Refrigerator

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. 

RELATED: THE HISTORY BEHIND THE 15
KITCHEN APPLIANCES THAT CHANGED THE WAY WE LIVE^[1]

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. 

Refrigerator

Source:
Home Advisor^[2]

Our refrigerators are finely engineered pieces of tech that are
vital to the modern day kitchen. Devices used to keep things cold
date back centuries, but the modern day refrigerator began in the
early 1900s as an icebox. These metal boxes were lined with a metal
like tin and would then be loaded with a massive ice block that
would slowly melt as it kept the food in the box cold. 

These early ice boxes did the trick, but by around 1915,
electric refrigerant style refrigerators began showing up in homes
around the world. These early machines functioned on the same
principle that modern machines do, cooling through the use of a
refrigerant. However, these early devices, called Domeires used a
variety of highly toxic gases as refrigerants. That meant that if
your refrigerant stopped running, you might too.

Cheesy jokes aside, manufacturers eventually started using Freon
in refrigerators near the end of WWII. You’ll notice that around
the 1940s is when refrigerators took on their modern shape with
doors – and not too much has changed since. 

Nowadays, refrigerators use tetrafluoroethane to keep our food
chilled.

Coffee Maker

Source:
Home Advisor^[3]

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.

Blender

Source:
Home Advisor^[4]

Before the invention of the blender as an appliance in 1922,
people used to have to break down and mix things by hand. Apart
from being utterly inconvenient, this process was commonly
practiced with mortar and pestles. Making a smoothie wasn’t really
a thing back then, at least in the lens of modern
context. 

In the 1930s, an appliance called the Miracle Mixer came along.
This device iterated on the first invention of the blender and made
it accessible to the public. 

Early blenders were basically just cups with spinning blades in
the bottom, but modern blenders now have all the tech in the
world. 

Juicer

Source:
Home Advisor^[5]

As the Industrial Revolution took over in the U.S., pressing
your own fruit for juice by hand became so last century. By 1915,
the first mechanical fruit press was created, which led way to the
Sunkist Juice Extractor, sold in the 1920s. This early juicer
popularized the practice in the U.S.

Over the years, the main thing that changed about juicing
machines was just how they extracted the liquid from the fruit.
Early machines emulsified the fruit and filtered out the pulp. As
time went on though, researchers discovered that these
high-intensity machines could break down some of the beneficial
nutrients from the fruits. 

Today, most juicers use a twin-gear system that squeezes out the
juice and keeps the nutrients intact.

Toaster

Source:
Home Advisor^[6]

Ah, the simple toaster… how much could that have changed over
the years? 1909 was the first year that a commercially successful
toaster was sold, called the D-12 from GE. This toaster was one
that surely would catch your house on fire as it was essentially
just heated exposed coils that you would set your bread in to
toast. 

As time moved on and houses undoubtedly burned, many different
companies iterated on the original toaster design. By about the
1920s we started seeing toasters that were fully enclosed and much
safer to use. 

Believe it or not, it wasn’t until Wonder Bread began selling
pre-sliced bread loaves in the 1930s that the toaster rose to
prominence as being a breakfast-making machine, according to
Home Advisor.^[7]

Kettle

Source:
Home Advisor^[8]

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.

Dishwasher

Source:
Home Advisor^[9]

Dishwashers changed the world. First introduced in the 1890s as
a hand-powered machine, the importance of these magical kitchen
devices grew over the years. Permanent plumbing as part of home
construction in the 1920s is part of what caused the use of these
machines to increase as more and more homes could be built with a
place for a dishwasher.

It really wasn’t until the 1940s and 50s that dishwashers became
the machine that we know and love with racks and spinning sprays.
Other than new engineering tech, the core design really hasn’t
changed much since then.

Stove

Source:
Home Advisor^[10]

Cooking before the modern stove meant using fire. Early stoves
were just metal casings that contained burning wood and directed
the heat to a cooking surface. In 1900 the first gas-fueled stove
was introduced. 

Gas would dominate the stove industry for nearly the next 3
decades until electric ovens were offered up as a safer and easier
alternative.

Stoves then started evolving from purely pieces of function into
modern aesthetic works of art. 

Pressure Cooker

Source:
Home Advisor^[11]

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. 

This appliance is one that really peaked in the mid-1900s and
has been on the decline in use ever since. Nowadays we have
appliances like the Instant pot that work to prepare out meals, but
in general, we let our quick-cooking get done by the friendly
microwave.^[12] 

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^[13]