REVOLUTION BORN FROM BURNT BREAD: THE STORY OF THE AUTOMATIC TOASTER AND SLICED BREAD

Behind that beloved toaster that "pops" up crispy bread at breakfast, lies the determination of an engineer tired of burnt bread in a factory cafeteria and a strange chain of events that transformed the global bread industry!

Previously, to toast bread, people had to skewer it on a fork over a stove and wait for hours. In 1909, the first electric toaster went on sale. However, this device had no regulator and only toasted one side of the bread. People had to stand guard by the device, and when one side browned, they had to flip the hot bread to the other side with their bare hands. A single second of inattention caused thick smoke in the kitchen and bread turned to charcoal.

Charles Strite, a mechanic working at a factory in Minnesota, USA, was fed up with the burnt bread served in the cafeteria every day. To put an end to the cooks' negligence, he built a special mechanism: he added an adjustable spring-loaded clock timer to the heating coil and a spring that pushed the bread up when the time was up. Thus, the first "pop-up" toaster was created, which toasted both sides of the bread evenly without human intervention and automatically popped it out when ready.

When the first home toaster called "Toastmaster" was launched in 1926, an unexpected obstacle arose: because people cut bread at home with knives to varying thicknesses, the slices didn't fit into the toaster slots and got stuck. To solve this problem, in 1928, an engineer named Otto Rohwedder built the first bread-slicing machine for factories, and the era of pre-packaged sliced bread in stores began. In English, the idiom "the greatest thing since sliced bread," used today to praise magnificent inventions, was born precisely because of the toaster's demand. This spring-loaded device, created by a mechanic frustrated with a factory cook's burnt bread, has transformed into the most practical helper of breakfast tables all over the world today.