Gas engines, canner retorts and an aluminium foundry in Eau Claire.

Presto is the appliance brand of National Presto Industries, Inc., a company based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. English Wikipedia gives its founding year as 1905 and its first name as Northwestern Steel and Iron Works. The company’s own history page says that in those early years it built gas engines for railroad repair equipment, along with hoists and implements for mixing concrete, and that before the First World War it began designing pressure canners, then called “canner retorts,” for commercial canneries.

The company describes a gradual move from industrial to household scale. By its account, it made large fifty-gallon retorts for canneries, then thirty-gallon models for hotels and ten-gallon models suitable for canning at home. It says it installed an aluminium foundry in 1915 specifically to cast large pressure canners for home use, and that a 1917 determination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture about canning low-acid foods helped its home business grow. The company says it then decided to concentrate on the home market rather than commercial customers.

Its products were sold under the trade name “National” in those years, and in 1929 the company changed its name to the National Pressure Cooker Company to match the brand on its canners. Both the company history and English Wikipedia record that change. The word Presto came a decade later. The company says that in 1939 it made a saucepan-style pressure cooker with a rotating cover and a simple gasket seal, in place of the lug nuts and clamps of heavier canners, and gave it the brand name “Presto.” It says the cooker was introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The Second World War interrupted that business. According to the company, nearly all of its production was converted to war work, including artillery fuzes, aerial bombs and rocket fuzes, while it continued to make canners from steel for the victory-garden canning programmes because aluminium was scarce. It says it resumed part of its aluminium canner and cooker production in 1945.

From a steam iron to a deep fryer called FryDaddy.

Electric appliances followed the war. The company history dates the start of its electric line to 1948 and the Presto Vapor Steam Iron, which it says used ordinary tap water. In the 1950s the line widened to a six-quart pressure cooker and to lighter stamped-aluminium and stainless-steel cookers, and on 1 May 1953, the company says, the corporate name became National Presto Industries, Inc., reflecting its spread into small appliances. English Wikipedia gives the same 1953 change.

In 1956, by the company’s account, it introduced a line of fully submersible electric cooking appliances with a removable heat control it named Control Master, so that skillets and griddles could be washed under water once the control was unplugged and taken out. It dates an automatic, submersible stainless-steel coffee maker to 1958, and lists a hot dog cooker sold as the HotDogger, a mixer, a toaster, a can opener and personal grooming aids among products of the 1960s and early 1970s. Both the company and English Wikipedia say National Presto was admitted to the New York Stock Exchange on 3 March 1969; the company gives its symbol as NPK.

In the 1970s the company added a run of playfully named products. It dates the PrestoBurger hamburger cooker to 1974 and describes it as the start of a series of “mini-appliances” for smaller servings. It dates the FryBaby deep fryer to 1976, the larger FryDaddy to 1977 and the family-size GranPappy to 1978, the same year as the PopCornNow hot-air popper and a redesigned range of pressure cookers and canners with a cover interlock. In the 1980s it launched the hand-held SaladShooter slicer and shredder, with a Professional model following in 1990.

The company’s list continues into the present century: the Pizzazz rotating pizza oven in 2000, the FlipSide Belgian waffle maker in 2007, the Dehydro food dehydrators in 2012, the non-electric MyJo single-serve coffee maker in 2014 and the Nomad traveling slow cooker in 2017. In 2020 it introduced the Presto Precise digital pressure canner, first in a twelve-quart size and, the company says, in a seventeen-quart version from 2024.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make small kitchen and home appliances: toasters, slow cookers, pressure cookers, mixers, coffee makers, fans and heaters. Names like these often sit at many different points in the trade, from companies that still carry a founder’s name or a home town to brands that have passed through several owners and now belong to much larger housewares or consumer-products groups.

A small-appliance brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a logo and a familiar look on the shelf, because the company behind that name may have been sold, merged or split, and its products may now be designed and made far from where the brand began. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its appliances are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A housewares brand inside a company with a defense segment.

National Presto is not only an appliance maker. English Wikipedia describes three business segments: Housewares/Small Appliance, which designs and sells small household appliances under the Presto brand; Defense, which produces ordnance and ammunition products; and Safety, made up of two young businesses, Rusoh, which markets a fire extinguisher, and OneEvent Technologies, which offers early-warning monitoring systems. The same article says the company had closed its defence operations in 1992 and returned to defence work in 2001 with the purchase of AMTEC.

The company’s own corporate mission page sets that structure out as a principle. Among its “guiding attributes” it lists the “wisdom of diversification,” saying the corporate structure should span more than one industry with both a commercial and a defense presence, and among its core values it lists a “small company culture” and being “financially conservative.” Presto, in other words, is the consumer face of a broader industrial company that still keeps its headquarters in Eau Claire.

The company’s own history is told largely through mechanisms — a rotating cover and gasket, a removable heat control, a cover interlock — and through product names built from family words, such as FryBaby, FryDaddy and GranPappy, set beside the plain brand word. The consumer website, gopresto.com, carries the line “Makers of world famous Presto Pressure Cookers, Canners, and Electric Appliances,” and still groups pressure cookers, canners and canning kits beside slow cookers, waffle makers and popcorn poppers.

For a design guide, Presto shows how a short, upbeat word chosen for a 1939 pressure cooker became the name of a whole company, carried through steam irons, deep fryers and digital canners while the parent business moved in and out of defence work. Compare it with West Bend, another Wisconsin housewares name, and with Hamilton Beach, a long-running American small-appliance brand. For this guide we use canner red, maroon and aluminium grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Presto’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.