I believe my rice cooker and I have been together for about forty-four years. I'm not sure of the exact date I got it, and I was going to see if I could find out whether or not there was any information on the Internet about the Toshiba Model RC-6B rice cooker that I own. All I could find was a plaintive plea from someone who had posted on kitchen.manualsonline.com hoping to find some lost directions for using the same model rice cooker, which they had bought in 1974 in Guam. I went to the Toshiba website and it seems they don't make any appliances like rice cookers anymore.
So I decided to do a little googlesleuthing. It turns out that, according to the Toshiba Science Museum, the first commercially successful rice cooker was made by Toshiba in December, 1956. In a short time, they were making 200,000 of them a month, and in four years, half the homes in Japan had a rice cooker. In 1970, the total annual rice cooker output was over 12 million.
In my travels about the web, I found websites that helped you to find a rice cooker. Apparently there have been many "improvements" over the last forty years, some of them mentioned in the aptly named ricecookerfetish.com website. There are rice cookers with battery-powered memory and electronic timers, some that use induction heating, some with non-metallic inner cooking bowls, and so on.
And my little Toshiba RC-B? It has an on/off switch. You can see it in the picture below. That's it, in the front, under the Toshiba name. You move the lever up to turn it on, and a red light goes on. It stays on while the rice is cooking, and then turns off automatically. If you listen carefully, you can hear the "pop" when the lever goes back down, and if you look, the light will be off. That's all.
I was going to write a diary about how they don't make appliances like they used to, but as I started to remember little bits and pieces of where it's been and what I've done with it, I realized it was part of my life story. Follow me below the orange kosquiggle to see what I mean.
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