Talk:Toaster

Some text taken from public domain USPTO source at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/01-46.htm

History

'crazy people cant get nothing right on this stupid page omg!!!!!!!!!!!ahhgggggBold text'

Vandalism

This article has been vandalized, but I don't know what the original text was to fix it. Someone please revert. AeoniosHaplo 10:34, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

more recent additions ?

More recent additions to toaster technology include the ability to toast frozen bread, automatic toast lowering with no lever to push, a mode to toast the cut side of a bagel only, separate operation levers to allow users to toast either two or four slices, and reheating functions which allow toast to be warmed without being burned.

this sounds like a refererence to the sunbeam toastamatic ..it does all this but it also automatically lowered bread when first released in the 1960s...todays unit is a reproduction of their origional 1960's unit. not a recent additio

13 Minutes?

A typical modern 2-slice toaster uses about 900w power and makes toast in 13 minutes.

Does anyone else find the idea that toast takes 13 minutes to make a bit strange?

MSTCrow 22:51, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

No. toast is my life, I would never, and I repeat, NEVER, find it strange. -User: All toasters toast toast

Insignifiant consumption ?

Well,
I assume a 1000W toaster - 2min - each morning as sugested this gives 33 W.h for only one use. Maybe used twice or more each morning, so, well, let's say 100 W.h each morning

Let's say... well, 20 million people each morning for the example (will be more for real). This gives 2 billion W.h

or a mean-power of 1000 MW while 2 hours (if this country take the breakfast during this range) every day

Well, this insignifiant energy need about 2 hours of a full-powered small nuclear station's power each morning ! And maybe more because there are much more toasters in the world. Only for having the bread toasted: well, I suggest to delete the insignificant word.

A sweet candy's packaging is nothing. Collected it needs a city dump.

Toasters in fiction

Why was this section removed?

I'm restoring this section to is prior state; it seems that the section may have been removed by a typo, witness the odd placement of "==See Also==", this section running into the previous like the edit was done carelessly or accidentally. oneismany 12:21, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

energy calculation

I don't think the energy calculation is right. Toasters probably don't heat the bread to 100 C. On the other hand, reducing the water content from 35% to 10% means vaporizing 25% (8g reduction, if the starting point is 32g). The energy needed is the heat of vaporization of 8g of water, 2260 J/g or about 18 kJ. The bread does get heated as well, but I don't know to what typical temperature.

Probably to substantially higher than 100 degrees. The browning effect is caused by a Maillard reaction, which typically occur at around 120-130 degrees. But obviously that's only the surface of the bread reaching that temperature. JulesH 20:10, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Electric shock?

If toast is stuck in a toaster [...] it is highly recommended that one does not attempt to free it by inserting metal objects such as knives, due to the risk of electric shock. The toasters I know use calrods and shouldn't give me an electric shock when putting an conductor on this heating element. I can't say for sure, but I guess all toasters nowadays make it impossible to be confronted to such risk. --Abdull 22:52, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

"Toaster-ovens" use calrods, but most ordinary toasters still use open nichrome heaters. Because they occupy a lot of surface area, these open-wire heaters are noticeably better at making toast, but they'll definitely give you a shock if you make electrical contact with them.

Atlant 23:15, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

The Breakfast Food Cooker

This toaster-related joke is always popular in the software engineering community.

Atlant 14:56, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

---

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors to test them. He showed them both a shiny metal box, with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. He asked his advisors, "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, who happened to be an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said.

The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"

The engineer replied,

I would use a 4-bit microcontroller to do the job. I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of sixteen shades of darkness ranging from snow white to coal black. The program would then use that darkness level as the index into a sixteen-element lookup table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop the toast.

Come back next week and I'll show you a working prototype.

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said,

Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles and pop-tarts. What you see before you is really a Breakfast Food Cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capability. They will need a Breakfast Food Cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign it in just a few years.

With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of Breakfast Foods. Specialize this class into subclasses called Grain Breakfast Foods, Pork Breakfast Foods, and Poultry Breakfast Foods. Each of these classes should inherit properties from the Breakfast Foods class. The specialization process should be repeated with Grain Breakfast Foods divided into Toast, Muffins, Pancakes, and Waffles; Pork Breakfast Foods divided into Sausage, Links, and Bacon; Poultry Breakfast Foods divided into Scrambled Eggs, Hard-Boiled Eggs, Poached Eggs, Fried Eggs, and various Omelet classes.

The Ham and Cheese Omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from Pork Breakfast Foods and Dairy Foods, as well as Poultry Breakfast Foods. Thus we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance.

At run time the program must create objects of the proper type and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depends, of course, on the kind of object, so it has a different meaning to a piece of toast than it does to scrambled eggs.

Reviewing the process so far, we see that the Analysis Phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of Breakfast Food. In the Design Phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course the user doesn't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.

We must also not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the Breakfast Food Cooker is plugged in, the user should see a cowboy boot on the screen. The user clicks on it, and the message 'Booting Windows Vista' appears on the screen. (Windows Vista should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) The user can pull down a menu and click on the foods he wants to cook.

Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the Design Phase, now all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the Implementation Phase. An Intel Itanium with 512 Megabytes of memory, a 64 Gigabyte hard disk, and an LCD monitor should be sufficient. Select a multi-tasking, object-oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built in GUI, and writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a 4-bit microcontroller!)

The king wisely had the computer scientist thrown in the moat.

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This is not the software engineering community. Lupine Proletariat 12:49, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Toasters in computing

"Toasters are very common sample peripherals for device drivers" - is this nonsense that has avoided deletion? It's confusing. If it's not a hoax, it needs more explanation, or a citation or something. How does the toaster connect to the computer? Can we have a picture of this? Lupine Proletariat 12:49, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

It's not a literal thing; toasters are occasionally used as (fictitious) example hardware devices in sample code or tutorials for writing device drivers. Added a link to the Toaster sample in the Windows Driver Development Kit and some clearer text. -- Dsandler 06:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Electrical use

Shouldn't there be something about how even in modern kitchens a toaster is a common culprit for tripping the circuit breaker?

Watt Seconds

I removed the line in the second paragraph about watt-seconds. Please don't randomly use Google Calculator to look smart. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.131.4.91 (talk • contribs).

picture

I think that the pic where you can see the photographer taking the photo in the nude reflected on the toaster should be in this article. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Notsharon (talk • contribs) 04:07, 7 May 2007 (UTC).

"Doneness"?

Why was this word used? is it even a word? Can someone change it? Eonut 00:12, 30 July 2007 (UTC) Eonut

Toaster oven photo needed

Toaster oven redirects here, but there's no photo of a toaster oven. We need one. Badagnani (talk) 21:21, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Done. Badagnani (talk) 21:32, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I think that Toaster oven should be it's own article. While one can be used simply to make toast, it's so much more versatile... Madlobster (talk) 05:54, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Cost to toast 2 slices of bread

What would be an estimated cost to toast two slices of bread? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.127.23.22 (talk) 01:00, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Reverted vandalism.

I reverted obvious vandalism. Britbrat0325 (talk) 17:01, 18 September 2008 (UTC)