Dinner's A Phone Call Away

So far, so good. But in the $23 billion appliance business, advances can take decades to work their way into the mainstream. Sub-Zero developed a built-in refrigerator in the 1950s, based on work its founder did for Frank Lloyd Wright, but mass-market manufacturers have only recently slimmed down models to fit flush with standard cabinets. Highly efficient induction cooktops, in which an electric coil under glass agitates iron molecules in pots, are being offered by a host of elite makers. Westinghouse debuted an induction prototype 35 years ago.

LCD screens are proliferating. New from LG Electronics is a refrigerator with a cable-ready 15-inch screen for watching TV and DVDs as part of a digital command center on the door. Whirlpool put a screen on the front of a fantasy microwave, making it theoretically possible to click from TV to that exploding popcorn bag. A multimedia screen on an experimental ventilation hood by the Faber company was even more unexpected. The desirability of making phone calls, viewing movies and checking recipes on the hood over the stove is untested.

At last year's builders' show, exotica included a $1,400 oven from Sharp, which promised to steam the fat out of food. Hitachi offered nanotechnology to pummel particles off plates in the dishwasher.

This year, GE introduced its "Kitchen of the Future." Appliances are shown communicating with each other and, to a limited extent, with owners by phone. Sensors in the refrigerator report what's in stock and what a recipe requires. The oven cooks faster, with halogen lights and what GE calls Trivection -- a currently available combination of conventional, microwave and convection technology. The dishwasher has a soap reservoir that needs refilling only occasionally and automatically releases the right amount of detergent. Refrigerators can chill wine and thaw meat faster.

"Design is cumulative," says Marc Hottenroth, GE's industrial design leader. "As we learn new things and try new things, we can progress."

A GE video shows a couple after a party using voice commands to start the cooktop on self-clean, but that's one of the features designers have yet to develop. Mansbery approached some of the large appliance manufacturers as he proceeded with his cooling-cooking oven. He says one executive told him, "David, we just bend sheet metal, we don't make them smarter." Walking the aisles in Orlando, he says, he spotted touch screens, but no attempt to alter the purpose of existing machines.

"Basically, we've created a new appliance," Mansbery says.

The next application for the command-and-control technology will be outside the home, Mansbery says. He believes it could help deliver hot meals to troops, as well as allow doctors to monitor heart patients or even conduct long-distance surgery.

"There has to be a compelling reason to apply technology," he says. "What we try to do is to try for the betterment of mankind."