Breakfast is a meal taken very seriously indeed by Brits. So seriously that continual attempts have been made to perfect the experience mechanically. Who could not delight to be woken up by a Teasmade alarm clock delivering a fresh cup of hot beverage, and where else would the getting out of bed sequence in Wallace and Gromit be, not the comedic animated film, but a documentary?
Latest in a long line of British builders of mechanical morning repast generators are [Peter Browne] and [Mervyn Huggett]. Working from a garden shed – where else! – in Sussex, they have spent three months and a thousand man hours creating their “Sunday Morning Breakfast Machine“, designed to cook and serve a slice of toast and a boiled egg alongside a cup of tea or coffee and the morning paper. Prototyping was done in Meccano , could there be any other medium for a machine like this one?
The machine itself is a mix of the practical and the whimsical. The giant-sized facsimile of a vintage Ever Ready battery and the toy rooster hide some pretty accomplished metalwork and control systems. They do admit that the primary purpose is to make people laugh, but it does the job, albeit with what looks like a leak from a cracked egg.
A full description from [Peter] is in the video below the break.
This isn’t the first breakfast machine to feature on these pages, our pair of British pensioners have been pipped to the post by a team from Japan. The quest to perfect the British breakfast has been featured with the help of workshop tools though, but as is so often the case when it comes to food it’s the French who steal the crown with their automatic crêpe machine.
Thanks [Niklas] for the tip [via Huffington Post].
i Love it great job….
The muffin tin control panel is a nice touch.
From Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Glad I’m not the only one who immediately thought of that when I saw the title.
Same thing here, the breakfast machine from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the first thing that came to my mind.
Caractacus Potts for the win!
I thought of Wallace and Gromit, but I’ve seen that more recently.
It’s really just a subset of Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson in the UK) type “inventions”, they do something by a convoluted scheme but one wonders if it would be simpler to do it by hand.
Preparing breakfast is just a subset, I think there must be other examples but no others come to mind right now.
But in “The Goonies”, they have a similar scheme to open the front gate, involving a bowling ball and sprinkler among other things, so they don’t have to open it by hand. I seem to recall mention of it being “Goonie technology”.
Michael
Poor Peter.
Didn’t Casper the friendly ghost have a machine like that in his lair? Awesome. That being said. Does he wanna sell me the machine for free? :)
My first thought on seeing this was Back to the Future and the machine Doc made…
Something Tim Hunkin might have done. Remember him?
This is great, but I was hoping to see ejected toast jump out of a toaster and being impacted with a glob of jam. The momentum of the jam would force the toast onward and down to a plate nearby. (just like the Wallace & Gromit rig in “The Wrong Trousers”) Anyone who could make that work would certainly get my “hats- off” :-)
Those that wish to watch the TV show (UK restriction) it was a part of the BBC’s Britain’s most spectacular backyard builds’ visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hk2lw
its a shame the sweet dispensing children’s carousel won, but i guess it was about building looks not how healthy it was…