City dwellers of a certain age love to reminisce about the automats, which were restaurants that resembled vending machines. A wall of food awaited the diner, in cubbyholes with glass doors. You decided what you wanted to eat, slipped a nickel in the slot, and opened the door to pull out a sandwich, bowl of soup, side dish, or piece of pie. The most successful of these in the U.S. was Horn & Hardart, named for the two men who brought the automat idea to the U.S. from Germany.
“These earliest automats relied on dumbwaiter technology, so essentially, there was a kitchen underneath the dining room,” says filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz, who is directing and producing a documentary about Horn & Hardart automats. “It was more about the novelty of the experience than about speed. Historians or academics refer to the automat format as ‘quick service,’ but they don’t refer to it as ‘fast food.'” Horn & Hardart’s first automat machine arrived in Philadelphia in 1902, purchased from overseas as a kind of experiment. While cold foods could be immediately taken from the automat after inserting a token, customers would have to wait for warm dishes to be finished and sent to up from the kitchen via dumbwaiter.
Over the next few years, Horn & Hardart’s chief engineer, John Fritsche, redesigned the machine, maintaining the fundamental design of European models but tweaking it to the needs of American cafeterias. In 1906, Fritsche secured a patent for an innovative automat that held ready-to-eat dishes, which could be purchased and removed directly through a bank of clear glass windows four rows high. Menu items were stocked from the rear by kitchen staff.
Automats went through technical evolution as well as cultural evolution in the decades in which they flourished. But cost-cutting and innovations in other types of food service caused the automats to decline starting in the 1950s. The last automat in New York closed in 1991. But that was a long run, and you can read the fascinating story of Horn & Hardart’s automats at Collectors Weekly.