Daniel Thompson, automated bagel and ping pong pioneer, is dead at 94

In 1953, Daniel Thompson patented the wheeled, folding ping pong table, but it didn't make him wealthy, his family tells The New York Times. The success of the American game-room staple, however, allowed Thompson to create the first automated bagel-making machine, an invention that led to the bagel's ascension to a popular American food, not the Jewish specialty item found only in certain neighborhoods of certain cities, notably New York and Montreal. Thompson died on Sept. 3 in Rancho Mirage, California — near his home in Palm Desert — his family said last week. He was 94.

Thompson and his wife, Ada, founded the Thompson Bagel Machine Manufacturing Corp. in 1961, and Lender's Bagels of New Haven, Connecticut, leased their first machine two years later. (Lender's still uses Thompson machines today to make its 750 million bagels a year.) The advent of mass produced bagels killed off the tight-knit, mafia-like union of bagel makers, The New York Times notes, and many bagel purists are disgusted with the revolution that followed. (Slate noted Lender's role in the popularization of the bagel, by freezing them and selling them in supermarkets, after Murray Lender died in 2012.)

"There was a kind of schism in bagel-making history: pre-Daniel Thompson and post-Daniel Thompson," Matthew Goodman, who wrote a book on Jewish foods, told The Times on Monday. The Thompson machine "was one of a confluence of factors that in less than a generation turned the bagel, which had once been smaller and crusty and flavorful, into something that is large and pillowy and flavorless — it had turned into the kind of baked good that Americans like, à la Wonder Bread." On the other hand, if you like bagels — pure or not — you probably have Daniel Thompson to thank. You can read more about him at The New York Times.

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