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AGA Cooker
| Between 1924 and 1929 Gustaf Dalén devoted much of his spare time to developing a heat efficient cooker which would burn unattended for 24 hours. He experimented with different fuels and decided on crushed coke. AGA’s board was hard to convince. Should they start manufacturing a product so widely different from all the others? | 
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| The AGA cooker works on the blue-flame principle, i.e. smokeless fuel and its heating efficiency is still unbeatable. The cooker was very well received by the daily and trade press and was a huge sales success. It was particularly popular in the U.K., not least due to its hot water heater. The cooker was manufactured both for private use and catering and eventually converted to burn wood and run on electricity. By 1934 it was being sold worldwide and was later manufactured in some ten countries. By October 1937 more than 35,000 cookers had been sold and this figure had reached 100,000 sold cookers by 1948. (In 1954 the AGA Heat Ltd. works in England had manufactured 100,000 under license). Households which had an AGA cooker were well placed in the competition for good domestic help. In 1957 AGA discontinued its production in the face of competition from electric cookers but Glynwed International, the licensed manufacturer in the U.K., still makes about 2,000 cookers a year. In 1931 the cooker cost US$ 130 and operating costs were around a dollar per month. |
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