he started working on in 1912. At first, Rohwedder came up with the idea of a device that held the slices together with hat pins (not a success). In 1928, he designed a machine that sliced and wrapped the bread to prevent the sliced bread from going stale. Pre-sliced bread was popularized by Wonder Bread in 1930, helping to spread the toaster's popularity further Another source states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toaster GE released an electric toaster in 1909, patented under the name D-12.(http://www.toaster.org/1900.html) It is widely thought to be the first electric toaster on the market, but there is some controversy. An ad for the Pacific Electric Heating Company's competing Hotpoint brand toaster ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1917, claiming, The First Electrical Bread Toaster a "Hotpoint." Perhaps you didn't know that the very first toaster made was a Hotpoint. That was 12 years ago. (http://www.toaster.org/hotpoint.html) That ad places the Hotpoint's introduction in 1905, the very year Albert Marsh developed Nichrome wire. Nichrome could endure a suitable heat for a long time, and the discovery of such a filament had been the lynchpin of electric toaster development. The pop-up toaster, which ejects the toast after toasting it, was patented by Charles Strite in 1919. In 1925, using a redesigned version of Strite's toaster, the Toastmaster Company began to market the first household toaster that could brown bread on both sides simultaneously, set the heating element on a timer, and eject the toast when finished. By 1926, Charles Strite's Toastmaster was available to the public and was a huge success.

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