Dualit 6 Slice Classic Toaster

The Dualit six-slot toaster is a long, heavy box of polished stainless steel with six wide slots in a row across its top. Its ends are rounded castings of aluminium. On the front, two dials set the slots in use and the toasting time, and beneath them a single lever lifts the bread. It does not pop up: when the timer runs out the elements switch off and the toast stays down, warm, until someone lifts it.

The toaster was the work of Max Gort-Barten, a German-born inventor who settled in London and set up a small factory in Camberwell after the war. His first company product was a cocktail shaker, then a heater called the Dual-Lite, which gave the firm its name. In 1952, according to Dualit and Wikipedia, he designed a six-slot toaster for hotels, restaurants and canteens, with a mechanical timer, a novelty at the time according to the Dutch retailer Marmelot, and a lever to raise the bread by hand. A museum of design gives the launch as 1955.

The first version wore a streamlined, rounded shell with its controls at one end. In the late 1970s a graduate of the Royal College of Art gave it the flat front and rounded end castings it has today, and it began to appear in John Lewis, Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. In the 1980s, Dualit says, the fashion for professional kitchen equipment quadrupled demand almost overnight, and the toaster moved from the café counter into the home.

Each element is wound on mica, and the patented ProHeat element of 1999 coated the windings against knives. The 6 Slice Classic Toaster shown here makes, by Dualit's count, 240 slices an hour, and is still assembled by hand, now in Crawley, with the assembler's name on its base. Nearly every part can be replaced.