Questioning Everything About What We Toast Today
Sometimes designers, god bless 'em, are up their own asses. It's not that this concept toaster [pictured top] is horrible, but it's not unassailably brilliant. Yet the description by the designer George Watson is overwrought. Here's a taste:There has been little development of the toaster since the start of the century…When the toaster was first invented eating toast was a social activity that took place on the breakfast table…This toaster is designed to engage the user, re-invigorating the social context of toasting by questioning everything about what we toast with today.I'm pretty sure nothing I hear today is going to make me giggle more than that last phrase.
Of course, the first phase is off, too, as a wide variety of toaster variants were cast adrift in the market in the last century, including the somewhat infamous Toast-O-Lator which made bread brown using the same drive-through concept as Watson's toaster. Besides coughing crumbs out its front and occasionally catching on fire, the Toast-O-Lator did a little re-invigorating of the social context of toasting itself.
Ceramics for breakfast [DesignBoom.com]
Restoring the Toast-O-Lator [Jitterbuzz.com]
(Thanks, Knutmo and Rocketdyke!)
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When I first saw this several months ago I wrote to the designer congratulating him on his inventiveness but pointing out that practicality was also important. That I, like many people, like my toast hot, so the butter will melt. I pointed out that it looked like the time it took to get the toast through the toaster probably meant that the leading edge might be a lot cooler than the trailing edge when it was done, etc.
Never got a reply. No surprise of course, he was surely stuck up his own fundament, as you say, Joel, and unable to deal with email as a result.
The toaster is one of the standard objects, like chairs and teapots, at which every design student seems to have a shot. I presume that many of them have to design a toaster as part of their coursework.
Most of the toaster redesigns, like most other "design concepts" for small devices, are horrendously unmakeable. I feel like writing a ranting essay almost every time I see one of these things. And this time, I will.
I concur with George57l on the main problem with this particular design. There's no way that the bread can feed through fast enough to still be evenly warm when it's done.
If all you care about is delivering a certain amount of energy per unit area of bread then you can just wind the element temperature up arbitrarily (mains power amperage permitting...), and crank up the feed speed to match. Bingo, a piece of bread that's been exposed to the required number of joules in five seconds flat.
But beyond a certain point, this will give you cold bread with a layer of charcoal on the outside, not toast. A cake that's meant to bake for one hour at 200 degrees will not be just as good if you give it 15 minutes at 800.
This device proposes that the bread actually be in physical contact with the heating plates on either side, which would seem to me to be an absolute guarantee that a singed surface and uncooked bread underneath would be the best you could hope for. You can make toast under a grill, but you can't make it in a frying pan.
Oh, and the rack that receives the allegedly toasted bread is not heated. So if the toast isn't cold and leathery when it comes out of the heating elements, it bloody soon will be.
(The toast-rack is an English invention whose purpose is to allow everyone to enjoy the kind of toast that the upper classes got when Cook made breakfast in the kitchens in the East Wing, and then Butler carried it to you, at a dignified pace, down a quarter-mile of stairs and hallways.)
And as if that weren't enough, the bleeding drive mechanism inside this toaster includes a "rubber band". When that starts slipping, your toast will catch fire.
The one-sided drive-wheel design also looks as if it'll stick - and, again, probably start a fire - if it tries to deal with a slice of bread that is not even in thickness.
And, as you say, the Toast-O-Lator did it first, and is even cooler than those automatic toasters in which the bread slowly descends, like Faust into Hell, then rises back up just as slowly when the bimetallic strip clicks.
More practically, "conveyor toasters" are normal equipment for commercial kitchens that need to make more toast than you can get from just a couple of battleship Dualits.
Conveyor models have large heating elements between which the bread passes relatively slowly, so that it actually toasts, instead of just burning. They're much more like an industrial conveyor oven than like this "sheetfed scanner" design.
And they work very well, because they don't have heating elements or drive wheels in contact with the toast, are completely insensitive to bread thickness or alignment, and do not deliver the toast to a vertical storage unit specially designed to convection-cool it to room temperature in 30 seconds.
Cheers to Joel Johnson for bringing us this, most interesting, Toast Post...Provst!
Joel, seriously, thanks for being awesome.
Deconstructing toast? OK, time to turn the dial to "Yes".
"A cake that's meant to bake for one hour at 200 degrees will not be just as good if you give it 15 minutes at 800."
Yes, but that act would go a long way to smashing the hegemonic paradigm that divides baked goods from charcoal. Vive le revolucion!
just thank noodle that mr. Watson here didn't take a swing at reinventing the common toilet.
i'd hate to see what horrible contraption he expects one to stick their ass into.
Anybody else suddenly reminded of Bloody Stupid Johnson?
I think Mikeyboy underestimates Mr Watson. Clearly a deconstructed toilet would not require the user to stick his ass into a contraption; rather, to stick a contraption..
sorry, I just can't finish that sentence.