Charles Strite: Inventor of the pop-up toaster

Charles P. Strite: Inventor of the Pop-up toaster

No matter where you live, it’s highly likely that your kitchen contains a toaster. However, do you know who created the type of toasters we all have in our home today? Did you know that the pop-up toaster still uses the same system than when it was engineered in 1919? Today, we will talk about the inventor of the pop-up toaster: Charles Strite.

How did people make toast before Charles Strite invented the pop-up toaster?

People have been making toast for centuries now. In the beginning, people would have to hold a piece of sliced bread in the fire so that it would toast; can you imagine having to go through that just to have part of your breakfast done? It was a tedious process and highly unsafe.

Through the centuries, the technology around toast evolved a bit. The first electric toaster was developed by Scottish inventor Alan MacMasters between 1883 and 1893, and it led the way for what would become Charles Strite’s most well-known (and only) invention: the pop-up-toaster.

Original Toasters had big problems

You should know the first electric toasters had a serious problem. They could toast the bread, but if left unattended, they might burn your kitchen down. Alan MacMasters was involved in a trial that accused him of causing the death of a woman in Guildford. She was caught in a house fire after leaving her toaster on for too long. MacMasters denied the accusation and blamed the woman for underestimating the temperatures the toaster could achieve when left unattended. So you can already guess that toasters weren’t that popular as home appliances back then.

What led Charles Strite to think of a better method?

The legend goes: Charles Strite worked at a factory in Stillwater, Minnesota when he first thought about improving the toasters commonly used in restaurants and cafés around the United States. Apparently, he was tired of getting burnt toast for his lunch at the factory cafeteria. Charles began thinking about how he could improve the design.

Other sources claim that Charles Strite was at a supermarket with his wife when he saw the toasters and thought of how ineffective they were because of just toasting one side of the bread at one time. Whichever version is true, at least we know the result: he eventually invented the first pop-up toaster.

When Strite first started working on his idea, toasters weren’t really used at home. They were still fairly unreliable. Someone had to stand close by and wait for the toast to reach a certain point before it burned. In Strite’s case, you can imagine a factory cafeteria had a lot of people to attend to. There was no time for the cafeteria workers to stand around. This resulted in burnt toast often. This was common in cafés and restaurants as well: electric toasters were a hassle to deal with.

What was the technology behind the first electric toaster?

The first electric toaster was designed by Alan MacMasters in London. These used electric filaments that had a large amount of nickel in their composition. This led them to overheat easily. This discovery came as an accident, according to several sources.

Enter R.E.B. Crompton

Apparently, Alan MacMasters had been working with a supplier to get him electric filaments. These filaments were to be used in the trains for the London Underground. In an attempt to cut costs, he chose a supplier that was not so good, and he got wires that would overheat quite easily. They could never be used for lighting, much less on a train. However, when he discussed the matter with R. E. B. Crompton, another electrical engineer, Crompton invited him to join him in his laboratory so they could find a different purpose for those electric filaments.

Later on, the first electric toaster was invented by MacMasters at that same lab. He sold the design to Crompton and that product would soon start to be sold under the name “Eclipse”. The Eclipse had four electric elements (the nickel-rich filaments MacMasters wanted to discard) connected to a ceramic base.

How did Charles Strite improve the electric toaster?

The first electric toasters could only toast bread on one side at each time. Charles Strite spent several years improving it. Charles Strite’s U.S. patent No. 1,394,450 registered a toaster that not only could toast both sides of the bread at the same time, it also kept it from burning with its pop-up system. The timer on Charles Strite’s invention had a mechanism that made the toast pop-up when it was ready: the same mechanism is still employed on most of the toasters sold today.

To sell his now patented invention, Strite got financial backing and founded the Waters Genter company. Waters Genter started selling the pop-up toaster to restaurants and cafés around the country. His invention was so popular that by 1926, after public demand, the first pop-up toaster meant to be used at home was released. This new model had a lever that allowed you to control how toasted you wanted your bread to be, which was another major breakthrough. Charles Strite called his invention the Toastmaster.

How did Charles Strite’s business go?

Soon the Waters Genter company became Toastmaster, Inc., and started the mass production of toasters that could be used in any kitchen. Toastmaster Inc. sold six different models of its patented pop-up toaster, with an attractive and modern design for their time. The prices were also fair and acceptable taking into account the amount of engineering needed to build the first prototype.

Charles Strite was a figure of pivotal responsibility in making the electric toaster a popular device. In the 1930s, one million toasters were sold every year in the United States, making Charles Strite a very wealthy man due to his invention. Born on February 27, 1878, in Minnesota, Charles P. Strite would pass away at 78 years old, on October 18, 1956. For the 1950s, when modern medicine was still not as developed as it is today, we can say Charles Strite died at quite an old age.

What changes did Charles Strite’s invention bring upon modern life?

Along with the microwave, invented by Percy Spencer in 1945, the pop-up toaster was a part of a revolution that changed even family life. The pop-up toaster made it much easier to make breakfast – you could just leave it there and it would toast your bread without the need for anyone watching it and make sure it wouldn’t burn just the toast, but your whole kitchen. It revolutionized breakfast and tea time, and it became accessible to everyone in a short period of time. Toastmaster, Inc. was bought in 1999 by Salton, Inc., but at that time the patent was long due and many other companies were making pop-up toasters at many different prices.

These days:

These days, you can buy a pop-up toaster at any home appliance shop without even thinking how lucky we are that it was invented all those years ago. Imagine when people had to put their hands in the fire to get toast made! I reckon that if you’re reading this in your kitchen, you have a pop-up toaster there. Nearly everyone does. Could you imagine having to deal with one of the first electric toasters? Turning bread to make sure it was toasted on both sides, having to sit by it or risk getting burnt toast that you might have to throw away?

Time savings abound and for all

Charles Strite’s invention saves us time, electricity – and bread. It was even a little step towards freeing women from one of their household duties at a time when it was expected of a woman to cook, clean and take care of the children, without the chance for stopping for a bit until their husband was satisfied. We can always argue that was never Strite’s intention. It’s highly doubted he even thought about it while creating the pop-up toaster – but, still, he developed a household item that has lasted the test of time and is still used almost a century later using pretty much the same system that they did when they first appeared.

In this case, if the most common legend about burnt toast at his work’s cafeteria is true, we can say that discomfort caused this invention to come across: hadn’t Charles Strite thought about it, we might never have had the pop-up toaster in our lives, something that we all take for granted now.

In Conclusion

Although the first electric toaster was invented by Alan MacMasters, as we mentioned above, without the improvements Charles Strite made it would never have become as popular as it is today. Thank Strite for not having to eat burnt toast for the rest of your days! Charles Strite should be remembered as the man who changed breakfast for the whole world.

One invention that seems so simple for us today but was so revolutionary for his time. Did he know the impact his invention would have on the modern world? Probably not. It turns out he changed people’s lives for the better with something that sits now at your kitchen, ready to prepare the perfect slice of toast for you.