People · 2026-08-26

Charles Cretors

Designed a steam-powered peanut roaster in Chicago in the 1880s; secured a Chicago peddler's license on 2 December 1885 and founded C. Cretors & Company on that sidewalk trade
U.S. Patent 506,207, "Peanut-roaster or corn-popper," applied 10 August 1891 and granted 10 October 1893; debuted the steam oil popper on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
With son Hazael DeWitt, converted steam equipment to electric power in 1907 (Model 3, UL file E4175); built horse-drawn and later self-propelled wagons; C. Cretors & Company remains family-owned in the Chicago area

Charles Cretors built the machine that made popcorn a commercial street product: a steam-driven oil popper that stirred kernels in their own seasoning, and a wagon business that could follow a crowd. American popcorn was already a hearth and picnic food, cooked by hand in wire baskets over fire, or thrown into ashes, or boiled in fat. What Cretors changed was the apparatus and the route. He turned an existing snack into something a vendor could make the same way twice, keep warm, and sell at a fair, a corner, and later a lobby. C. Cretors & Company still exists. It is still family-owned. The living line is not the subject of this record. The subject is the first machine that made street popcorn an industry.

The kernel is older than Chicago and older than Ohio. The industrial change is dated, patented, and still sold under the family name. The origin essay on the steam machine covers the apparatus in the larger sequence. This page is the life.

Ohio, Decatur, a peanut roaster

The company's own account of the inventor is spare. Charles Cretors was born in Ohio in 1852. A Chicago cemetery history places the birth on 11 December 1852 in Lebanon, Ohio, and the death in Chicago on 24 June 1934, at age 81, with burial at Rosehill. Popmaize, a trade history that tracks the company's narrative, has him traveling the Midwest, spending time in Fort Scott, Kansas, then settling in Decatur, Illinois, where he worked in painting and contracting before opening a bakery and, later, a confectionery.

Those Decatur years are the hinge. HISTORY.com calls him a candy-store owner who bought a commercial peanut roaster so he could sell freshly roasted nuts. The company says the same thing, and then says he found the machine inadequate and rebuilt it. The origin the firm still tells is a bought roaster, a craftsman who would not leave it alone, and a steam engine where a weaker heat had been.

Popmaize dates the family's move to Chicago to 1885. New City, visiting the Wood Dale plant in 2024, says he had come from Decatur several years before the Fair to start a business around the modified roaster. The company's history page is more precise about that first winter. Charles Cretors, "an Ohio-born craftsman," designed a steam-powered peanut roaster in Chicago in the 1880s. To hold attention he added a steam-powered clown, the Tosty Rosty Man, who stirred peanuts in a glass tumbler. That is the company's current spelling. Later pages print variants: Toasty Roasty Man (Popmaize), Mr Roasty Toasty (BBC Future, following Andrew F. Smith). The figure is a merchandiser, not a cook. New City, quoting Charles D. Cretors on the museum floor, is blunt. The clown did nothing to produce popcorn. It turned heads.

On 2 December 1885 he secured a Chicago peddler's license and put the machine on the sidewalk in front of his shop. The company treats that date as the founding of C. Cretors and Company. New City is careful about what the license was for. The peddler's paper predates the popcorn machine. He needed money. The first business was roasted peanuts, a sidewalk test, and a steam engine that could be watched.

A traveling salesman, J. M. Savage, bought peanuts, asked about the device, and became the first official sales representative. His surname also appears as a witness on the 1893 patent. Word left Chicago because someone sold the machine, not because a Fair invented a demand.

The patent and the Fair

The years between the license and the patent are the ones secondary pages like to flatten. Smithsonian, in an otherwise careful 2013 essay, writes that "in 1885, the first steam-powered popcorn maker hit the streets." BBC Future does the same collapse: a commercial popping machine "appeared in 1885." The company's own chronology refuses that merge. 1885 is the peanut roaster and the license. 1893 is the popcorn machine, the Fair, and the grant.

Cretors applied on 10 August 1891. U.S. Patent 506,207, "Peanut-roaster or corn-popper," issued to Charles Cretors of Chicago on 10 October 1893. The specification describes a frame, a peanut cylinder, a glass-fronted corn chamber, a stirrer, and a small engine that ran all of it.

The peanut side is a rotating cylinder over a perforated burner pipe, with a sliding rear door and a hinged apron so the nuts dump without catching and burning. Exhaust steam heats a water tank. The peanut warming pan sits above that tank, under a glass lid. The corn side is a pan in a glazed chamber, heated from a jet beneath, with a wire-gauze band to keep popped kernels from flying. A vertical shaft carries a stirrer that rides close to the pan bottom "to prevent the corn from burning." The shaft lifts on a gravity clutch so the operator can empty the pan. A pulley on that shaft also rocks a bar attached to "a figure N," there "for the purpose of attracting the attention of people passing the device." The engine drives two belts, one to the popcorn stirrer and one to the peanut cylinder, and a pump that feeds the boiler.

That is the invention: an automated combination of roast, pop, stir, season, and hold warm, in a case built to be looked at. Households already popped corn. Vendors did not yet have a machine that did this work in public and kept the product warm.

The company's history page says he reached this by upgrading a No. 6 peanut roaster with a built-in popper. Traditional method had been a basket over open flame. His machine "automatically stirred popped corn evenly in a kettle and seasoned with a mix of butter and seasonings." The 12 February 2025 innovation timeline puts the same contrast in industrial language: not dry popping over fire, but a steam-powered agitator stirring kernels in seasoning. The company calls it the first device that could pop popcorn uniformly in its own seasoning. That claim is narrower than a blanket invention claim, and it is the claim the patent supports.

1893 was also the year of the World's Columbian Exposition on Chicago's lakefront. The company says he debuted the steam popper on the Midway Plaisance. Later company and press copy supplies a barker's line about a free bag and a revolutionary method. Andrew F. Smith, in a passage BBC Future quotes from Popped Culture, treats that shout as something "the C Cretors Company later claimed." This record does not reprint a Midway pitch that cannot be tied to 1893. What can be tied is the stage: a world's fair that sold American machinery as spectacle, a machine that made buttered corn in public, and a city that already had street confectioners.

Popmaize, following company tradition, says that by 1893 the apparatus could roast twelve pounds of peanuts and twenty pounds of coffee, pop corn, and bake chestnuts, and that free samples at the Exposition produced lines. Treat the lines as company memory. Treat the patent number as a document.

The Popcorn Board still reprints a Scientific American notice of the mobile machine. The original issue was not retrieved for this essay. The reprint, which Popmaize also carries, is the mobility argument in period language: the machine "was designed with the idea of moving it about to any location where the operator would be likely to do a good business." The apparatus, "light and strong, and weighing but 400 or 500 pounds," could be "drawn readily by a boy or by a small pony to any picnic ground, fair, political rally, etc." That is the business model the Fair made visible. A machine that could follow a crowd for a day or two.

The wagon

Mobility is the second half of the invention. By 1897 the company was building tall upright machines with large rear wheels, meant to roll onto the sidewalk by day and back inside at night. Wagons followed. In 1897 Cretors exported its first machine abroad: a Model No. 1 Wagon sold to Gist and Spiritus Fabriek in Delft, the Netherlands, for $400. The company says the wagon is still owned and displayed by the successor firm, Unilever.

The "who invented" page dates the larger horse-drawn wagons to about 1900. A Chicago cemetery sketch, following the same chronology, calls the Special "the first large horse-drawn popcorn wagon" of that year. New City describes the move from pushcart to horse-drawn cart: bright red bodies, yellow wheels, built to last because a vendor was buying a livelihood. The 1890s were hard. Cretors sold on time. A machine bought on installments let people start a business without owning property. Charles D. Cretors, the current chief executive, told New City that income from one cart could equal $60,000 to $70,000 a year in present dollars. That is a living executive's conversion, not a 1900 ledger. The wagon was a small firm on wheels.

The company later moved to 620 West Cermak Road, an address it "proudly called home for the next 76 years." New City dates the move from Randolph Street to Cermak to 1900. Either way, the plant sat in Chicago while the product left it.

In 1909 the wagon left the horse. After a decade of development, Cretors introduced a self-propelled peanut and popcorn wagon on a four-cylinder Buda gasoline engine. The company calls these the first mobile concession stands of their kind, later built on Ford Model T and Model AA chassis. The first buyer of an automobile model, in the company's telling, was Mrs. L. P. Dupoyster of Cairo, Illinois, who paid $1,850. The innovation timeline dates a Buda Truck, selling popcorn, peanuts, and soda, to 1911. The dates are adjacent, not identical. The change is the same: the route no longer depended on a horse.

A 16.7-cent United States postage stamp, issued 7 July 1988 in the Transportation Series, later put a 1902 Model No. 1 Wagon on federal paper. New City and the company history both confirm the stamp. It is a coda, not a founding fact.

The indoor turn

Steam put popcorn on the curb. Electricity took it inside.

The company's history page is specific. In 1907 Charles and his son Hazael DeWitt received a patent for converting steam-powered equipment to run on an electric motor. That year the firm introduced its first No. 3 peanut roaster and corn popper on electric power. The electrically powered Model 3 earned Underwriters Laboratories file E4175, which the company says remains active. A company blog prints EA 4175. This essay uses the history page's E4175. The 1907 patent document itself was not retrieved. The claim is the company's, repeated by New City: father and son patented an electric motor to replace the steam engine, "allowing the poppers to move indoors."

That indoor move is the hinge between street vendor and theater concession. Steam had a reputation for complication and risk. Electric motors were quieter, cleaner, and usable in a shop. The "who invented" page dates the electrical turn to the 1910s and says electric machines eventually outsold steam. Retailers came off the street. Cretors followed them.

The Earn More, introduced in 1924, was the first machine the company designed for both indoor and outdoor use. The history page calls it, over more than twenty-five years, the most successful machine the firm ever built. In 1925 high-volume double-popper machines followed, aimed at theaters and stadiums. As electric models rose, steam wagons declined. The Hollywood Machine was built for the theater market once owners stopped treating popcorn as a lobby nuisance and started treating it as a profit center.

Andrew F. Smith, speaking to Smithsonian in 2013, is the historian of that indoor fight. Picture palaces wanted carpets, not curb food. "Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn," he said, "because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters." Vendors sold outside. Talkies, the Depression's five- and ten-cent bag, and wartime sugar rationing did the rest. By 1945, Smithsonian reports, more than half the popcorn eaten in America was eaten in theaters. Cretors supplied the indoor machine that made that marriage operational.

Hazael D. Cretors became president in 1934, the year of his father's death. The cemetery page gives 24 June 1934 in Chicago. The next chapter is already a different generation: catalog selling through the Depression, then, under third-generation president Charles J. Cretors, a wartime shift to aircraft oil-line fittings and anti-aircraft parts after the War Production Board's L-65 order. The founder was gone. The firm was not.

The company that outlived him

C. Cretors & Company is still a fifth-generation family business, still in the Chicago area, still making concession equipment. The about page says so in the present tense. The mission statement calls the firm a fifth-generation family business. New City, walking the Wood Dale floor in 2024, found Charles D. ("Charlie") Cretors as chief executive and his son Andrew G. Cretors as president. Those two names are the continuation. They are not this biography.

The industrial afterlife is how a street inventor became a supply house. In 1935, after Charles's death, the Duplex candy-coat machine let a shop pop and coat in one unit. In 1967 Charles D. Cretors, fourth-generation president from 1974, designed and patented Flo-Thru, a continuous hot-air industrial popper. Later models, the company says, reach 5,000 pounds an hour.

Andrew G. Cretors became the fifth president in 2006. In 2014 he moved headquarters and manufacturing from Chicago to a 101,000-square-foot plant in Wood Dale, Illinois (176 Mittel Drive). New City reports products in more than 150 countries and more than eighty patents. The claim that matters is endurance.

Charlie Cretors, an engineer who worked at Commonwealth Edison before joining the family firm, told New City he holds twenty-five patents. The plant still keeps a museum of wagons, including the wire baskets that preceded the steam popper. The Tosty Rosty Man, he noted, vanished when machines moved into theaters. There was no longer a sidewalk to stop.

Charles Cretors died in Chicago on 24 June 1934, age 81, and was buried at Rosehill. The firm he founded on a peddler's license in 1885 still builds concession equipment under his name, in Wood Dale, under Charlie Cretors and Andrew Cretors.