Milestone-Proposal talk:Rice Cookers

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Advocates and reviewers will post their comments below. In addition, any IEEE member can sign in with their ETHW login (different from IEEE Single Sign On) and comment on the milestone proposal's accuracy or completeness as a form of public review.

Advocates’ Checklist

  1. Is the proposal for an achievement rather than for a person? If the citation includes a person's name, have the proposers provided the required justification for inclusion of the person's name?
  2. Was the proposed achievement a significant advance rather than an incremental improvement to an existing technology?
  3. Were there prior or contemporary achievements of a similar nature? If so, have they been properly considered in the background information and in the citation?
  4. Has the achievement truly led to a functioning, useful, or marketable technology?
  5. Is the proposal adequately supported by significant references (minimum of five) such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or citations to pages in scholarly books? At least one of the references should be from a peer-reviewed scholarly book or journal article. The full text of the material, not just the references, shall be present. If the supporting texts are copyright-encumbered and cannot be posted on the ETHW for intellectual property reasons, the proposers shall email a copy to the History Center so that it can be forwarded to the Advocate. If the Advocate does not consider the supporting references sufficient, the Advocate may ask the proposer(s) for additional ones.
  6. Are the scholarly references sufficiently recent?
  7. Does the proposed citation explain why the achievement was successful and impactful?
  8. Does the proposed citation include important technical aspects of the achievement?
  9. Is the proposed citation readable and understandable by the general public?
  10. Will the citation be read correctly in the future by only using past tense? Does the citation wording avoid statements that read accurately only at the time that the proposal is written?
  11. Does the proposed plaque site fulfill the requirements?
  12. Is the proposal quality comparable to that of IEEE publications?
  13. Are any scientific and technical units correct (e.g., km, mm, hertz, etc.)? Are acronyms correct and properly upper-cased or lower-cased? Are the letters in any acronym explained in the title or the citation?
  14. Are date formats correct as specified in Section 6 of Milestones Program Guidelines? Helpful Hints on Citations, plaque locations
  15. Do the year(s) appearing in the citation fall within the range of the year(s) included at the end of the title?
  16. Note that it is the Advocate's responsibility to confirm that the independent reviewers have no conflict of interest (e.g., that they do not work for a company or a team involved in the achievement being proposed, that they have not published with the proposer(s), and have not worked on a project related to the funding of the achievement). An example of a way to check for this would be to search reviewers' publications on IEEE Xplore.

Independent Expert Reviewers’ Checklist

  1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?
  2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?
  3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?
  4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?
  5. Have proposers shown a clear benefit to humanity?


In answering the questions above, the History Committee asks that reviewers apply a similar level of rigor to that used to peer-review an article, or evaluate a research proposal. Some elaboration is desirable. Of course the Committee would welcome any additional observations that you may have regarding this proposal.

Submission and Approval Log

Submitted date: 30 July 2021
Advocate approval date:
History Committee approval date:
Board of Directors approval date:

Original Citation Title and Text -- Administrator4 (talk) 15:53, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Commercialization of Electric Rice Cookers, 1923 and 1955

The world’s first ‘electric rice cooker’ and ‘automated electric rice cooker’ were commercialized in 1923 and 1955 by the Japanese Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and Toshiba Corporation collaborated with Koshinsha Co., Ltd., respectively. Each was aimed at a kitchen appliance for rice cooking, and its commercialization contributed greatly to the progress of home electrification in Japan and other East Asia countries.


Advocate for this proposal -- John Vardalas (talk) 21:04, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

My name is John Vardalas. I am the History Committee's Advocate for this proposal. I look forward to working with you to get this proposal approved.

The Rice Cooker is an intriguing candidate for an IEEE Milestone. The apparent simplicity of the Rice Cooker belies a rather complex process to cooking rice automatically. Automatic rice cookers have greatly improved the domestic lives of people throughout Asia. The main challenge now is to identify expert reviewers who are able to comment on the engineering aspects claimed in this proposal, the commercialization story related in this proposal, and the social history of the rice cooker in Japan. At a minimum, two reviewers will be required. Finally, one has to be assured that the references provided substantiate the claims made in this proposal.

New advocate initial comments -- Djkemp (talk) 21:30, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

As the new advocate for the rice coolers milestone proposal (taking over from Vardalas) I offer the following initial comments based on a first quick read...

Two sections are missing content: "1) Describe briefly the intended site(s)....." and 2) Please give the addresses..." It might also be good to provide the GPS coordinates as suggested on the form.

Grammar - sentence beginning "The historical significance not only on the" "Not only on" does not read correctly; perhaps change "on" to "of".

Section 3 History....maybe change the bullets to alpha numbering s as to not be confused with the other numbering used.

In the sentence beginning "Eventually" delete the word "anyhow".

In the Sentence beginning "In the early..." maybe add "developers after the word "cookers". Also, make "Cookers" singular.

In the paragraph beginning "Eventually..." maybe change "anyhow" to "earnestly"

In the paragraph beginning "The 'electric..." maybe change "on board" to "on ships".

In the paragraph beginning "This article also touches...." remove the brackets from Induction Heating and instead add the brachets to the abbreviation "IH". maybe also reverse the order of the full term and its abbreviation.

In place of the terms "desperate" and "desperately" maybe consider using "earnest" and "earnestly". This avoids a potential negative connotation associated with "desperate"

I like the proposal and encourage you to pursue it with passion.

Regards Dave Kemp

Rice cooker advocacy comments -- Krein (talk) 20:27, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

I am one of the advocates for this milestone. I would strongly recommend that the proposers seek some background closer to primary references. Examples could include patents or any documents from close to the actual product release dates. The provided material emphasizes relatively recent commercial information and secondary sites such as Wikipedia. The milestone proposal would be much stronger if English translations of primary sources can be added to the package. Let me agree with other advocacy comments that electric rice cookers have had outsized impact.

Thank you.

Elaboration on prior comment -- Krein (talk) 19:24, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Adding some additional detail to the preceding comment: There is no doubt that the modern automatic electric rice cooker has had huge impact on culture and lifestyle throughout the rice-producing world. Prior methods were labor intensive and slow. The anecdotes about the Toshiba inventor having his wife do the assessment of performance and success is of interest. However, there are several challenges here: 1. The references are Wikipedia or similar types of articles. There are some museum pieces to back up a limited portion, but the broad information seems quite anecdotal. There is a very nice article at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-cooker-history, but I am uncomfortable whether it has enough to validate a milestone. 2. The first version mentioned, from 1923, apparently is very similar to an electric pot – a heating element and no controls. Electric kettles predate this, so the proposers probably need to relate the date and innovation to other early electric cooking devices.