Talk:Toaster

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Removed cultural information about toast - posted here on talk
This is the article about toasters. There was some pop culture information about toasted bread ("toast"), toasting as baking, and Toast (honor) as a ritual in this article, and I removed it from the article to this talk page until a better place can be found for it. Likely places might be those articles mentioned above or Wikiquote.


 * The term toast comes "...from the Latin torrere, 'to burn'". The first reference to toast "...in print is in a recipe for...Oyle Soppys (flavoured onions stewed in a gallon of stale beer and a pint of oil) that dates from 1430." In the 1400s and 1500s, toast "...was discarded rather than eaten after it was used as a flavouring for drinks." In the 1600s, toast was still thought of as something that was "put it into drinks. Shakespeare gave this line to Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1616: "Go, fetch me a quart of Sacke [sherry], put a tost in 't." By the 1700s, there were references to toast being a gesture that indicates respect: "Ay, Madam, it has been your Life's whole Pride of late to be the Common Toast of every Publick Table."
 * The other popular idiom associated with the word "toast" is the expression "to toast someone's health", which is typically done by one or more persons at a gathering by raising a glass in salute to the individual. This meaning is derived from the early meaning of toast, which from the 1400s to the 1600s meant warmed bread that was placed in a drink. By the 1700s, there were references to the drink in which toast was dunked being used in a gesture that indicates respect: "Ay, Madam, it has been your Life's whole Pride of late to be the Common Toast of every Publick Table."
 * The slang idiom "you're toast", "I'm toast" or "we're toast" is used to express a state of being "outcast", "finished", "burned, scorched, wiped out, [or] demolished" (without even the consolation of being remembered, as [with the slang term "you're] history["]...)." "Hey, dude. You're toast, man", which appeared in The St. Petersburg Times of October 1, 1987, is the "...earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary research staff has of this usage."
 * Additionally, the phrase "all toasters toast toast" originated in the CD-i video game, Hotel Mario. In one cutscene, Mario discovers the source of a hotel's rolling blackouts; a room full of toasters with Bowser's Sourpuss Bread in them. To alleviate this, he had to pull the plug on the toasters, allowing the mechanisms to release and release the toast where the phrase was then spoken.

 Blue Rasberry  (talk)  18:01, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Rearrange sections
Hello. I rearranged sections of this article. Here is how it is after my changes -


 * 1) Types
 * 2) History
 * 3) Risks
 * 4) Society and culture
 * 5) Etymology
 * 6) In popular culture
 * 7) Marketing
 * 8) Research

Here is how it was -
 * 1) Etymology
 * 2) History
 * 3) Types
 * 4) Technological innovations
 * 5) In popular culture
 * 6) Marketing

I would appreciate any comments either here or at WikiProject Home Living, where I eventually hope to develop guidance on what articles on home products should include. I work for a nonprofit organization, Consumer Reports, which has expert information on consumer products and I am interested in trying to share more information from my organization. If there were more consensus on how articles should be arranged then it would be easier for me or anyone else to develop home living articles.

In this case, here are my thoughts on ordering - This article had 140,000 pageviews last year, which makes this in Wikipedia's top third of articles by popularity. Lots of every items have articles on Wikipedia, but not all are so popular as this one, so I think the traffic to this one is partly because a steady stream of people are asking questions about toasters. My guess at the question they are asking is, "what kind of toaster should I buy?". In general, products which exist in lots of varieties tend to have more popular Wikipedia articles than products without brand differentiation. Since I think the information on types of toasters is most important, I put that first among the available information.

However, I feel that the "types" section is not the ideal first section. The first section which I would recommend would be something like a definition or a description or an explanation of why the product matters. A description for toaster might say "This is a small appliance which browns bread or cooks other food. It sits on a countertop. It weighs 3-5 pounds, is 9x9x12 inches, and uses a household electric connection." I am not sure where to get this kind of definition for household products. For familiar products, this might seem mundane. For less familiar, or specialized, or culture-specific products, for example a fondue pot or hibatchi, more people will benefit from reading a fundamental description of the thing. Following the "description/uses" section I think that a "mechanism" section would be best. Now that the use and physical description is presented, the next section should say how the item works. In the case of a toaster, that section could say that it is a small stove with a heating element and some device for accepting bread and returning toast. Finally after "mechanism" then there should be the "types" section.

I put "history" after types because I think more people are interested in contemporary product information than historical information. After history I think that cultural topics should go next, because while probably everything to this point applies to all cultures, what follows will be most relevant to different regions and cultures, or niche special interests. Among niche interests, many people are interested in etymology so that is first. "In popular culture" could be regional variation or any mention, and marketing could either be branding or business information. I posted "research" last because not only is that culture specific, but also it might discuss aspects which are not even in wide use.

This is just an attempt at ordering and not the last word, but I would like to seek some consensus about whatever aspects of ordering seems right. I would like to present an acceptable ordering system so that anyone might develop articles in a uniform way.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  20:04, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Copy of patent, use of patent information in article


I was thinking about how to find a definition of a thing and an explanation of how something works.

One source of information could be a patent application. In the United States, text and images in patents filed before 1989 are public domain by default. I grabbed the patent for the "pop-up toaster" as filed in the United States and posted it into this article. The document goes into great detail describing toaster fundamentals and how the device works.

Wikipedia often tries to avoid WP:PRIMARY sources, so using patents is not appropriate for everything. In this case, the patent says, "provide an automatic electric toaster in which the heating current will be automatically cut off after the bread has been toaster for a predetermined length of time, which may be varied according to the amount of moisture in the bread and the degree of crispness desired for the toast" and "bread toaster comprising an oven, heating means associated with said over, and means for automatically moving the toasted bread from said oven when the toasting operation is completed." These are fundamental explanations in easy-to-understand language and might be considered the secondary source summary of other original data-heavy primary source information presented in the patent. When other sources are lacking and when the patent seems useful, I think that it would be fine to cite the patent for some fundamentals. This is especially so for older products which in Wikipedia have their notability established by other sources.

There are not many patents in Wikimedia Commons nor is it so common to see patents cited in Wikipedia articles. I am not sure that I have seen a patent document in any Wikipedia article, and documents in general are rare to post inside the bodies of Wikipedia articles. I did it here as an experiment and would like comments from anyone.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  20:37, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Patents are of limited utility to WP articles. They are "self-published" in the sense that you can pay to apply for a patent.  The existence of a patent doesn't tell us if the methods described in the patent were ever put into practice; just because you can find a patent for a radio hat doesn't mean that radio hats became common items of apparel, for example. Patent citations are most useful when supporting articles about inventors; we can cite Professor Kropotkin's patent on the lemon-battery powered car and give the reader a link to the artwork depicting it there, instead of drawing the silly thing ourselves; and document the professors short and obscure career as well. But patentability is not notability and by itself isn't a criterion for inclusion.  --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:52, 1 February 2018 (UTC)


 * But surely it could be useful as supporting material; for example if a particular office-granted patent (rather than just an application; there's a point and a meaning behind "patent" rather than just "a thing I designed then wrote on paper and sent off in the post" - before yours can be granted, an officer has to do a fair bit of research to verify that your idea has some kind of primacy to it) is associated with a particular landmark product (via the patent number that a lot of said products then sport, at least in small print on an undercarriage label if nowhere else).
 * For instance, we might find the original patent granted for Johnson-Random's Patent Automatic Electric Toasting Device of 1933 (actually launched in 1932 as the JR Patent-Pending AETD), which happened to be the first known model to brown on both sides and turn off the elements after an adjustable time period, thus setting the model that all future "standard" toasters would follow (...with JR Corp Inc jealously guarding their IP and demanding royalty payments on each one that worked by a demonstrably similar method, thus artificially inflating the prices of automatic electric toasters for at least the next two decades).
 * In that case, if the granted patent showed the mechanism by which said groundbreaking simultaneously-browning automatic-shutoff toaster worked, in a straightforward and visually obvious manner, then it would in fact be highly valuable to the article. 146.199.60.36 (talk) 20:08, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Free toasters from banks
How about including info on when banks gave free toasters, why it started and why it stopped. 122.106.83.10 (talk) 04:26, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

Removing "Risks" entirely.
The "Risks" section of this article is misleading.


 * "Toasters cause nearly 800 deaths annually due to electrocution and fires."

This source is a Reuters blog post that cites promotional/educational material from a South African aquarium. I can't find the video the Reuters article mentions -- probably because it is/was on display at said aquarium. The aquarium has posted a blog post with toaster death claims but no sources.


 * "Poking knives and other objects into a toaster is dangerous; aside from a risk of electrocution, such insertion can damage the toaster in ways that can increase the risk that the toaster will later start a fire."

The cited Straight Dope article states:


 * "The Consumer Products Safety Commission estimates that on average 15 people are electrocuted in the U.S. annually due to faulty or misused home electrical appliances, including toasters."

Which is, amusingly, slightly less than the average number of shark attacks in the US per year depending on your data source. So the aquarium folks do have a good point about sharks, but perhaps overstate the risk of toasters.

I did not find the CPSC source they mention.


 * "Even without such tampering, toasters can cause house fires."

None of the fires mentioned specifically in the linked Consumer Reports article are the fault of toasters. The article does reasonably claim that 1,335 fires occurred involving toasters over a 7 year data collection period. But that does not seem to meet a significant enough threshold to call this risk out here. For example:


 * Ranges have ~40x the fires according to this source, and there's no "Risks" section there.
 * Microwaves have ~2x the fires according to this source, and while it does have a lengthy hazards section, risk of electrical fire is not listed.

Given that searching for "toaster deaths" gives a reddit post linking to the "Risks" section as one of the top results (YMMV), this is actively doing damage, so I removed the section.

72.193.105.70 (talk) 15:09, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
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Semi-protected edit request on 8 December 2023
It is an electric kitchen appliance designed to toast or brown slices of bread or other similar baked goods. It typically consists of one or more slots into which bread is inserted, and the toaster uses heating elements, often made of nichrome wire, to generate heat and toast the bread to the desired level of crispiness.

1234Alee (talk) 18:48, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Shadow311 (talk) 19:45, 8 December 2023 (UTC)