A Fond Farewell to the Man Who Made Bagels What They Are Today

What would our world be without bagels? What would become of our breakfast routine, our lox and cream cheese, our sense of identity as New Yorkers or denizens of Montreal?

That's a tough question to answer. And before you brush off bagels as a given, with their lovely, shiny exteriors and doughy insides and sprinkles of sesame seeds or onion bits, consider that you owe their modern incarnation to a man named Daniel Thompson, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 94.

Unless you're from New York City or another city with a longstanding Jewish culinary tradition, you may never have tasted a bagel if it wasn't for Thompson and his amazing bagel-making machine, which revolutionized the industry and made the bagel into something of an "everyman" food.

Purists, fairly, will balk at the diluted, plastic-wrapped inferiorities that were to come. But who can really complain about a world with more bagels? Certainly not the people whose mouths were stuffed with glorious, schmear-smothered dough.

According to the The New York Times, Thompson was born in 1921 and got his start as a math teacher in California, but found that he had a knack for inventions. In addition to pioneering a machine that would make decent-quality bagels through automation, he's also responsible for the modern Ping-Pong table, with wheels and a hinged design that allow for easy storage.

Prior to Thompson's invention of the machine in the early 60s, bagels were something of a scarcity—always handmade, and only found in Jewish neighborhoods, for the most part. And they probably didn't taste much like that bagel you'd get on a layover at a Midwestern airport. They were crustier, shinier, and chewier than the fluffy things that grace most office breakfast meetings. In 1960, The New York Times Magazine described them as "an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis." And they were made solely by members of the New York-based International Beigel Bakers Union. Think of the frenzied, protective nature of the Italian pizza-makers' association, were it successful in actually safeguarding the sanctity of its prized food.

Maybe they were better. But they certainly weren't as well-liked, and the world had a side-eyed regard for them.

But Daniel Thompson—the son of Jewish bagel-baker Meyer Thompson—came along, and saw an opportunity.

"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 told the Times on 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."

After years of efforts, Thompson successfully created a machine that could shape and stretch the dough without the need for human labor. And, of course, anyone in possession of said machine could enter the bagel business, and make off with some 400 bagels an hour rather than the 120 that could be produced by hand by a worker. The Thompson Bagel Machine Manufacturing Corporation was founded in 1961. And the first buyer, in 1963, was the Connecticut-based brand Lender's.

Today, Lender's produces some 750 million bagels a year. And even if you haven't had a Lender's bagel, you've tasted the influence of Thompson's work.

For the purists, there are still the shops to be found in New York City's corners where you can get a bagel with a little more bite than the mass-produced kind you'll find at your typical coffee shop.

But then again, we should thank Thompson for being able to find them there at all.