While they’re less often used today, most readers will be familiar with egg beaters – items with a top handle and hand crank above a pair (usually) of beaters that rotate when the hand crank is turned. The first of these appeared as early as the 1850s. The earliest examples were made in the United States and in England. An early design by Dover Stamping Co. in the US was issued in 1859.

There was no standard design for these beaters, and makers experimented with a variety of forms. Most were made as independent tools to be used with a bowl of the cook’s choice, but there were also versions that were attached to a glass or metal container to hold the contents during mixing. Some were even attached to table or counter clamps similar to those used for meat grinders (“Early Rotary Egg Beaters,” Home Things Past, homethingspast.com/2012/02/19/antique-egg-beaters). Of this latter style, one 1875 housewife commented, “Ah! and what a silly was meself…to be thinking it was a coffee-mill, when I saw you a-screwin’ it on to the table!” (https://www.victorianpassage.com/2008/11/the_dawn_of_the_egg_beater/).

My mom collected old egg beaters of various forms and delighted in finding new versions. The handheld types were made in so many different forms that she had an old wooden barrel full of them. I confess it’s surprising to me that an item so relatively simple to use was made in so many different forms, the inventors of which each insisted that theirs was best.

Whisks – simple handles with non-mechanical mixing wires attached – were also popular and were used to whip lighter items such as liquids and eggs while beaters were generally used for thicker challenges such as batters or frostings. The beaters were especially useful in whipping up egg whites to make meringue, a process that, before the advent of the egg beater, took as much as 90 minutes by hand! By the 1870s, the Dover cast-iron rotary beater reduced that time for beating egg whites to a froth to just 5 minutes. Between 1903 and 1908, Clarence Taplin made a beater that he claimed was an improvement in ease of use, strength, durability – probably in no small part because it was made of a metal that wasn’t cast iron! (Terry Kerston, “The Labor-Saving Rotary Egg Beater,” Lacrosse County Historical Society from the Lacrosse Tribune, Sept. 17, 2016).

Egg beaters were made in so many different forms by so many manufacturers that they could be purchased for as little as 10 cents apiece – albeit a dime meant a lot more in the late 19th and early 20th century than it does today. When my mom was collecting in the 1970s and ‘80s, she could pick them up in antique stores and second-hand shops for less than $5 apiece. Today, depending on age and condition, each can sell anywhere from about $20 to $50 or more; at the higher end, we’re talking hundreds of dollars. Still, there were so many beaters made in so many different forms that you shouldn’t be surprised to find some much cheaper at your local antique mall. Be aware also that egg beaters have been made right up to the present day, so not all of them are antiques.