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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Crock-Pot

A slow cooker or Crock-Pot is a countertop electrical cooking appliance that maintains a relatively low temperature (compared to other cooking methods like baking, boiling, and frying) for many hours, allowing unattended cooking of pot roast, stew, and other suitable dishes.
The Naxon Utilities Corporation of Chicago developed the Naxon Beanery All-PurposeCooker. The Rival Company bought Naxon in 1970, and reintroduced it under the Crock-Pot name in 1971. In 1974, Rival introduced removable stoneware inserts. The brand now belongs to Sunbeam Products, a subsidiary of Jarden Corporation. While Crock-Pot still dominates the market in the USA, Hamilton Beach, West Bend Housewares and other companies have also introduced similar slow cookers.

A slow cooker consists of a lidded round or oval cooking pot made of glazed ceramic or porcelain, surrounded by a housing, usually metal, containing a thermostatically controlled electric heating element. The lid is often transparent glass and is seated in a groove in the pot edge; condensed vapour collects in that groove and provides a low-pressure seal to the atmosphere. Pressure inside a working crock pot is therefore effectively at atmospheric pressure, despite the water vapor generated inside the pot. A crock pot therefore is substantially different from a pressure cooker and presents no danger of an abrupt (perhaps explosive) pressure release.

The ceramic pot, or a 'crock', acts as both a cooking container and a heat reservoir. Many slow cookers have two or more temperature settings (e.g., low, medium, high, and sometimes a "keep warm" setting). A typical slow cooker is designed to heat food to 170°F (77°C) on low, to perhaps 190-200°F (88-93°C) on high.
Click here for some Crock-Pots.

Corelle

Corelle is a brand of glassware and diswasher.It is made of Vitrelle, a laminated tempered glass product with three layers of two types of glass. The thermally bonded layers give Corelle its strength, allowing it to be much thinner than other dinnerware. Introduced by Corning Glass Works in 1970, it is now manufactured and sold by World Kitchen. Corelle is chemical resistant, durable, and lightweight: A typical Corelle dinner plate measuring 26 centimeters across weighs 355 grams.
Sudden temperature changes and other damages have been shown to cause serious structural harm, raising the risk of shattering at a later time.
Click here for some Corelle products

Dyson Company

Dyson is an appliances manufacturer. Its main products are vacuum cleaners that use cylonic separation. The founder, James Dyson, used centrifugal particle separation after finding that to restore suction, the dust bag in his vacuum cleaner needed to be replaced – even when it was not full.

In 1979, James Dyson bought what was then the top of the range vacuum cleaner. He became frustrated with how it rapidly clogged and began to lose suction so he emptied the bag to try to restore suction but this had no effect. Dyson opened the bag and noticed a layer of dust inside, clogging the fine material mesh. He resolved to develop a better vacuum cleaner that worked more efficiently.

During a visit to a local sawmill, Dyson noticed how the sawdust was removed from the air by large industrial cyclones. He conjectured the same principle might work, on a smaller scale, in a vacuum cleaner. He dismantled his machine and fitted it with a cardboard cyclone. On cleaning the room with it, he found it picked up more than his bag machine. This was the world’s first vacuum cleaner without a bag.

According to The Journal of Business and Design (vol. 8, no. 1), the source of inspiration was in the following form:

In his usual style of seeking solutions from unexpected sources, Dyson thought of how a nearby sawmill used a cyclone—a 30-foot (9.1 m)-high cone that spun dust out of the air by centrifugal force—to expel waste. He reasoned that a vacuum cleaner that could separate dust by cyclonic action and spin it out of the airstream would eliminate the need for both bag and filter.

Dyson developed 5,127 Dual Cyclone prototype designs between 1979 and 1984. The first prototype vacuum cleaner, the G-Force, was built in 1983, and appeared on the front cover of Design Magazine the same year. In 1986, a production version of the G-Force was first sold in Japan for the equivalent of £2,000.

In 1991, it won the International Design Fair prize in Japan, and became a status symbol there.

Using the income from the Japanese licence, James Dyson set up the Dyson company, opening a research centre and factory in Wiltshire, England, in June 1993. His first production version of a dual cyclone vacuum cleaner featuring constant suction was the DC01, sold for £200. In their research for the vacuum cleaner, when Dyson asked people whether they would be happy with a transparent container for the dust, most respondents said no. Dyson and his team decided to make a transparent container anyway.

In 1999, US company Hoover was found guilty of patent infringement and later admitted that it did consider buying the patent from James Dyson, but only to keep the technology out of the market.

After the introduction of the DC02, DC02 Absolute, DC02 De Stijl, DC05, DC04, DC06 and DC04 Zorbster, the root Cyclone was introduced in April 2001 as the Dyson DC07, which uses seven smaller funnels on top of the vacuum.

Click here for some Dyson products.

Dualit Limited

Dualit is a British manufacturer of kitchen and catering equipment, best known for their range of heavy-duty toaster. The Dualit toaster is regarded as a design classic, thanks in part to its retro styling. It differs from most other toasters in that it is relatively simple in construction, with an electromechanical timer and using a manual lever mechanism to lift the toast from the toasting slots. It is also easily repairable, with replacement elements and other parts available, so it typically has a longer service life than contemporary electronic toasters. Although it was primarily designed for the commercial catering market, its classic appearance has led to its becoming trendy in the domestic market, described by The Observer as a "symbol of the kitchen porn 90s"

Designed by inventor Max Gort-Barten in the early 1950s, the Dualit toaster is notable for its 'large loaf' shape, characterised with cooling slots at both ends of the unit. These are necessary for the periods of extended use, expected of the toaster in the busy environment of the commercial café or canteen. The units are available in different sizes, with various slot numbers and are manufactured in a range of colours. The simple hand-built process used in their manufacture, with each part held together with visible screws, makes the toaster robust, yet easy to disassemble and repair. Another distinguishing feature of these machines is the electromechanical timer which makes a loud whirring noise when in use.

Dualit have manufactured a diverse range of kitchenware products in recent years, including smaller domestic toasters, kettles, mechanical scales and digital radios.

The iconic status of the Dualit toaster has let to it being widely imitated and in some cases these copies have been subject to legal action from Dualit.
Click here for some Dualit products

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Coleman Company

Coleman Company, Inc. is an American company that specializes in outdoor recreation products. Historically, Coleman is known for camping gear.
It was founded by W. C. Coleman, who began selling lamps in 1900 in Kingfisher, Oklahoma and moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1902.
The Coleman Company's headquarters are in Wichita, and it also has facilities in Texas. There are approximately 1500 employees.
Throughout its history, Coleman has produced a wide variety of equipment primarily aimed at the camping and recreational markets. Perhaps their most famous product is the Coleman Lantern, a series of lamps that burn kerosene, naphtha, gasoline, or propane and use one or two mantles to produce an intense white light. Coleman also manufactures camp stoves, sleeping bags, coolers, hot tubs, generators, watches, tents, and backpacks among other things. They also make a line of small boats, including canoes, pontoon boats, johnboats and the unique scanoe. In the past they also sold pop-up travel trailers, Skiroule snowmobiles and the Hobie Cat brand of sailboats.
A separate business unit sells home heating and air conditioning units.
Click here for some Coleman products.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Braun

Braun GmbH (German pronunciation "brown", commonly pronounced "brawn" in English) is a German consumer products company in Kronberg im Taunus. There is also a factory situated in Carlow, Ireland.

From 1984 through 2005, Braun was a wholly owned subsidiary of The Gillette Company, which had purchased a controlling interest in the company in 1967. Braun is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Procter & Gamble, which acquired Gillette in 2005.

Formerly a manufacturer of radios, slide projectors, Super 8 film cameras and accessories, and high-fidelity sound systems.

Braun no longer provides replacement parts for their Multipractic Food processor, one of their most popular items. Braun's clocks are increasingly difficult to find in the marketplace.

Click here for some Braun products.

Whirlpool Corporation

Whirlpool Corporation is a Fortune 500 company and a global manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances, with annual sales of approximately $20 billion, more than 70,000 employees, and more than 70 manufacturing and technology research centers around the world. The company markets Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, Gladiator Garage Works, Inglis, Estate, Brastemp, Bauknecht, Consul, and other major brand names to consumers in nearly every country around the world.

After acquiring the Maytag Corporation on March 31, 2006, Whirlpool Corporation became "the largest home appliance maker in the world", prior to which Electrolux was the largest home appliance maker in the world.

Whirlpool's global and North American headquarters are in Benton Harbor, Michigan. In the U.S., Whirlpool has manufacturing facilities in Fort Smith, Arkansas; Evansville, Indiana; Iowa (Newton and Amana); Tulsa, Oklahoma; Ohio (Clyde, Findlay, Greenville and Marion); and Cleveland, Tennessee.

Whirlpool Corporation has seven employee run diversity networks that are involved with business, employee, and community projects to address the needs of the groups they represent. These diversity networks are The Women's Network (TWN), the Native American Network (NAN), the Whirlpool African American Network (WAAN), The Pride Network (PRIDE), the Whirlpool Asian Community (WAC), the Whirlpool Hispanic Network (WHN), and the Young Professionals Network (YP).

Whirlpool received a 100% rating on the Corporate Equality Index released by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equal rights organization Human Rights Campaign starting in 2004, the third year of the report.

Click here for Whirpool product.