Daniel Thompson brought on the bagel revolution

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Daniel Thompson, who five decades ago automated the arcane art of bagel-making, a development — seen variously as saving grace and sacrilege — that has sent billions of mass-produced bagels raining down on the American heartland, died Sept. 3 in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 94.

His family announced the death last week.

A California math teacher turned inventor, Thompson was a shaper of postwar suburban culture in more than one respect: He also created the first wheeled, folding Ping-Pong table, a fixture of American basements from the mid-20th century onward.

But it was for the bagel machine that Thompson remained best known. The invention changed the American diet, ushering in the welter of packaged bagels — notably Lender’s — now found in supermarkets nationwide, and making the bagel a staple of fast-food outlets.

“There was a kind of schism in bagel-making history: pre-Daniel Thompson and post-Daniel Thompson,” Matthew Goodman, the author of “Jewish Food: The World at Table,” said in an interview Monday. “What happened with the advent of the automated bagel-making machine was that bagel-makers were capable of producing far more bagels than had ever been imagined.”

What was more, Thompson’s machine proved to be a mirror of midcentury American history. For bound up in the story of its introduction is the story of Jewish assimilation, gastronomic homogenization, the decline of trade unionism, the rise of franchise retailing and the perennial tension between tradition and innovation.

If Thompson’s brainchild, in the eyes of grateful consumers, democratized the bagel, there remain mavens who charge that his machine, along with those of later inventors, denatured the soul of a cherished cultural artifact. To these stalwarts, centered in the bagel redoubts of New York and Montreal, even invective-rich Yiddish lacks words critical enough to describe a machine-made bagel, though “shande” — disgrace — perhaps comes closest.

“Is what happened to the bagel a good thing or a bad thing?” Goodman said. “To me, it’s kind of a tragic story. What happened is that the bagel lost, both literally and metaphorically, its Jewish flavor.”

The son of Meyer Thompson, a Jewish baker of bagels from Hull, England, and the former Annette Berman, Thompson was born on Jan. 16, 1921, in Winnipeg, Canada, where his father had established a bakery. When he was a few weeks old, to memorialize a cousin who had recently died, his parents changed his name to Daniel.

The family moved to Los Angeles when Daniel was a baby. As a young man, he served in World War II with the Army Air Forces in the Pacific; he later graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied industrial arts and mathematics. Afterward, Thompson taught high school math and junior high school wood shop in Los Angeles.

Patent for success

Like his father before him, Thompson was a tinkerer. In 1953, he received U.S. patent 2,645,539 for his “Folding Table, Tennis Table, or the Like.” Though the table did not make him wealthy, his family said, it did give him the wherewithal to attain the grail his father had long sought: an automated bagel-maker.

In the late 1950s, the son perfected the father’s creation, building a functional machine that took the labor out of rolling and forming the dough.

In 1961, Thompson and his wife, Ada, established the Thompson Bagel Machine Manufacturing Corp. Two years later, Lender’s, which had been making bagels in New Haven, Connecticut, since the 1920s, leased the first Thompson machine.

Where a traditional bagel baker could produce about 120 bagels in an hour, Thompson’s machine let a single unskilled worker turn out 400. This allowed Lender’s to make bagels in immense quantities and sell them, bagged and frozen, in supermarkets.

Thompson resided in Palm Desert, California. Besides his wife, the former Ada Schatz, whom he married in 1946, his survivors include two sons, Stephen and Craig; a daughter, Leslie; a brother, Robert; and three grandchildren.