What a great story.
Tablet really does keep the gems coming.
Wonderful article!
This guy was amazing. Look how inspiring the holy Sabbath is!
Read the whole thing:
"The inventor of the slow cooker was one of the tribe. Irving Naxon (ne Nachumsohn) applied for the first patent for a slow cooker in 1936. His daughter Lenore, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me in an interview that her father was inspired by cholent. “His mother grew up in Vilna or wherever, and on Friday afternoons her mother would take a big crock and fill it with dried beans and root vegetables and a shtickel meat, and ask my grandmother to go to the local bakery and put the crock in the oven. The oven was turned off at the end of the day, but as it cooled it provided slow, even, diminishing-temperature cooking. Then [on Saturday] my grandmother was sent back to pick up the crock, and the stew was cooked. Dad asked himself, ‘How can I emulate this kind of slow, even cooking in a crock-lined pot?’
"Naxon’s patent was granted in 1940. His invention began life as “The Boston Beanery” (at various times it was also known as the Naxon Beanery and the Flavor Crock) and the original market was coffee shops and luncheonettes. “There was a gold one and a red one, so you could have one for milchig and one for fleishig,” Lenore recalled."
"The device was just one of Naxon’s over 200 patents, along with a portable washing machine on casters that attached via hose to a kitchen faucet, a frying pan with its own heating element, infrared and ultraviolet health lamps, a tabletop tub with an agitator for washing cloth diapers, and a tiny electric washer for doll clothes called Dollyduds. During WWII, Naxon invented a sonar submarine detector and an oxygen-flow indicator for aircraft used by the Defense Department. “And when you go to Times Square and see what they call the Zipper,” Lenore said of the electronic billboard that wraps around 1 Times Square and broadcasts a steady stream of headlines, “in an earlier incarnation it was the Naxon TeleSign. It sent data from The New York Times all over the world over telephone wires.”
