Electric Toaster - History - Before The Pop-up Toaster

Before The Pop-up Toaster

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. Simple utensils for toasting bread over open flames appeared in the early 19th century.

The first electric bread toaster was created by Alan MacMasters in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1893, Crompton, Stephen J. Cook & Company of the UK marketed an electric, iron-wired 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, mostly only at night.

In 1905, Irishman Conor Neeson (1877–1944) of Detroit, Michigan, and his employer, American chemist, electrical engineer, inventor and entrepreneur William Hoskins (1862–1934) of Chicago, Illinois, invented (and in 1906 patented) chromel, an alloy from which could be made the first high-resistance wire of the sort used in all early electric heating appliances (and many modern ones). The first US patent application for an electric toaster was filed by George Schneider of the American Electrical Heater Company of Detroit. AEH's proximity to Hoskins Manufacturing and the fact that the patent was filed only two months after the Marsh patents suggests collaboration and that the device was to use chromel wiring. One of the first applications the Hoskins company had considered for chromel was toasters, but eventually abandoned such efforts to focus on making just the wire itself.

At least two other brands of toasters had been introduced commercially around the time General Electric submitted their first patent application in 1909 for one, the GE model D-12, designed by technician Frank Shailor, "the first commercially successful electric toaster".

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 the toaster with automatic bread turner. The company also produced the "toaster that turns toast." Before this, electric toasters cooked bread on one side and then it was flipped by hand to toast the other side. Copeman's toaster turned the bread around without having to touch it.

The next development was the semi-automatic toaster, which turned off the heating element automatically after the bread toasted, using either a clockwork mechanism or a bimetallic strip. However, the toast was still manually lowered and raised from the toaster via a lever mechanism.