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.