A toaster is pretty simple, but it is more technology than science. That's because toast was invented and created long before the electric toaster was invented. The toaster is an application of science to do something that was done before so that is what makes it technology. It is done in a slightly new manner, but the application of the science was long known and it wasn’t until Edison made the light bulb that it was used in technology. Then the use of the light bulb created an need to wire homes which meant the newly developing science of electricity could be applied to the technology of creating a toaster.
The only science in an electric toaster is the secret of electricity and the fact that when you run an electrical current through a resister you create heat.
Benjamin Franklin had a metal container that could hold bread to be put into a fire and toasted. The technology was far older than his invention of the pot belly stove.
The invention of electricity was a simple novelty until Edison applied it to the light bulb. Now finally there was a use for electricity more than Voltaire’s simple party tricks of shocking people. Voltaire was a contemporary of Franklin, so the idea of electricity was not a recent one in Edison's day; it was just a useless one.
Once Edison invented the light bulb it was practice to run wires to house to house to provide light. Once that happened then little things and great things could be done with electricity because now it had a purpose. When attempts were made to generate electricity it was found that a motor could be made out of the generator and that made a lot of more things possible. Especially labor saving devices. The electric toaster was invented four years after Edison invented the practical light bulb.
Once we started to use stoves and heaters to warm our house and banished the flame to the simple gas oven then we needed a way to cook toast and that simple method filled the need. Electric coils made of nickel iron are what makes up the heart of a toaster, that and a simple timing gadget. Since its invention we haven't found any way to perfect it further or change its basic design. We can add templates for cooked designs on the toast, we can change the composition of the coils and we can tweak the timer, but there is little else that can be done. This means a toaster is the result of perfected technology.
According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_bulb
“Thomas Edison's creation of the first practical incandescent lamp in 1879.”
According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toaster
“Prior to the development of the electric toaster, sliced bread was toasted by placing it in a metal frame and holding it over a fire or by holding it near to a fire using a long handled fork.
Utensils for toasting bread over open flames go back at least 200 years. Toasters for bread using electricity were invented by Crompton and Company, Leeds, England in 1893. The technology that makes electric toasters possible, a nichrome wire that can endure high heat, has existed for a long time. At least two other brands of toasters had been introduced commercially around the time GE submitted the first patent application for their model D-12 in 1909…
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, set the heating element on a timer, and eject the toast when finished. By 1950, some high-end U.S. toasters featured automatic toast lowering and raising, with no levers to operate - simply dropping the slices into the machine commenced the toasting procedure…
More recent additions to toaster technology include wider toasting slots for bagels and thick breads, the ability to toast frozen breads, and a single-side heating mode. Most toasters can also be used to toast other foods such as teacakes, Pop Tarts, and crumpets, though the addition of melted butter and/or sugar to the interior components of automatic electric toasters often contributes to eventual mechanical or electrical failure.
Toasters and toast bread have recently drawn attention of modders whom modify toasters to print images and logos on bread slices.”
High Tech Toasters
- There have been a number of projects adding advanced technology to toasters.
- In 1990 Simon Hackett and John Romkey created The Internet Toaster, a toaster which could be controlled from the Internet.
- In 2001 Robin Southgate from Brunel University in England created a toaster that could toast a graphic of the weather prediction (limited to sunny or cloudy) onto a piece of toast. The toaster dials a pre-coded phone number to get the weather forecast.
- In 2005, Technologic Systems, a vendor of embedded systems hardware, designed a toaster running the NetBSD Unix-like operating system as a sales demonstration system..
There are always little things you can do to tweak or improve a system but the basic design that we see today hasn’t changed since.
So that implies the question what invention was mostly science rather than technology and that would be the light bulb. The electric telegraph preceded the invention of the electric light bulb, so there were electric lines around before Edison, but few homes needed telegraphs in fact normally only rail road stations had them. The ability to bring light without the need of fire and so safely into the home created the need to wire the world. Electricity was known before Voltaire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire) and Franklin messed around with it, but it was little more than party tricks. Voltaire literally wired up the battery he invented to give people shocks as a party joke. So the science of electricity was around for a while, but the application of that science to create the light bulb technology was a major an noteworthy step; enough to advance the science of electricity; because until the invention of the light bulb there wasn’t enough of a need for electricity for there to be things like toasters. Voltaire had the knowledge to invent a toaster, but it would be easier to do it the old fashioned way. Ben Franklin invented the improved stove; the pot belly stove, and he too could have invented a toaster. He knew of Voltaire’s work and he could have easily have invented a way to electrically toast bread, but again the old fashioned way was better; after all who had electricity, and a century later when it was fairly common it was only in rail road stations, not homes, so why invent it then. It wasn’t until the key invention of the light bulb that the invention of the toaster was a good idea.
You can argue that the light bulb was just technology and that Edison only perfected it, he didn’t invent it. If you do that then the science was something that came around more when Voltaire worked with it, but electricity was known before then, but barely. It wasn’t until Franklin connected it with lightning that we knew it had been around for longer than man.
Where the science starts and the technology starts is hard to say since they are so related to each other, you can’t have one without the other. But it is always science that goes first. We knew about lasers for a while, in the 1970s we used a laser to measure the distance between the earth and a mirror posted there by the Apollo astronauts, but it wasn’t until the invention of the CD player that the laser entered our homes. The DVD player uses the exact same technology, done at a slightly different wavelength and with more compression. So the DVD player is technology, but it took the science of the laser to make it work. Once science had invented the CD player the evolution of it to the DVD player was only a matter of time; it was an improvement of an existing idea. The light bulb was a new and important idea, and the toaster was just the application of a new technology to an old need.
According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph
“In 1775 Francisco de Salva offered an electrostatic telegraph. Samuel Thomas von Soemmering constructed his electrochemical telegraph in 1809. Also as one of the first, an electromagnetic telegraph was created by Baron Schilling in 1832. Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber built and first used for regular communication the electromagnetic telegraph in 1833 in Göttingen.”