Antique and Vintage Toasters

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Toast isn’t a 20th-century invention: People had always stabbed slices of bread with sticks and held them over a flame. In the early 19th century, metalsmiths and manufacturers even produced special forks and tong-like utensils with metal cages...
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Toast isn’t a 20th-century invention: People had always stabbed slices of bread with sticks and held them over a flame. In the early 19th century, metalsmiths and manufacturers even produced special forks and tong-like utensils with metal cages at their ends to brown bread. But the toaster as we know it, the plug-in electric toaster, wasn’t possible until the turn of the century. You had to have access to electric current, and electric power grids in the United States were only a dream until Thomas Edison and others started building their own in the late 1800s. Even more importantly, you had to have the right metal to turn an electric current into heat. British inventors made several attempts at electric toasters around the turn of the century, but all of these were dangerous: The iron wires would either catch on fire or melt. Toasting bread with electricity was first made possible in 1905, when American metallurgist Albert L. Marsh developed a nickel-chromium alloy. This alloy, which he patented as “chromel” on February 6, 1906, was low in electrical conductivity, infusible, and resistant to oxidation, which made it the perfect metal to shape into filament wires and coils for heating elements. Shortly after, inventor George Schneider of the American Electrical Heater Company filed a patent for a toaster that was never built. At the time, Marsh was working with an entrepreneur named William Hoskins, who owned a chemistry consulting firm in Chicago. The two formed Hoskins Manufacturing Company and introduced the table cooker ToastStove in 1909. Their toasters and other appliances failed on the market, but they found success licensing Marsh’s chromel wire (now known as “nichrome”) to other appliance manufacturers. In an effort to dodge Marsh’s patent, General Electric patented its own nickel-chromium alloy, called “calorite,” this one with containing iron, in 1908. In 1909, GE introduced its D-12 bread toaster, invented by Frank Shailor, which was a...
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