Are old toasters better than modern ones?
Hollywood's burnt toast trope, a Heritage Minute, the BEST TOASTER OF ALL TIME, and lax 20th century consumer safety standards.
Ever the inspiring force in my life, my pal Gumby recently mentioned a conversation she’d had with her dad. It was about toasters, and it wasn’t the first time they’d talked about it. Her dad knows in his heart that toasters were better once upon a time, and are worse now than ever before. They take longer to pop, the browning is inconsistent, and the slots are almost always the wrong shape for the thing that’s getting toasted.
Gumby and I had a laugh about the centrality of toaster discourse from the 80s to the mid 2000s, where the humble countertop technology had a bit of a heyday in pop culture. Not to mention the fairly common TV and movie trope where people always seemed to be burning their toast.
Exhibit A: Even Doc Brown can’t get the runaway power of an 80s toaster under control in the opening sequence of Back to the Future (1985). Though maybe it was more about the experimental nature of the contraption.
Exhibit B: Thanks to a time travel mishap that sprung him from the 18th century, Leopold, Duke of Albany, (Hugh Jackman) can’t believe that the General of Electric didn’t think to build an appliance that does what it’s supposed to in a single toasting, rather than one and a half. Kate & Leopold (2001):
And in 2005’s Season 2, Episode 4 of The Office, “The Fire”, temp Ryan leaves his cheese pita in the toaster oven on the wrong setting, triggering an evacuation.
Those are just the miscues relating to the actual functionality of the appliance. There were also many, many, more appearances in non-burning roles during this time period. For example:
The entire 1987 children’s film The Brave Little Toaster, which I now recall is harrowing (this isn’t even the scariest number).
Bill Murray gets clocked by a toaster-wielding Carol Kane in the 1988 Christmas hit Scrooged.
In Ghostbusters II (1989), ectoplasmic goo animates a toaster during a kinetic test.
Bruce Willis’ toaster and its gently warming off-brand Pop-Tarts plays a big role in 1994’s Pulp Fiction.
Also in 1994, The Simpsons aired the fifth iteration of their long-running Halloween special, “Treehouse of Horror.” In the second of the episode’s three vignettes, Homer travels back and forth through time, altering the future, aided by a time-traveling toaster.
I’m convinced there are more of these, but for now I’ve come to my wit’s end for Googling different combinations of the words “toaster” “toast” “burnt” and “scene”, to just okay results.
For you peeps who grew up on Heritage Minutes, you’ll be interested to know that this was the top hit, regardless of the keywords surrounding “toast”:
I can’t help but wonder why so many different writers’ rooms decided that toasters were a plot device worth exploring. They are almost comically mundane, which has some value in this regard. Further to that, though, I’m convinced there was some larger cultural understanding about burning one’s toast during this era that would lead to this kind of specific widespread phenomenon.
This conversation is really starting to feel like a Jerry Seinfeld bit.
What’s the deal with toasters? All these little knobs to adjust, and it never works the way you want. Every time you use it you think, maybe this time it’ll be perfect, I learned from last time, I really did. The dial shouldn’t be on 5, it’s a hair before 5. You’re talking to it, you’re pleading with it to work because you know it should work. You’re looking in the top, smelling, doing the waft. But you know, as soon as you smell the burning, it’s too late. It’s over. [beat] The idea of good toast is like a mirage. Every time you buy a toaster, you’re buying the hope of having a good piece of toast. And when you finally think you have it, the mirage disappears before your eyes and it really is the desert. Too hot, too dry, and inedible.
Back to the toaster question: Does this cultural relevance mean toasters were somewhat of a focal point for people? Were they really this constant a source of ire and domestic hijinks?
(Kind of like in the 1920s when America hustled to add iodine to salt after young men, almost en masse from a huge chunk of the country, were deemed unfit to serve in WWI due to goiter. “The Goiter Belt” entered people’s vocabulary shortly thereafter, but largely petered out along with the issue after a few decades.)
If they really were so mired in challenges, there’s an argument to be made that this points to toasters of yore being more powerful than they are now. According to Consumer Affairs, there is evidence that toaster timers have suffered from faulty design for decades. Plus, the very first generations of toasters were at risk of melting down because the highly conductive materials used in the heating coils. Those were the early days, though, before the nickel and chromium alloy called nichrome allowed for a marginally safer heating element, though toaster bodies were still basically hot irons.
Following the nichrome innovation and as the availability of electricity improved, toasters expanded beyond restaurant use. They began entering the homes of well-to-do families starting in the early 1920s, about the same time as pre-sliced bread. I say well-to-do because a countertop toaster in 1923 would run you over $300 in today’s dollars. You had to really want it.
Actual, historical information about toaster power is surprisingly hard to get. I’ve resorted to looking at schematics for 20th century toasters to see if there’s any hint at how hot and/or powerful they were meant to be, and whether the knobs allude to the level of brownness or the toasting time.
For the record, most modern toasters (with a few exceptions that monitor the toast colour and that DO NOT MAKE SENSE given the existence of darker-hued breads like pumpernickel) are set on a timer.
As I’ve discovered through my now many hours’ worth (and dozens of browser tabs) of research, there is only one perfect toaster and it has yet to be replicated in the 21st century. Alec of the YouTube channel Technology Connections makes a compelling case for one unassuming appliance.
The patent for the Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster was secured in 1948. Its sleek, chrome shell made it a fixture of midcentury tabletop décor, but what has stood out as the very pinnacle of toaster technology is the radiant thermometer. Instead of measuring time, there was an indirect radiant heat thermometer that would trigger the lever when the bread was the proper temperature.
The bread’s temperature. I just need a minute.
How long have we suffered at the hands of the time-based dial, hoping that the millimetre separating the 5 and the 6 would understand the difference between a perfect golden brown and a charred and acrid puck of disappointment?
Too long.
According to the original 1948 patent application, Sunbeam was plugged into the feelings of toast lovers everywhere:
[The] toasting interval [will] provide for a uniform degree of toasting regardless of the character of the bread and under any and all operating conditions of the toaster. The type of bread, i. e., rye, whole wheat, raisin or white, as well as the bread slice size and thickness and the degree of dryness of the bread determine the degree of toasting during a given toasting interval.
The usual commercial practice has been […] employing clocks or thermal timers having the function of measuring out an arbitrary toasting interval and then deenergizing the toasting heating elements. Various elaborate refinements have been made in mechanisms of this type in attempts to obtain more uniform toasting of the bread slices. Such mechanisms have not only been high in initial cost but have required costly service operations and more important fall far short of the goal of producing uniform toasting under any and all operating conditions. It has been discovered that the only accurate index which may be relied upon to determine the degree of toasting of a bread surface is the temperature of that surface.
It’s both an unsurprising and brilliantly simple choice to go with bread temperature, since there is a universal standard for what temperature is required to reach different point along the spectrum of a Maillard reaction.
(Maillard is that thing that happens when things brown - think roasted potatoes, coffee beans, a seared steak, and toast.)
This is the ideal toaster. It was automatic, nearly fool-proof, it was quiet, and it was ingenious.
The crux of the issue has now arrived. In terms of power, most toasters just use conventional 120 volt household outlets, though others (like industrial toasters or toaster ovens) can go up to the household maximum of 240 V. Those more powerful power supplies are typically reserved for larger appliances like stoves, washing machines, and fridges.
When electricity started to spread and become standardized starting in the 1880s or so, regular customers used 110 V supply, incredibly similar to what we use today. Thanks to coupling wires through the distribution network, Thomas Edison patented a way to run 220 V through the same circuitry. This remained the case into the 1900s until voltages crept up into the 112, 115, and even 117 V range.
HERE IT IS, FOLKS:
At the end of WWII, the standard voltage in the U.S. and Canada became 117 V. It rose again in 1967 to 120V. The thing with voltage is that it’s measuring the pressure of the electrical current, to use a water metaphor. It doesn’t actually measure the rate at which the electricity flows - that’s the wattage.
Let’s say you plug in a brand-new Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster from 1950 into a 120 V socket. The Sunbeam is rated for that outlet, and it’s also rated for 1275 watts of power. The higher the wattage rating, the more power the appliance can turn into straight toasting energy.
In the final hours (okay, final minutes) of research (literally 5 minutes ago), I came across the Holy Grail of historical toaster information. (I almost cried. This was a challenging one from a sleuthing perspective.)
It’s a plain-text html physics website with an entry from 2004 about the power capacities of historical toasters. I. Shit. You. Not.
In this divine text among texts, it offers toaster models through the decades and their respective voltages and wattages. [Law and Order theme plays] These are their stories.
The wattages of toasters from the 40s and 50s snuck up from the 500-600 range, then into the 800s, and by the time the 60s rolled around there were toasters with the capacity to carry 1200 W or more, just like the Sunbeam.
What’s giving me SO MUCH JOY here at [redacted] o’clock is that we finally have ourselves an answer.
In the 60s and 70s, appliance companies were hungry to display their convenience to the modern consumer. That meant kitchen tools that were hot, fast, and able to get food on the table. As a result, the electrical capacity of toasters spiked in this era. We’re talking 1600 W or more. More watts means more electricity running through those glowing nichrome ribbons, which makes for hotter toasters, which means faster toasting AND a higher likelihood of burning.
By the 80s and 90s, things were out of control - one Toastmaster model from that era boasts a capacity of 1875 W. It’s no wonder everyone was burning their toast.
These days, toasters are back to the 800-1200 W range, with few if any household models exceeding 1500 W. Toasting today feels slower because it is, and the toasters themselves seem weaker because they are. Those crusty ryes and sourdoughs, bagels, and 100-grain loaves we’re throwing in these things are just too sturdy to be toasted to golden perfection the way a slice of Wonder did back in the day. But that’s a story for another time.
Gumby, tell your dad he’s right - toasters are worse now. But at yeast we know why.
THANK YOU!
i absolutely knew that they had to be cutting back on power but i never knew how to prove it. do you have a link to that page with the historic information?
this is fantastic research; thank you again!!!