This gas oven is so heavy that light in the kitchen gravitationally lenses around it, but it's still going strong and the best oven I ever used.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
They used a shielded bimetalic thermostat to measure the radiant heat coming from the toast surface, instead of a timer, to establish doneness (consistently toasting despite heating element variance) and implemented the mechanical lowering & raising of toast without a single motor (which is why 60+ year old examples still work).
Since they only use a thermostat on one side, you do need to use a particular side for single toast.
As the elements cool, your bread returns to you, unharmed.
harmed to a degree that is proportional to the toast-decision-making latency of the operator
The toast slot is too narrow. You can't heat a bagel - well, technically you can force it in there, but it won't come back out with some help from a utensil.
They get flakey and you end up bouncing the toast a dozen times to get it to lower. Yes, I know there's an adjustment, but it's finicky and annoying. It's a toaster for crying out loud.
Yes, the design is ingenious, but there's a good reason they aren't made anymore.
I'm not so sure. You could probably make the slot wider, but it's still a 100% analog device that operates via heat expansion of metals. The adjustment is going to be finicky. People expect toasters to "just work" without maintenance.
As soon as you add digital electronics to automate the analog adjustment... why bother with the complicated analog part?
The only major advantage this toaster has over a spring/timer device is that the toast (usually, but not always) goes down by itself. Pushing down on a toaster spring just doesn't seem like that much of an inconvenience.
Have you ever owned one of these things? Did you genuinely like it?
The lack of bagel-width is annoying, but widening the slot on a redesign shouldn't impact any other components.
Even low-end toasters from the '60s outperform high-end toasters these days.
[1] https://www.sageappliances.com/eu/en/products/toasters/bta82...
Ovens and toaster ovens are where bagels "belong" - otherwise, you just end up with a sloppy toast-hole that may or may be great at cooking toast!
s/visible/noticeable
s/noticeable/noticeable with a naked eye
s/lensing/gravitational lensing
Now, figuring out this limit is left as an exercise for the reader as it's way beyond my abilities.
α = 4GM/((c^2)b), where b is the impact parameter[0].
Apparently human visual acuity is 0.3 milli-radians, so if b = 1 meter, that's approximately "the moon" (in at most a 1 meter radius volume)…
…assuming I didn't mix up my units in this formula I never used before, though it feels about right given the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth is ~ centimetres.
[0] never heard of this before just now; I think it's the shortest distance between the central point and the path the light would have taken if it hadn't been deflected?
I don't know how fast the radius of curvature drops off as a function of the Schwarzschild radius, but I'd imagine it's at least R^-1. So assuming a spherical cow^H^H^H oven with gravitational lensing dying out at ~100x the event horizon, we need a Schwarzschild radius the size of a tennis ball in order to still see the curvature a few metres out. The oven needs to weigh ~4x the Earth's mass for that.
https://dcmovies.fandom.com/wiki/Fortress_Key_(All-Star_Supe...
Last I tried to calculate (poorly), if you were to touch it. You liquify and be sucked into it just before contact.
Assuming "dwarf star material" means "neutronium" (which is unstable at any level less than a neutron star) and the "half million tons" mass quote for the key…
That's about the energy content of all the world's fossil fuel reserves being released in a 10 minute half-life.
22 grams. That is how heavy my glasses are.
>The angle of deflection (theta) is:
theta = (4GM)/(cr^2)
toward the mass M at a distance r from the affected radiation, where G is the universal constant of gravitation and c is the speed of light in vacuum.[0]
The best resolution our eyes can offer is about one arcminute (1/21600 of a turn). Depending on your distance from the object, just plug in some numbers.
Say at the earth-moon distance 384400 km the object must be about 24x the mass of the sun to bend the incoming light at one arcminute (~0,0002909rad).
The sun actually bends light at about 2 arcseconds as seen from Earth; the focal point would be about 542x the distance Sun-Earth. [1]
Alternatively the object of say 1m^3 volume at a distance of 10 meters will bend light by 1 arcminute if it weighs 3.27x10^16 kg, the density of about 1/10th of a neutron star.
To conclude: one will be instantly overwhelmed by the gravitational forces before being able to see an object bend light with one own eyes. That's why this kind of extreme bending/lending is reserved for galaxy clusters.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens#Explanation...