Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The Development Of Modern Kitchens Throughout The Years

By Matthew Kerridge

Improvements in modern kitchens throughout the centuries pay homage to the innovation and hard work undertaken by many people, especially inventors and other innovators in the'th and 20th centuries, to streamline work and improve equipment of all types. This is especially so when it comes to kitchen appliances. In fact, kitchens today owe much to the work taken to improve these appliances.

It is perhaps most often the case that a modern kitchen today owes almost everything to the work done in the Industrial Revolution to improve commonplace household items so that they could be manufactured more efficiently. This is especially the case when it came to the stove and refrigerator. By the'th century, the basic design of the kitchen was cemented even for the lower classes.

As always with fashions and styles that at first are affordable only to the wealthier in society, mass production -- which really began to take primacy of place in the manufacture of a limitless number of goods -- allowed the cost of the stove and other items now found in every kitchen to become less expensive over time. This meant that more people than ever could afford a stove, for example.

Along with improvement in home technologies, concurrent improvements in plumbing that allowed running water to be brought into the home and the laying of natural gas pipes in the late'th century throughout many cities around the country allowed stoves to be manufactured that took advantage of self-contained heating rather than using coal to fire the stove.

It was still the case, though, that many areas in the United States all the way up through the first third of the'00s were not able to access indoor plumbing, electricity or natural gas, especially in more rural areas. Today, we take for granted these basic necessities which were not available to our forebears, meaning that today's modern kitchen was still off in the distance back then.

Along with improvements in the manufacture of home technologies, improvements developed as a result of the streamlining of work contributed greatly to kitchen design. Industrial engineers of the'th and 20th centuries design kitchens to be more efficient so that the women cooking in them could return back to the factory floor much quicker and therefore devote more time to work.

Because of this effort -- which was quite unpopular initially among women factory workers -- the technological improvement in kitchen design also led to concurrent improvements in stoves and refrigerators. These improvements not only made food preparation easier but also created a need to design even more efficient and better looking kitchen areas even up through the last third of the 20th century.

Today's modern kitchens, in many cases, usually don't resemble anything close to what kitchens were for most of human history. They have incorporated design and technological improvements that allow far more efficient utilization of space and equipment in it than was ever possible just a half-century ago. We take these rooms for granted but they are supremely vital these days, though we may not know it.

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