"MIT" news and stories

You know that saying, "The greatest thing since sliced bread?" It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to those of us born in the last few generations since we've always had sliced bread, but the invention of the slicer sure had an impact on the world when it debuted 80 years ago.

The first loaf of pre-sliced bread was sold on July 7, 1928, but its inventor, Otto Rohwedder, had been working on it since 1912. Invention Dimension profiled Rohwedder, who was a jeweler until 1916 when he decided to work on this idea full time. The world would have been treated to sliced bread in 1917 if a fire hadn't destroyed the blueprints and prototypes at the factory set to produce the first bread slicers. Rohwedder didn't give up, though. He worked until he made up for those losses, and kept plugging away at perfecting his bread slicing machine. He sold the first one to a bakery in in Chillicothe, Mo., in 1928, and a star was born.

I think fate may have played a part in that 1917 fire, because it wasn't until 1926 that the electric pop-up toaster became popular in the US. Would sliced bread have caught on without the new toasting device? We'll never know, but they sure do go well together!

[via Coldmud]

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If you belong to the Sandra Lee fan club because you can't cook, then the Intelligent Spoon is something you and I, a kitchen gadget geek, can share.

The Intelligent Spoon is the product of an experiment out of the MIT Media Lab that detects temperature, acidity, salinity, and viscosity levels with zinc, gold, zener diode, and aluminum sensors. The spoon sends the information back to a host computer for processing and direction. Kind of like a techno-geeky sous chef/cooking school coach.

Um, I doubt it would help you with a fallen souffle, but it certainly would be able to tell you if you accidentally substitute salt for sugar in your cupcakes.

[via: Engadget]

When a phone call or e-mail isn't as intimate as you would like, there is a new technology that will allow you to share a drink with a loved one - no matter how great the physical distance between you two: glowing wine glasses. The glasses were designed by researchers at MIT. When one glass of a pair is picked up, its matching glass gives off a red glow. When lips are pressed to one glass, presumably while drinking, the partner glass glows brightly. The glasses contain liquid sensors and wireless links that trigger the light-emitting diodes.

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