Toaster from the 1920s. pic.twitter.com/LmULdBpcuO
— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) December 22, 2023
The art deco toaster from 1929 is the Universal E9410, aka the “Sweetheart”, invented by George E. Cubtiss according to this reddit post.
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Sorry, all I get is: This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.
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Same here Roxie, seems it was removed. I found the same 14 second gif animation on TikTok. The best part is how it flips the bread, which you can only see in the video. Here is a still image I found on another site:
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That is amazing. Here is a post I originally made on Ratburger.org on 2019-04-24 about what may be the most elegant toaster ever made.
When I was a kid, we had a Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster. Everybody did. It was elegant—its advertising tag line was “Automatic Beyond Belief”. There were no controls: you simply dropped the bread in the slot(s), and it glided magically into the toaster. When it was perfectly toasted, it came back up, ready to eat. There was no knob to adjust the time or temperature: it monitored the heat radiated from the surface of the bread, which is proportional to its colour, so each slice was perfectly toasted every time. Here is a video dissection of this remarkable appliance.
These toasters were manufactured from 1949 through 1997 when they were displaced by cheap imported “burn-o-matic” models with a lever and open-loop toasting control. If somebody built something like this today, it would probably contain a microcontroller, servomotors, limit switches, and sensors to do the job. The Radiant Control had none of these: in a masterful example of engineering elegance, the heating element itself, which had to be present to accomplish the primary mission, was made to do the job automatically. How did they do it? Watch the video or, if you want more details, see U.S. patents 2,667,828 (1948) and 2,459,170 (1942).
There is a Web site devoted to the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster.
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Thanks, Owen!
Looks manually operated and elegant.
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Do you use TikTok?