The History of the Toaster, Gapped Text Exercise

History of the Toaster

Before the development of the electric toaster, sliced bread was toasted by placing it in a metal frame or a long-handled fork and holding it near a fire or kitchen grill. Simple utensils for toasting bread over open flames appeared in the early 19th century. Earlier, people simply speared bread with a stick, sword or knife and held it over a fire.

In 1905, Irishman Conor Neeson of Detroit, Michigan, and his employer, American chemist, electrical engineer, inventor and entrepreneur William Hoskins of Chicago, Illinois, invented chromel, an alloy from which could be made the first high-resistance wire of the sort used in all early electric heating appliances (1) .

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. (2) , and when it was, mostly only at night. 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. (3)  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.

(4) , 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.

The automatic pop-up toaster, which ejects the toast after toasting it, was first patented by Charles Strite in 1919. 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, (5)  and eject the toast when finished.

By the middle of the 20th century, some high-end U.S. toasters featured automatic toast lowering and raising, with no levers to operate — (6) . A notable example was the Sunbeam T-20, T-35 and T-50 models (identical except for details such as control positioning) made from the late 1940s through the 1960s, which used the mechanically multiplied thermal expansion of the resistance wire in the center element assembly to lower the bread; the inserted slice of bread tripped a lever to switch on the power which immediately caused the heating element to begin expanding thus lowering the bread. When the toast was done, as determined by a small bimetallic sensor actuated by the heat passing through the toast, the heaters were shut off and the pull-down mechanism returned to its room-temperature position, (7) . This sensing of the heat passing through the toast, meant that regardless of the color of the bread (white or wholemeal) and the initial temperature of the bread (even frozen), the bread would always be toasted to the same degree. If a piece of toast was re-inserted into the toaster, it would only be reheated.

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