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The Evolution of Kitchen Appliances over Time
Kitchen appliances have drastically changed over the years, always improving our lives even more with each iteration.
The kitchen is the focal point of the modern home. Its engineering has evolved over the last several thousand years, from hobbled together washbasins to finely engineered perfectly styled hardware. Arguably though, a kitchen isn’t a kitchen if it isn’t filled with appliances.
Today’s kitchens have changed from even just 20 years ago. It seems like now we have an appliance for everything – from deshelling hard-boiled eggs to mincing garlic. Kitchens are pretty high tech in the 21st century.
While we’re certainly living in the future, this technological innovation inside of modern-day kitchen appliances happened like all human innovation, over time. That means that for every modern kitchen appliance, we can trace its origins back centuries through technological and even analog past.
Thanks to Home Advisor, seeing how common appliances evolved through history is a little bit easier.
Pressure Cooker
Pressure cooking was first experimented with in 1679 but really wouldn’t become a cooking method of popularity until the second World War. This was due to pressure cookers allowing for lower fuel usage, making them far cheaper to cook with.
Kettle
Kettles, like toasters, are another appliance that didn’t really need a ton of improvement to bring it into the modern era. Early kettles were simple metal pots that would be placed over gas stoves. Believe it or not, by the 1890s, the world already had an electric kettle that could heat water by being plugged in.
After this innovation, kettle designs were essentially just slowly improved upon as even the most advanced kettle tech today is still just an electric kettle.
Coffee Maker
The origins of coffee as a drink date back to the 15th century in Ethiopia and Yemen. These early drinkers likely would’ve muddled the beans with water and used the drink to stay awake. However, such a manual process would become increasingly unfavorable as the industrial revolution slowly made simple daily processes even easier.
The first “machine” like appliance used for making coffee was the percolator originating in the 1860s. This technique of coffee making evolved until in the 1920s, vacuum system machines were introduced and coffee makers incorporated pumps and filtering systems.
The groovy 1970s brought about the invention of the Mr. Coffee branded coffee maker. While it may be today’s budget brand, Mr. Coffee machines were the first in-home drip brewing system for coffee. This invention helped to spread the popularity of coffee across industrialized populations.
If you want to take a look at the evolution of each appliance side-by-side, take a look at the infographic below.
Source: Home Advisor and https://interestingengineering.com/