Who Invented Toast? The History of Toasted Bread and the First Toasters

If you search for the invention of toast today, popular trivia sites and AI search snippets will confidently tell you that ancient Egyptians invented toast to preserve bread in the desert heat, or that the Romans “popularized” it because the word comes from Latin. It’s clear that this is not a satisfactory answer. It ignores what we mean when we say toast. Baking raw dough over open coals or hot stones isn’t making toast, it’s just simply the ancient method of baking bread. Nobody looks at charred pita, a crisp Indian naan, or a browned pizza crust pulled from a wood-fired oven and calls it “toast.” For a food to be considered toast, it requires a secondary step, applying dry heat to an already-baked, sliced portion of bread.

The “Desert Preservation” Fallacy

Some popular articles claim that when Egyptian leavened bread dried out and went hard, workers “scorched slices of bread so they lasted longer.” This gets the food science completely backward. Exposing a slice of bread to dry heat does not magically preserve it for long-term storage. It only temporarily reverses starch retrogradation so you can chew and swallow a stale piece of bread right now. Drying dough into rock-hard rusks or hardtack was indeed an ancient preservation method, but nobody sitting down to breakfast considers military hardtack to be “toast.” So, again, we run up against linguistic confusion, made even worse by the gross misunderstanding of the Latin roots of the word.

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The Latin Word Game

The idea that the Romans invented toast relies entirely on a linguistic misunderstanding. The modern English word toast does trace back to the Latin verb torrere and its past participle tostum. But in ancient Rome, tostum did not mean “a slice of browned breakfast bread.” It was simply the everyday Latin word for scorched, parched, roasted, or dried by heat. This word could be applied to roasting grain or drying wood. It could even be used to describe sun-baked earth.

The English word toast traces back through Old French to the Latin verb torrere and its participle tostum, meaning to parch, scorch, or dry out with heat.

To claim the Romans invented toast because we adopted their word for “burned” makes as much sense as claiming the French invented all cooked meat because we use the word roast. It is, in fact, as absurd as suggesting that a certain civilization invented roasting the meat on a stick or even that they invented boiled water. People have been scorching stale bread over embers for as long as leavened loaves have existed.

The “Shield on the Fire” Myth: Hastings, 1066

In addition to ancient desert preservation myths, another bizarrely persistent internet tale claims that toast was invented during the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

According to this legend, Norman (or Saxon) soldiers found their field bread soaked by rain, laid the wet loaves across their battle shields propped next to camp bonfires to dry them out, and were astonished to discover they had created crisp, delicious “toast.”

This is an historically nonsensical example of folk history manufactured out of thin air to sound highly specific and thus more authoritative. The notion that seasoned medieval soldiers, or anyone else in 11th-century Europe, needed a military invasion to figure out that heat dries and crisps damp bread is absurd. By 1066:

• Hearth-toasting, trenchers, and roasting forks had been common across Europe for centuries.
• The Romans had already spent hundreds of years scorching stale bread over embers.
• The French root of the word (toster) was already part of everyday vernacular for roasting and parching food over coals.

Placing food on a hot surface near a fire isn’t a practice suddenly discovered on an11th-century battlefield. It’s just a highly logical and, frankly, quite obvious example of how human beings have cooked over open flames since the Stone Age.

Underlying all these origin myths is a common historical fallacy: the assumption that ancient humans only ever did things out of strict, utilitarian survival “need.” We imagine our ancestors living in joyless, calculating pragmatism, never warming bread unless forced to by desert preservation or military rainstorms.

In reality, ancient people had the exact same taste buds, sensory preferences, and textural desires we have today. Simply warming up a cold piece of bread next to a morning fire to make it aromatic, tender, and comforting wasn’t an elaborate technical solution to a crisis. It was just as likely an obvious, pleasurable thing to do. The fact that radiant heat temporarily revived hard, day-old bread could have been merely a convenient bonus, not an intellectual breakthrough.

An Elemental Human Practice

So, no single culture invented toasted bread. For as long as humans have baked grain loaves, bread has gone stale. And for just as long, people across every bread-eating civilization have held yesterday’s hardened bread over hearth coals, set it on hot stones, or propped it near a fire on a stick to make it warm, crisp, and edible again.

What was actually invented in modern history wasn’t the concept of browning bread over heat, it was the machine designed to automate the process.

The First Electric Toaster – Way Before Its Time

So, now that we’ve established that toasting is an ancient practice, the next obvious question is when did we get the appliance meant to make it easier? First, it’s important to realize that people had been slicing loaves of bread by hand long before pre-sliced bread was invented. And, amazingly, the first electric toaster was made before this too! The very first such appliance, by many accounts, was invented 1893 by a British company called Crompton and Co. If that seems a bit early to have developed a heating product that relied on electricity, it is. There wasn’t much electricity flowing around in those days. Edison didn’t even turn on his Pearl Street power station until September 1882, and that only served 503 customers by the next year. Central power stations really started taking off by 1890 but in 1863, there was not a big market for an electric toaster.

In addition to the lack of juice, the toaster from Crompton, which was called “The Eclipse,” had wire coils that burned out very quickly, only toasted one side of the bread, and had no controls or even a power switch. This electric bread toaster that barely worked and had many problems came a good sixty years before the first electric stoves began coming on the market. This, at least, established what a toaster was, and before long, somebody was willing to mess around in this fledgling, and risky, business.

The Toaster Improved – Still One Side At a Time

Albert Marsh, in 1905, worked on solving the crappy wire problem and patented a chromium-nickel alloy that would make high-resistance wire (the kind that glows red hot when you run current through it), which would last a long time. He formed the Hoskins Manufacturing Company to sell the wire. A year later, a guy named George Schneider, who worked for the American Electric Heater Co. of Detroit, came along and invented a new toaster using the wire, which was patented. His company entered into the toaster selling business on the basis of this patent. The wires wouldn’t burn out as fast but it still wasn’t much different than using a wood-burning fire to toast bread so that only one side toasted at a time. You had to turn the bread over to heat the other side.

General Electric, in 1909, developed a toaster but using a different wire alloy, hoping this would allow them to work around the previous Marsh wire alloy patent. Hoskins brought a suit and it was found that their design did, indeed, infringe on the patent.

All Those Pretty Toasters – And Finally Both Sides at Once

In 1909, Pacific Electric Heating Company developed a toaster that might be called the first toaster oven, which they sold under the Hotpoint brand, but claimed that they had actually invented the toaster in 1905. Improvements by others followed, such as a better bread holding or “pincher” mechanism designed by Alonzo Warner that Landers, Frary, and Clark used to go into the business, and their firm began making prettier looking toasters which sold well for over a decade. Then came automatic turners and in the mid 1920s, a toaster made by Frederick Hummel and John Noeth that not only toasted both sides but had a timer that caused the bread rack to tip out when the timer cycle ended. Finally, you could automatically toast your bread without standing there staring at it.

Many Different Types: Pinchers, Swingers, Flatbeds, Droppers, Perchers, and Floppers

Many of the innovations in toasters had concerned the mechanism for expelling the toasted bread. There were pinchers, swingers, flatbeds, droppers, tippers, perchers, and floppers, but these were still manually controlled. The greatest toaster was yet to come.

Finally, The Pop-Up Toaster! Enter the Toastmaster

The greatest of all toasters is the one we know today and it was in 1919 that the first Pop-up Toaster was invented by Charles Strite. This had elements on both sides, a timer, and a spring that popped the bread up when the timer cycle was done. The basic design of a toaster that is still used today! You’ve got to hand it to Strite. Nobody has been able to improve on his basic design for almost 100 years. Everything since then has been bells and whistles. There was, however, a similar type of toaster which was a side loading “pop-out” toaster, made by Superior Electric Products under the brand name “SuperElectric,” which popped to the toast out onto a warming plate, but this was nothing to the pup-up, because of the moving parts involved.

This first pop-up toaster entered the market in 1926 and was called the Toastmaster. It toasted only one slice at a time. Early on, there was even a product called the Perc-O-Toaster, which allowed you to brew coffee and toast bread all in one appliance. The breakfast of champions!

After the toastmaster came on the market, toaster sales hit the moon, and by 1960, almost every house in the US had a toaster in it. Advertisements claimed, “You don’t have to watch it – The toast can’t burn.” Of course, the toast could burn, and it still can. We’ve all done it.

The First Sliced Bread

So, how does the invention of sliced bread fall into this timeline? Well, about the time Hoskins, Pacific Electric, and General Electric were messing around with the early, primitive toasters, in 1912, Otto Frederick Rohwedder began working on a machine to slice bread on a large enough scale so bakeries could use it. It took him a while due to some personal disasters, but in 1928 he sold his first machine to M.F. Bench’s Chillicothe Bakery of Missouri. The machine didn’t just slice the bread, it wrapped it as well. Chillicothe used the machine and marketed Kleen Maid Sliced Bread. So, the first sliced breads began emerging just about the same time as the first pop-up toasters. Perfect timing, if you ask me.

Continental Bakeries got into the action in 1930 and marketed that most famous of all sliced breads Wonder Bread, originally called “Wonder-Sliced Bread.” Wonder Bread had been introduced as a 1.5-pound wrapped loaf of white bread in 1920, by the Taggart Baking Company of Indianapolis, but five years later the firm was purchased by Continental of St. Louis, which made the brand a national phenomenon.

Rohwedder subsequently sold his patents and his bread machine company, and there are not any surviving examples of his machine today. His are still the standard, though.

Further Reading

• Why Is There No Plural for Beef, Pork, or Meat? The Norman Conquest & Weird Food Plurals
• The “Regular Corn” Myth: Why Popcorn Isn’t the Anomaly