Lloyd Groff Copeman

Lloyd Groff Copeman (28 December 1881 – 5 July 1956) was an American inventor who devised the first electric stove and the flexible rubber ice cube tray, among other products. He has nearly 700 patents to his name, and he claimed that he could walk into any store and find one of his inventions.

Copeman was raised by his Canadian parents on a farm in Hadley Township, Michigan which was later incorporated into Farmer's Creek, Michigan - located approximately 20 miles east of Flint, Michigan. He studied engineering at the former Michigan Agricultural College, now Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.

Copeman began his career as an apprentice at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia. Following that, he worked for electric utilities companies in Philadelphia and Spokane, as well as Detroit Edison and Consumers Power where he learned about electrical, marine and mechanical engineering, as well as steam fittings.

His first successful patented inventions, patented in 1909, were an electrothermostatic heat regulator for more effective control of stove and toaster heating elements and a thermostat for high-tension power cables.

Before this, while working for the Washington Electric Company in 1906, Copeman developed a design for an electric version of the gas stoves which had been available in Britain and the USA for several decades. Development of the idea took several years, but in 1912 the Copeman Electric Stove Company was formed in the city of Flint, Michigan to produce the Copeman Electric Stove (also marketed as the "fireless cooker"). Westinghouse Electric Corporation bought the company in 1917, moved production to Mansfield, Ohio, and continued to develop and improve the stove.

From 1913, another of Copeman's inventions, a toaster with automatic bread turner, was also produced by the Copeman Electric Stove Company. Electric toasters were a recent invention at that time - the first commercially

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