The History of the Kettle and Toaster

The electric kettle and the electric toaster both emerged in roughly the same era — the very end of the 19th and start of the 20th century — as some of the first genuinely practical electric kitchen appliances, though both took longer than you might expect to become truly reliable.

The electric kettle’s slow start

The first electric kettles appeared around 1891, produced by the Crompton and Company, but these early designs had a serious flaw: the heating element sat in a separate compartment beneath the water rather than directly in contact with it, meaning it took an impractically long time to actually boil water compared to a stovetop kettle. It wasn’t until the heating element was redesigned to sit directly in the water — a design improvement generally credited to the 1920s — that electric kettles became genuinely competitive with the traditional stovetop version on speed.

Automatic switch-off

Early electric kettles had no automatic cut-off at all — you had to remember to switch them off yourself, and a forgotten kettle could boil dry and become a fire risk. The automatic switch-off mechanism, using a steam-sensing bimetallic strip, became standard from the mid-20th century onward and is the same basic principle still used in most kettles today, which is why a heavy limescale build-up (insulating the sensor from the steam) causes the exact “clicks off too early” symptom our own troubleshooting guide covers.

The pop-up toaster

Early electric toasters, from around 1893 onward, toasted only one side of the bread at a time and needed manual attention throughout — you had to open the appliance and turn the bread yourself. The pop-up toaster, automatically timing the toast and ejecting it when done, is generally credited to Charles Strite, an American who patented the design in 1919 after reportedly growing frustrated with burnt toast in a factory cafeteria. Strite’s design, refined through the 1920s, established the basic pop-up mechanism that’s still recognisably the same today, nearly a century later.

Becoming standard kitchen fixtures

Both appliances took time to become universal in British kitchens specifically — through the interwar and early post-war decades, ownership was far from universal, and it was really the wider rollout of household electricity and rising post-war affluence through the 1950s and 60s that turned the kettle and toaster from a novelty into the near-default kitchen items they are today.