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The Betamax of toasting
Sep. 26th, 2006 05:38 pmI'm writing this to the accompaniment of an ice-cream van going along the street, playing a very off-kilter, music box version of "The Happy Wanderer". I love this song; something about the "val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-hah" line makes it impossible for that cheerful hiker not to sound like a crazed supervillain with a diabolical plan.
Right now I'm reading a book (Michael Tambini's The Look of the Century) about twentieth century design, which has page after page illustrating how different household objects changed over those one hundred years (washing machines changed quite a lot; fridges, not so much). Apart from the "ooh, yes, I'll have one of those, and one of those, and one of those, and how great would it be to still use one of these?" factor, my favourite thing so far has been the toaster page.
In the early decades of the last century, great minds devoted many hours to solving the problem of how to toast bread on both sides at once. We benefited from this with the pop-up toaster - but how much different (or better, even) would modern life be if the mid-1930s design, the Toast-o-later, had stuck? That magnificent name is one thing, the way it worked was even better: "... the bread was grilled as it travelled from one side of the machine to the other on a mini conveyor belt". And that little hole in the side? An eyehole for watching the whole process. I feel robbed.
Right now I'm reading a book (Michael Tambini's The Look of the Century) about twentieth century design, which has page after page illustrating how different household objects changed over those one hundred years (washing machines changed quite a lot; fridges, not so much). Apart from the "ooh, yes, I'll have one of those, and one of those, and one of those, and how great would it be to still use one of these?" factor, my favourite thing so far has been the toaster page.
In the early decades of the last century, great minds devoted many hours to solving the problem of how to toast bread on both sides at once. We benefited from this with the pop-up toaster - but how much different (or better, even) would modern life be if the mid-1930s design, the Toast-o-later, had stuck? That magnificent name is one thing, the way it worked was even better: "... the bread was grilled as it travelled from one side of the machine to the other on a mini conveyor belt". And that little hole in the side? An eyehole for watching the whole process. I feel robbed.
