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Sontheimer, Carl. M.I.T.-trained engineer and compulsive tinkerer (1914-98) whose love of cooking and eating resulted, after a prosperous career in electronics, in a second act as the inventor of the Cuisinart food processor (which was actually a licensed, modified version of an industrial blender he found in France, Le Magimix). Though perceived as dubious fad gadget upon its introduction in the early 1970s, the Cuisinart took off when the media-savvy Sontheimer demo’d his gizmo for JULIA CHILD and JAMES BEARD, who pronounced it nothing less than a seismic development in the annals of home cookery. Thus did Cuisinarts become the coveted objects of elbows-out department-store wrangles in the mid-’70s, and did Sontheimer come to enjoy an odd sort of kitchen-implement celebrity not repeated until George Foreman came along.