What is the deal with toasters?

[Glinda]

I have the ultimate cool toaster. Actually, I have two of them (the original from 1949, and a later version from 1952). Both work perfectly and have never had to be repaired.

The Sunbeam Model T-20 appeared on the market in the late 1940s and, although it underwent some minor design changes and retoolings, it remained in Sunbeam's product line until 1997.

Engineered by Ludvig Koci with the design supervised by Ivar Jepson and styled by Robert D. Budlong, the T-20 was the first fully automatic toaster. An ad from 1954 states, "Automatic Beyond Belief! All you do is drop in the bread ... Bread lowers itself automatically, no levers to push ... Toast raises itself silently, without popping or banging."

In a 1949 Consumer's Union test of toasters, they note the novel design, "The weight of the bread closes an electrical contact; this turns on the current and the bread slice is automatically lowered...". And the T-20 was one of the first toasters to use a bi-metallic, heat-sensitive device to gauge the temperature of the bread slice rather than the temperature of the toaster. This is supposed to prevent the bread from being able to burn.

The T-20 shed its "incised lines" and became the T-35; the light/dark control was placed on the front of the unit in the 60s, where it remained until the toaster went out of production in 1996.

The Sunbeam cost $22.50 in 1949, $85.00 in 1996 This was always a high quality toaster, perhaps it just couldn't compete anymore with the $9.99 K-Mart specials.

HA! I say. My parents received the T-20 model as a wedding gift 58 years ago, and the sucker still works like a charm. I had to pick it out of the trash six or eight years ago, when my mother threw it away because it was "old."

I declined to make the obvious comment about the person who threw it away...

P.S. I see one for sale on eBay... only three hours left!