About a year ago, ESR wrote a post on consumer grade toasters and how, regardless of price, they are all essentially the same, suffer from identical problems, and are basically junk. It’s hard not to sympathize. Here at Irreal headquarters we gave up on toasters some time ago and replaced them with what amounts to a high end toaster oven. It can theoretically cook all sorts of things but I can’t remember ever using it for anything except toasting bread.
The other day, I saw a link to a video about a toaster from over 60 years ago that, the video claimed, is better than the toaster you’re using today. It’s the Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster. I remember having one of those as a child and marveling at how all you had to do was put the bread in the toaster and everything else was automatic. There was no lever to push down and no timer to set. Just put the bread in.
Automatically lowering the bread is sort of nice, I guess, but it was the lack of a timer that was the killer feature. Modern toasters all have a timer—either implicit or explicit—to determine how long to heat your bread. The Sunbeam used a simple and ingenious mechanism to estimate how brown the bread was and to stop heating and raise the toasted bread when it reached the desired color.
Every bit of this was analog of course but what was really incredible was the mechanism for raising and lowering the bread. There was no motor or electromagnet as I had always assumed. Rather the mechanism depended on a series of levers and the thermal expansion of the heating coil.
The video is 18 minutes long and several of the commenters remarked that they couldn’t believe they’d just spent 18 minutes watching a video on toasters but they all seemed glad they had. Toasters aren’t in the normal Irreal purview, of course, but the site is for and by geeks and I can’t imagine any geek not loving this video.