Electric Kettle

An electric kettle is a small kitchen appliance that boils water using its own internal heating element rather than a stovetop, typically drawing 2 to 3 kilowatts of power through an element that shuts off automatically once the water reaches boiling point. General Electric began selling an early electric kettle in London in 1890, but its first designs kept the heating element in a separate compartment beneath the water because it could not safely be immersed; the breakthrough came in 1922, when Leslie Large developed a wire-wound heating element sheathed in metal tubing that could sit directly in the water, and the fully automatic kettle followed in 1955 with Russell Hobbs's K1 model, which used a bimetallic strip to switch itself off.