Tatung Electric Rice Cooker

The Tatung Electric Rice Cooker is a squat metal drum on three short feet, with a handle on either side and a domed lid capped by a black knob. On its front is a small panel with two lamps and a single lever. Inside the body sits a heating plate; on it stands a removable inner pot that holds the rice. A cup of water poured into the outer body, around the inner pot, is the cooker's timer: it steams the food until the water is gone, then the switch clicks off and the cooker keeps it warm.

The principle came from Japan, where Toshiba sold the first automatic household rice cooker in 1955, with exactly this two-pot arrangement. In 1960 Tatung, then the Tatung Steel and Machinery Manufacturing Company of Taipei, began making its own under a technical agreement with Toshiba. Design historians describe the first model, the TAC-6, as a close copy of Toshiba's.

It was one of more than thirty such cookers made in Taiwan in the 1960s, and it became the market leader. The historian Chin Hsien-yu records how Tatung's engineers adapted it: a hotter cut-off for Taiwan's mixed rices and thick aluminium pots, a lower-wattage model for homes on ten-amp supplies, a heavier lid and later a vent notch to stop it rattling, and in 1970 three grooves in the inner pot. By the mid-1970s it was in most city kitchens, and Tatung became the everyday word for a steam cooker in Taiwan.

Tatung still makes it, now in stainless steel and in sizes from three to twenty servings, along with dual-voltage versions sold for use abroad. The working parts are those of 1960: an outer pot, an inner pot, a measure of water and one switch. Some owners say theirs have run for decades, and Tatung sells the power cord on its own because it is the part that wears out first.