When they wake up and prepare breakfast, one of the first things millions (if not billions) of people around the world do is slip a couple of slices of bread into a toaster, before preparing the rest of their morning repast. However, the toast is almost always first because, to paraphrase a famous advertising slogan for orange juice, “a breakfast without toast is like a day without sunshine.”
While early electric toasters were a vast improvement over previous means of converting slices of bread into toast, they still had a long way to go before becoming the absolute go-to utensil required for composing the first meal of the day.
Because of the central role, it plays in human nutrition, and for numerous other reasons, I believe the electric toaster unquestionably deserves a place on the list of what I like to call “extraordinary ordinary things.”
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