This Is What Your Appliances Would Have Looked 100 Years Ago

With all the gadgets on the market it’s no surprise that what’s being sold today might not even be recognizable in a few decades. Give it 100 years and the things we use today will probably look completely unfamiliar to folks in the future! Go back in time a century and some of our everyday appliances looked pretty different to how they look today. Here’s how your everyday appliances would have looked 100 years ago.

6) Toasters

These little machines used to be quite bare bones. The familiar chrome casing which covers all the hot parts of the apparatus wasn’t common on toasters until the 1950s. Before then many older style toasters had very little in the way of outer encasement and some were not much more than slots arranged around a red hot heating element!

The old style looks very pretty in its own way, but we’ll stick with the safer models that we have today, thank you very much.

5) Washing Machines

The top and front loading machines we know today are quite different from the first washing machines. Thor was the first and the configuration looks almost like a smoker or grill to most people today. This original model uses a lot of floor space to support a fairly small drum. Notice this model still uses a manual mangle – no spin cycle on this bad boy.

We’ve come a long way as far the design, features, and capacity of washing machines go.

4) Vacuum Cleaners

The very first vacuums were manually operated, meaning the suction came from wood and leather bellows which had to be operated separately from the the hose. This meant that it took two people to operate it!

Vacuums were quite expensive when they first came out which meant that only large and rich households could afford to buy one. In these cases, they had several maids or more on hand so having a two-person cleaning machine was not considered inconvenient at all. But, of course, this also meant that only the wealthy could buy them. This all changed with advent of handy electrical outlets and the birth of the middle class.

Today’s vacuum cleaners are usually very easy to operate and have features no Edwardian could have dreamed of.

3) Hot Plates

While chaffing dishes may not have changed much since the 1800s the hot plate certainly has. This skillet hot plate burner isn’t flat, but rather has the pan already built-in. This model is powered by alcohol instead of electricity.

Hot plates today are much more versatile and can accommodate a variety of vessels as long they are stovetop ready.

2) Kitchen Multi-appliances

100 years ago the combination appliance wasn’t plugged in at all, but used fuel to make sure breakfast went smoothly. It looks simple enough, although we can’t imagine that tilted skillet area to be much fun to operate.

Today’s “breakfast stations” do a lot more with a lot less work than their 1910s predecessors.

1) Refrigerators

From the icebox to the refrigerator, the path for fresh food at our fingertips 24/7 was not a fast one. Many different types of food preservation devices were tried before the more efficient modern fridges were made.

This style from 1919 looks almost like a curio cabinet with its glass panels that let you see inside. However, the condenser appears to take up about half of the space inside the unit.

The refrigerators of today fit a lot into the space they use with convenient drawers, slots, and shelves. They don’t look as much like furniture as this old ones do, but that is a small price when we consider just how much more food can be stored in a modern refrigerator.