in their catalogue. However, these first electric kettles were quite primitive as the heating element couldn't be immersed in the water. Instead, a separate compartment underneath the water storage area in the kettle was used to house the electric heating element. The design was inefficient even relative to the conventional stove-top kettles of the time. In 1902, the 'Archer' electric kettle made by Premier Electric Heaters in Birmingham, England, was marketed as a luxury item. It had an element sealed in the base of the kettle (not exposed to water), and was one of the first kettles with a boil-safe device. In 1922, Leslie Large, an engineer working at Bulpitt & Sons of Birmingham, designed an element of wire wound around a core and sheathed in a metal tube. The element could be immersed directly into water which made the kettle much more efficient than stovetop kettles. In 1955, the newly founded British company Russell Hobbs brought out its stainless steel K1 model as the first fully automatic kettle. A thermostat, heated through a pipe by the steam produced as the water comes to the boil, flexes, thereby cutting off the current. Notably as little steam is produced before boiling occurs, so the thermostat is set to activate well below 100C, and thus this simple design works well even at high altitude where the boiling point is significantly lower. The design has since been widely adopted by other manufacturers. Whistling kettles A whistling kettle is a kettle fitted with a device that emits an audible whistle when the water in the kettle starts to boil. The action of steam passing through the device causes vibration, in turn creating the sound, known in physics as a tone hole. The exact mechanism by which this occurs was not fully understood until a paper, The aeroacoustics of a steam kettle, was published by R. H. Henrywood, a fourth-year engineering undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, and A. Agarwal, his supervisor, in the journal Physics of Fluids in 2013. Harry Bramson is the inventor of the whistling tea kettle. Automatic tea kettles These are relatively new kinds of tea kettles. They are high tech kitchen appliances that are geared towards making tea brewing easy for everyone. They are built with the capability to intelligently make different kinds of tea without much input from the user. Once set, the automatic tea kettle brings the water