The first commercially successful electric toaster, the D-12, was introduced by General Electric in 1909. It could toast one side of a single piece of bread. You had to flip it yourself. Progress has been slower than you might expect.

The pop-up mechanism arrived in 1926. Automatic shutoff followed in 1930. Quartz elements did not enter consumer toasters until the 1990s. In a century of toaster design, there have been perhaps five genuinely new ideas.

There is a specific pleasure in a kitchen that works. Not a beautiful kitchen, necessarily, but a functional one — where the kettle is where you expect it, where the bread is where you left it, where the toaster does exactly what you set it to do.

A well-made toaster becomes part of the morning without demanding attention. That is what we were trying to build.