wff_ng_7 wrote:

> I get the feeling things such as kitchen stoves were a lot more varied 40-50
> years ago then they are now, with a lot of interesting features. Now even
> with the professional style stoves, the variation isn't as great as it once
> was. Needless to say, there are dramatically fewer stove manufacturers today
> than there were 50 years ago, in spite of a lot of the brand names still
> being around for marketing reasons.


IMO the last big stylistic advance in kitchen appliances was
Frigidaire's "Sheer Line" (squared corner) styling of the late 50's,
nothing much has changed since. June Cleaver's big "Sheer Look"
fridge c. 1960 would be perfectly at home in today's kitchens...

Frigidaire was a division of General Motors and GM back in the 50's was
in the forefront of future "prognostications". GM had wild show cars
with gas turbine engines, plexiglass tops, and they predicted that cars
would be driven automatically by radar on superhighways. For years in
the 50's the GM "Motorama" shows brought these dreams to the masses,
and these dreams included Jetson - style kitchens...

GM didn't *quite* put tailfins on appliances, but it surely wasn't for
want of trying ;-)

Here is a bunch of fun stuff I found about "future" kitchens:


I like this kitchen:

Frigidaire Kitchen of the Future, 1957

http://www.plan59.com/decor/decor021.htm

---------------------------


You can view a Frigidaire 1957 promotional film he

http://www.archive.org/details/Frigidai1957

Frigidaire Finale 1957

"The Sheer Look" was Frigidaire's tagline for its 1957 line of
refrigerators, ranges and washer-dryers, and refers to their
straight-line, square-cornered, "flat" styling, which was an innovation
at a time when major appliances were all rounded and bulgy-looking.
They were the first of their kind, and spelled the end of the
traditional blimp-like 1950s refrigerator. The ad campaign featured
models in evening gowns and elbow-length gloves, holding their arms in
an odd position so that their fingertips met at right angles
(symbolizing "sheer" square corners). An eBay search for Sheer Look
will turn up examples of these. When I was a kid we had a 1957 Sheer
Look refrigerator -- a white Frigidaire Imperial with turquoise
interior.

"A dancing couple caress appliances instead of each other. A woman in a
party dress leads a man in a tails in an energetic dance around a group
of stoves, washer-dryers and refrigerators. Instead of being set in a
house, the film takes place on an obvious stage set. Only in the
fifties were household appliances seen as such objects of glamour as
they are here. The appliances carry a hint of intrigue, particularly
the black refrigerator which the woman climbs up on in a moment of
triumph. Maybe the film's message to women consumers was that once
their kitchens were stocked with "Sheer Look" appliances, it would
free them up for dalliances with dapper, tuxedo-wearing men who are not
their husbands. The woman in this film leads a life very different from
the women who would have been the audience for this film. She has a lot
of new appliances without actually having to be in a kitchen. She wears
a pretty, impractical dress. She has an attentive man (who's also a
great dancer) who follows her around in a state of devotion. She even
gets to wear a tiara. Given how drab most womens' lives were then, this
film encapsulates their longings for recognition and escape. But the
last scene in the film, where we see a woman holding her arms in a
square shape that echoes the "Sheer Look" shape of the appliances,
puts the woman back in her lowly place. The woman and the object sold
are one and the same."

------------------------------


More comment on the _Frigidaire Finale_ film:

http://gopher.well.com:70/0/Art/Expe.../rainbow.yours

FRIGIDAIRE FINALE

Jam Handy Organization for Frigidaire Division of General
Motors, 1957. 4 min., faded Eastmancolor, 16m
This film fragment is a surviving
segment of the gala
industrial show mounted to roll out the 1957 Frigidaire
kitchen appliance line to retail dealers at the national
sales meeting.
Futuramas, Motoramas and Kitchens of Tomorrow, like many
"utopian" ideas, often seem to recall the past rather than
predict the future. The utopia of the late thirties linked
the advent of a better world to the success of cars,
refrigerators or ball bearings. These visions were often
invoked when few people could actually afford to buy
expensive products, and it seemed safer to speak of the
future than the present. Wars and the attendant shortages of
materials and goods intervened, temporarily shifting
futuristic schemes back into the marginal realm of science
fiction.
But in the second half of the Fifties, advertisers once
again felt confident to invoke the future, and filled the
mass media with utopias, fantasies and dreams. Conservative
corporations proposed new, futuristic and sometimes fanciful
needs to a society abandoning dirty, old-fashioned cities
for the new suburbia. Images of national mobilization, duty
and scarcity disappeared from advertising in favor of images
of gracious living, seductive housewives and, always, a
choice of several colors.
Frigidaire, a division of General Motors, marketed its
appliance lines just like automobiles. All that had become
associated with automotive marketing -- the annual model
change, high-pressure pitches, and especially planned
obsolescence -- was applied to selling the home and its
contents. New models were introduced with great fanfare
every year. Three distinct product lines -- the Imperial, the
Deluxe and the Super Deluxe -- were designed for different
levels of purchasing power. Buyers were encouraged to trade
up to top-of-the-line models, loaded with options. Oddly,
these spanking new washers, dryers, ranges and refrigerators
seemed almost ornamental in their detail. Unlike ads just a
few years earlier, these glamorous late Fifties
representations shunned any mention of time-saving,
convenience or even housework. Smiling women in formal
dresses danced their way through magazine pages and TV
spots, untroubled by the actual operation of their "sheer
look" appliances."


More vintage appliance videos:
http://automaticwasher.org/vintage_video.htm

-----------------------


This is a fun site with lots of "future" food and kitchen stuff:

http://www.davidszondy.com/future/Li...encomputer.htm

"This isn't a food making machine, but it is an example of pure
technical daftness. We present the Honeywell Kitchen Computer of 1969.
For only $10,000.00 you too could have a machine in your kitchen that
can store recipes, tell you which dishes you can make with the
ingredients on hand, and (all together now!) balance your cheque book.
Mind you, it had no user interface except for a small row of buttons
on the front, you had to take a fortnight's course on how to use it,
and it cost as much as a house, but it's progress. And who can argue
with that?"

--------------------


http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/...t-kitchen.html

Today's "Kitchen of Tomorrow"

The first in a series of visionary tales inspired by the great
corporate marketing films of the 1950s and 1960s.

From: Issue 102 | January 2006 | Page 39 By: Paul Lukas

"In the 1956 film _Design for Dreaming_ -- a promotional trailer
produced by Frigidaire--a housewife in the "kitchen of tomorrow" feeds
a recipe card into a slot, triggering a series of appliances that
automatically bake a birthday cake complete with lit candles. Other
films of the era promised that future kitchens would include . . . a
transparent cylindrical refrigerator! A robot butler! And an oven that
cooks a roast in minutes "by electronics."

Fifty years later, none of that has materialized; really great espresso
machines represent the current apex of home gastronomy. But the vision
of a high-tech kitchen remains tantalizing. "Historically, technology
has entered the home through the kitchen," says Ted Selker, an
associate professor at MIT. who runs a lab dedicated to exploring what
tomorrow's kitchen may actually look like.

The 1950s version of the future focused primarily on labor-saving
gadgetry with a "gee whiz!" factor. Selker's lab has its share of this:
dishes that can be custom-stamped from acrylic disks, a "smart sink"
that recognizes what you put in it and adjusts the water temperature
accordingly. But he's more interested in improving the quality of how
we eat and interact. "Everyone talks about fresh, fresh, fresh," he
says. "But what is fresh food? The freshest food is alive." So his
kitchen lab includes a hydroponic cupboard with an ultrasonic
evaporator, which allows leafy vegetables and herbs to thrive like cut
flowers.

"And why should a refrigerator just be a cold place?" Selker asks.
"Eggs don't need to be refrigerated; butter, if you use it soon enough,
doesn't need to be refrigerated.

So why not have a warm compartment, maybe with a nitrogen atmosphere,
so you don't worry about oxidation? What if we want apples to ripen?
Throw some carbon dioxide in there."

Kitchen research is also progressing at Microsoft, where Jonathan Cluts
oversees a team that projects what might be brought to market in the
next 5 to 10 years. "What I try to focus on," he says, "is
demonstrating what will be possible and then gauging people's
reactions. So it's great when we develop something and people say,
'Yeah, I'd love to have that.' But it's also useful when someone says,
'No, don't make that.' "

Among the things people seem to like: recipes projected directly onto
countertops (no need to fuss with index cards or cookbooks), an oven
that can be remotely programmed from a cell phone, and a microwave that
reads a product's bar code and knows how long to cook it for. And
that's just the start: "We basically assume that anything in your house
that has power can be part of your home network," says Cluts.

But even in this vision of the future, the feeling of home is more
important than bells and whistles. "The kitchen is the social nerve
center for the family," says Cluts. "So we do a lot of stuff involving
scheduling, using touch-screen displays, and putting computer monitors
in the kitchen so kids can do their homework there and the whole family
can stay together." So ultimately, this kitchen of tomorrow may be more
about preserving the domestic values of yesterday".

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