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A toaster is a small electric appliance that uses radiant
heat In thermodynamics, heat is defined as the form of energy crossing the boundary of a thermodynamic system by virtue of a temperature difference across the boundary. A thermodynamic system does not ''contain'' heat. Nevertheless, the term is ...
to brown sliced bread into toast.


Types


Pop-up toaster

In pop-up or automatic toasters, a single vertical piece of bread is dropped into a slot on the top of the toaster. A lever on the side of the toaster is pressed down, lowering the bread into the toaster and activating the heating elements. The length of the toasting cycle (and therefore the degree of toasting) is adjustable via a lever, knob, or series of pushbuttons, and when an internal device determines that the toasting cycle is complete, the toaster turns off and the toast pops up out of the slots. The completion of toasting may be determined by a timer or by a thermal sensor, such as a bimetallic strip, located close to the toast. Toasters may also be used to toast other foods such as teacakes, toaster pastry, potato waffles and crumpets, though the resultant accumulation of fat and sugar inside the toaster can contribute to its eventual failure. Among pop-up toasters, those toasting two slices of bread are more purchased than those which can toast four. Pop-up toasters can have a range of appearances beyond just a square box and may have an exterior finish of chrome, copper,
brushed metal A piece of brushed aluminium A collection of brushed stainless steel Breville small appliances A DeLorean featuring non-structural brushed stainless steel panels The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri ">St._Louis,_Missouri.html" ;"title= ...
, or any color plastic. The marketing and price of toasters may not be an indication of quality for producing good toast. A typical modern two-slice pop-up toaster can draw from 600 to 1200
watt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James ...
s. Beyond the basic toasting function, some pop-up toasters offer additional features such as: * One-sided toasting, which some people prefer when toasting
bagel A bagel ( yi, בײגל, translit=beygl; pl, bajgiel; also spelled beigel) is a bread roll originating in the Jewish communities of Poland. It is traditionally shaped by hand into a roughly hand-sized ring from yeasted wheat dough that is fi ...
s * The ability to power the heat elements in only one of the toaster's several slots * Slots of various depths, lengths, and widths to accommodate a variety of bread types * Provisions to allow the bread to be lifted higher than the normal raised position, so toast that has shifted during the toasting process can safely and easily be removed


Toaster oven

Toaster ovens are small electric
oven upA double oven A ceramic oven An oven is a tool which is used to expose materials to a hot environment. Ovens contain a hollow chamber and provide a means of heating the chamber in a controlled way. In use since antiquity, they have been use ...
s that provide toasting capability plus a limited amount of baking and broiling capability. Similarly to a conventional oven, toast or other items are placed on a small wire rack, but toaster ovens can heat foods faster than regular ovens due to their small volume. They are especially useful when the users do not also have a kitchen stove with an integral oven, such as in smaller
apartment An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are ma ...
s and in
recreational vehicle A recreational vehicle, often abbreviated as RV, is a motor vehicle or trailer that includes living quarters designed for accommodation. Types of RVs include motorhomes, campervans, coaches, caravans (also known as travel trailers and campe ...
s such as truck campers.


Conveyor toaster

Conveyor toasters are designed to make many slices of toast and are generally used in the catering industry, restaurants, cafeterias, institutional cooking facilities, and other commercial
food service The foodservice (US English) or catering (British English) industry includes the businesses, institutions, and companies which prepare meals outside the home. It includes restaurants, school and hospital cafeterias, catering operations, and many ...
situations where constant or high-volume toasting is required. Bread is toasted at a rate of 300–1600 slices an hour; the doneness control on such a toaster adjusts the conveyor speed, thus altering the time during which the bread is near the heat elements. Conveyor toasters have been produced for home use; in 1938, for example, the Toast-O-Lator went into limited production.


Press Toaster


History

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 Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition point, flames ...
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 Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to ...
in the 17th century. Another wrought-iron toaster was documented to be from 18th-century England. Utensils for toasting bread over open flames appeared in America in the early 19th century, including decorative implements made from wrought iron.


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 which 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 lightbulb An incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is an electric light with a wire filament heated until it glows. The filament is enclosed in a glass bulb with a vacuum or inert gas to protect the filament from oxida ...
s by Joseph Swan and
Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventi ...
. However, the light bulb took advantage of the presence of a vacuum, something that couldn't 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 Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive but large pieces are slow t ...
and
chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hard ...
, which came to be known as
Nichrome Nichrome (also known as NiCr, nickel-chromium or chromium-nickel) is a family of alloys of nickel, chromium, and often iron (and possibly other elements) commonly used as resistance wire, heating elements in devices like toasters, electrical kett ...
.; republished in ''hotwire: The Newsletter of the Toaster Museum Foundation'', vol. 3, no. 3, online edition. 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 had 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. The first commercially successful electric toaster was introduced by
General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable ene ...
in 1909 for the GE model D-12. Toasters were not invented by an "
Alan MacMasters The reliability of Wikipedia concerns the validity, verifiability, and veracity of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition. It is written and edited by volunteer editors who generate online ...
"; that notion stems from a 2010s Wikipedia hoax.


Dual-side toasting and automated pop-up technologies

In 1913,
Lloyd Groff Copeman Lloyd Groff Copeman (December 28, 1881 – July 5, 1956) was an American inventor who devised the first electric stove and the flexible rubber ice cube tray, among other products. He had nearly 700 patents to his name, and he claimed that he cou ...
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 in order 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 Charles Perkins Strite Life Charles Strite was born in Iowa on February 27, 1878. During World War I, he worked at a manufacturing plant in Stillwater, Minnesota, where he noticed the cafeteria often served burnt toast. While electric toasters ...
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, begins 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.


Research

A number of projects have added advanced technology to toasters. In 1990, Simon Hackett and John Romkey created "The Internet Toaster," a toaster which could be controlled from the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
. In 2001, Robin Southgate from
Brunel University Brunel University London is a public research university located in the Uxbridge area of London, England. It was founded in 1966 and named after the Victorian engineer and pioneer of the Industrial Revolution, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In Jun ...
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 system An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded ...
s hardware, designed a toaster running the
NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is ava ...
Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
as a sales demonstration system. In 2012, Basheer Tome, a student at
Georgia Tech The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...
, designed a toaster using color sensors to toast bread to the exact shade of brown specified by a user. A toaster which used
Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
was cited as an early example of an application of the
Internet of Things The Internet of things (IoT) describes physical objects (or groups of such objects) with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other com ...
. Toasters have been used as advertising devices for online marketing. With permanent modifications, a toaster oven can be used as a reflow oven for the purpose of
soldering Soldering (; ) is a process in which two or more items are joined by melting and putting a filler metal ( solder) into the joint, the filler metal having a lower melting point than the adjoining metal. Unlike welding, soldering does not inv ...
electronic components to circuit boards.


Similar inventions

A hot dog toaster is a variation on the toaster design; it can cook hot dogs without use of microwaves or stoves. The appliance looks similar to a regular toaster, except that there are two slots in the middle for hot dogs, and two slots on the outside for toasting the buns. Or there can be a set of skewers upon which hot dog are impaled.


See also

* Bachelor griller *
Dualit Dualit is a British manufacturer of coffee and tea capsules, kitchen and catering equipment and is best known for its range of heavy-duty toasters. Although it was primarily designed for the commercial catering market, its domestic usage increa ...
* List of cooking appliances * List of home appliances * Pie iron


References


External links

* Electric cooker * Electric heater, GE D-12 * {{Authority control 19th-century inventions Cooking appliances Home appliances Kitchen Ovens Products introduced in 1909