Remember how I did that post last month about patent drawings? One of the patents I linked to in that post was for a Sunbeam toaster. I just showed the overhead-view drawing in that post, but all four drawings from the patent application are shown above. (I should add that this is just the toaster’s design patent, covering its visual aspects. Its utility patent, which covers its functional aspects, is here.)
Why am I revisiting this patent? Because that particular toaster happens to be my toaster. Check it out:
Nice, right? It originally belonged to my paternal grandmother. She died in 1980, when I was in high school, but I asked my parents to save the toaster for me. I took possession of it four years later, when I got my first off-campus apartment during college, and I’ve had it ever since.
I should mention here that I really like toast. I’ve been having pretty much the same breakfast of Cheerios, OJ, and toast nearly every morning since I was about 14, and the toast is always the highlight. As my friend Liz once said — and I’m ashamed not to have said it myself — bread is just raw toast! (True fact: I’m so into toast that there’s even a particular slice in the loaf that’s my favorite for toasting. But that’s another topic for another day.)
But why did I want this particular toaster that used to be my grandmother’s, and why have I kept it for so long? One reason, for sure, is that I enjoy feeling a connection to my grandma, who was a very sweet woman. Another reason is that it’s fun to think of a toaster as a family heirloom. And yet another is that this toaster is a nice example of the type of midcentury design that I tend to like.
But the main reason, bigger than all those others, is that I’ve always been fascinated by the way this toaster operates. As you may have noticed, it doesn’t have the usual knob that you push down to initiate the toasting process. So how does the bread go down? Like this:
Pretty cool, right? It’s self-lowering! It seemed like magic when my grandmother would use it during my childhood, and I still get a kick out of it today. I’ve been using it just about every day for about 40 years now, and it still does the job for me each morning.
And instead of popping up at the conclusion of the toasting cycle, the toast slowly rises out of the slots, just as gently as it went down a few minutes earlier: