Vintage Consumer Reports: Steam irons didn't impress in October 1951

"The introduction of the first home steam-electric iron a few years ago was greeted with considerable fanfare, and the fervent hope, among iron-tired housewives that here, at last, was a good answer to their ironing problems."—Consumer Reports, October 1951

Those first-generation steam irons didn't impress. Manufacturers made bold claims, but the irons ran out of steam and clothes still had to be dampened before ironing, according to our 1951 test results. Even worse, for the October 1951 report, nine of 11 steam irons were judged Not Acceptable, eight presented burn or scald hazards, and the soleplate melted and the thermostat failed on the Silex (shown). Talk about ironing problems.

In our latest tests of 26 steam irons, cordless irons, and steam generators, which will appear in the January 2010 issue of Consumer Reports, things got heated when we ironed 482 shirts, 54 linen tablecloths, and 81 napkins, but no meltdowns occurred. We tested and found some terrific irons that delivered a crisp look, had plenty of steam, and handled easily.

Safety is always a concern when ironing, and most of the newly tested models have a safety feature that shuts off the iron within minutes if you leave it upright and usually less than a minute if you leave it facedown.

One thing has remained the same since 1951: the price of a couple of models in the ratings. That Silex that melted cost $20 in 1951, as does the recession-busting Black & Decker Steam Advantage F1060, one of the highest-rated models in our new tests. (According to the federal government's inflation calculator, $20 in 1951 is worth more than $166 today.)—Kimberly Janeway | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential reading: Check our free buyer's guide to irons and look for our newly updated ratings later this week. If you're in a nostalgic mood, read our other Vintage Consumer Reports items.

Birthday toast: A basic kitchen appliance turns 100

One hundred years ago this week, a General Electric technician named Frank Shailor submitted the patent for the first commercially successful electric toaster. Shailor's invention had capitalized on another recent invention—nickel-chromium, or ni-chrome, wire—that could be heated repeatedly without breaking, according to the National Museum of American History.

Shailor's D-12 model (shown) arranged grids of ni-chrome wire and mica plates in an open configuration on a porcelain base. Early models sold for $4.50 and were an instant hit. Owners had to turn the bread by hand, so burned fingers were common.

Safety issues with toasters remained, as Consumer Reports covered in a 1956 report; three models were judged Not Acceptable due to electric shocks they caused. Recent toasters and toaster ovens we've tested are safer and more stylish.

You might not see many versions of Shailor's toaster around these days, but one  reader still uses her 1936 Toastmaster, which was featured in our roster of great old appliances. (If you're a nostalgia freak, check out the Vintage Consumer Reports posts on fluorescent lights, air conditioners, and the planned obsolescence of appliances, among other blasts from the past.—Gian Trotta |e-mail | Twitter

Essential Information: The centennial of the toaster comes a year after the invention of the vacuum cleaner, whose 100th birthday was marked by the Hoover Anniversary Windtunnel vacuums.

Vintage coffee: Two industrial films tell it like it used to be

The chart topping-performance by Eight O'Clock Coffee 100% Colombian in our latest report on coffee (available to subscribers) brought to mind those far-off days when there wasn't a blessed thing to do on Sunday afternoon but sit around in my aunt's back yard in New Jersey and drink coffee.

Not Caribou or Kickapoo or Starbucks coffee, either. This was 1965 or so, and if you were drinking coffee, it was Bokar, Red Circle, Savarin, or good old Eight O'Clock. And it flowed from a massive aluminum percolator after brewing for what always seemed like at least four hours.

Maybe it was that percolator or all that half-and-half we dumped into our cups before dunking a huge hunk of my aunt's dense, butter-rich pound cake. But my aunt's coffee and those quiet Sundays were memorable.

Two films from the Prelinger Archives on Archive.org evoke that lost time with a beguiling mix of promotion, propaganda, and still-current facts on the making of what now surpasses even soda in popularity among adults—at least when it comes to soft drinks.

This Is Coffee, from 1961, is easily the better of the two pieces. The 12-minute film's faded color images take you through such "exotic" choices as café au lait and cappuccino as you visit South America. A Latin-tinged beat keeps the cadence as the buttery-voiced announcer talks you through "proper" coffee-making ("fresh water, the right grind, and time, carefully measured does the trick").

You even get the recipe for percolator coffee (six to eight minutes over gentle heat) for "the romance of evening when young dreams grow softly." Never mind that the Cold War was simmering to a boil; in this film made by the Coffee Brewers Institute, all is sweetness and light in this best of all possible worlds.

Time For Coffee is even older. Judging by the cars and clothes (see the photo, above), it hails from somewhere just before Elvis gyrated onto the scene. This 12-minute-plus film, fittingly enough sponsored by the A&P Coffee Division of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, is a sort of Weekly Reader look at how coffee gets from the ground to your table. There amid an army of apparently contented villagers, the film takes you through the 24 major operations required, though I confess I counted more like 12, from picking, crushing, and washing the berries to drying, packing, roasting, tasting, shipping, retasting, and sealing the resulting beans.

And sure enough, as the sealed, packaged bags of finished coffee move down the space-age conveyor belt, there's the Eight O'Clock wending its way down the line toward some long-cleared breakfast table somewhere in an America long past.—Bob Markovich

Essential information: Find the best coffeemaker to brew your favorite coffee.

Buy the best microwave oven

When we tested 23 microwaves for our March 1981 report, we wanted to find out how good microwave cooking could be, as noted on the whimsical cover of the issue (click on the cover, right, for a better view). So our Tech department staff spent hundreds of hours preparing comfort foods like roast beef, meat loaf, stew, and pudding.

The testers noted the ease or difficulty of preparation for each oven and evaluated how the food looked and tasted. They found that microwaves weren't ideal for all dishes: Meat loaves turned out juicy and flavorful, but, the story concluded, "In our opinion, microwave cooking is no way to treat a $15 roast—cook it in a conventional oven instead."

Twenty-eight years later, our February 2009 report on microwave ovens covers more than 60 models. While all of the latest microwaves can handle basic tasks like making popcorn, some ovens promise to make cooking main meals as simple as preparing snacks. A few models can produce nicely browned, crispy chicken.

For specific details on the ovens, check out our Ratings (available to subscribers).—Kimberly Janeway

Essential information: For more advice on choosing a new oven, visit our updated microwaves product page and watch the video buying guide (right).

Vintage Consumer Reports: Lightbulb testing

The big round object in the photo at right isn't some early satellite or a giant fitness ball. It's an integrating, or Ulbricht, sphere that we used for an August 1965 report on incandescent lightbulbs to check the quality and quantity of their light output.

Each bulb—we tested five major brands—was suspended in the center of the sphere, whose sides were coated with a specially formulated high-reflectance white paint. A precisely regulated current lit each bulb while a photoelectric cell and meter measured the light output in lumens. We ran the test on the bulbs when they were new and after they had burned for 500 hours.

Our testers chose the 500-hour milestone because most of the tested bulbs had a claimed life span of 750 hours. Some of the bulbs burned out far short of their advertised life, while others well exceeded it. But most lasted just about 750 hours.

Forty-three years later we're still testing lights, though now they're compact fluorescent lightbulbs. We covered CFLs in an October 2007 report and continued to test them for months. Read the results of that testing in this update. Our follow-up tests revealed that some low-priced CFLs aren't lasting as long as manufacturers claim.—Gian Trotta

Essential Information: Watch our video on CFLs, right, and read about Home Depot's new CFL-recycling program.

Vintage Consumer Reports: Kitchen countertops

Fifty years ago, we used a wide range of materials, including ammonia, coffee, drain cleaner, ink, juices (beet, grape, and lemon), mustard, shoe polish, tea, and vinegar, to test kitchen countertops for durability, ease of maintenance, and stain resistance (photo, right).

Our testers pitted, stained, and scraped rigid plastic laminates (then-new Formica), flexible plastic laminates, calendared and printed vinyls, and linoleum against traditional materials like wood and stainless steel.

Stainless steel proved, well, stainable and earned a poor rating because it discolored severely from application of some common materials; wood also stained badly. A natural material (ceramic tile) and a synthetic product (Formica) topped the overall ratings.

Jump ahead 50 years to our latest countertops report, for which we beat up butcher block, ceramic tile, granite, limestone, marble, and stainless steel as well as materials like concrete, paper composite, quartz (engineered stone), and solid surface. See how we test countertops in the video, right.

Quartz and granite finished at the top of the rankings. The top two 1958 counter materials, ceramic tile and plastic laminate proved to be very good this time around. Plastic laminate has come full circle and is now being offering in a series of modernized 1950s patterns, like crisscross and boomerang. You'll find more details on our latest tests in our Ratings (available to subscribers).—Gian Trotta

Essential information: For more "counter intelligence," learn how to maintain your kitchen counters and read our money-saving secrets of a successful remodel. Uncover more Vintage Consumer Reports: toasters (1956), air conditioners (1957), general appliance woes (1967), and ceiling fans (1982).

Vintage Consumer Reports: Ceiling Fans

With ceiling fans, “you can go from breeze to bluster to benign zephyr,” we wrote in our July 1982 report on summer cooling. “Even the most profligate model,” we noted, “would cost only pennies a day to run.”

Ceiling fans haven’t changed much over the past 26 years. (The top fan shown is from 1982; the bottom one, from our July 2008 story on ceiling fans.) Although they cost slightly more to run today than they did during the early part of the Reagan era, ceiling fans can decrease energy consumption and save you money, but only if you use your air conditioner less or set it to a warmer temperature and rely on the cooling breeze from the fan. (See our latest report on and review of air conditioners, and learn more ways to keep cool this summer.)

“A ceiling fan can conjure up an exotic feeling even in a raised ranch in the suburbs,” we wrote in the 1982 article. If a virtual experience isn’t enough, you can put the money you’ve saved toward a real getaway. Read our Ratings-based reports on airlines and hotels.

Vintage Consumer Reports: Appliance Woes

Most of you probably find Consumer Reports a pretty serious publication and ConsumerReports.org a fairly staid Web site. Both are certainly great sources of testing-based product reports, compelling investigative features, and expert advice for all aspects of your life. But beyond the entertaining Selling It column, neither the magazine nor the Web site has much of a reputation for humor.

At least that's what I thought. I recently was looking at issues from 1967 and came across the amusing cartoon shown here. We've reported on how appliance makers are shortening their warranties, and everyone's heard of planned obsolescence being a business model of some manufacturers. But I never imagined that these were concerns more than four decades ago. Call me naive, but I believed that companies were somehow more consumer friendly back then. As this cartoon from our March 1967 issue illustrates, that wasn't the case. (Click on the cartoon to enlarge it.)

Obviously appliance longevity and extended warranties remain issues today, and Consumer Reports regularly covers those topics. If you're looking for information on whether you should fix or nix an appliance, read "Repair or Replace It?" (available to subscribers). The article  includes  repair-or-replace timelines for many products, including appliances.

And before you buy an extended warranty for a refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher, or other appliance, read "Why you don't need an extended warranty," which includes repair rates for a number of 3- to 4-year-old products.—Steven H. Saltzman

Essential information: As I mentioned in this recent post, I'm going to tap into our archives to bring you interesting articles and photographs from over the past 70-plus years. Click on my name above to let me know what interests you.

Vintage Consumer Reports: Automatic electric toasters, 1956

I recently stopped by our InfoCenter, a great resource for Consumer Reports editors. As part of some housekeeping they're doing, the folks in our library are giving away bound copies of past issues of Consumer Reports. I grabbed a few tomes, including the one from my birth year, 1963.

As someone who's fascinated by these old magazines and the great photography that filled their pages, I've decided to post our archival images on the Home & Garden blog, a way for you to take a step back in time and (re)connect with the work Consumer Reports has done since 1936.

The image here is from a 1956 toasters test. (That's not an army mess hall but one of our old labs.) In our tests of 22 models that year, we judged three toasters that were otherwise high in overall quality Not Acceptable because they presented a serious shock hazard.

Fifty-two years later we continue to encounter hazardous products, including this robotic lawn mower.

Drop me a line to let me know whether you want to see more photos from our archives and which home products interest you the most.—Steven H. Saltzman