Half-a-cup Kettle

As power hungry devices go, the traditional electric kettle has come in for a lot of criticism. One of the major problems with it is you always end up boiling more water than you need - most people fill up the kettle to half-full or more, even if they only want one cup of tea. Why do we do this? In these days of environmental awareness, it's a shocking waste of energy.

Personally, I think it is because of the alarming noise and behaviour of a kettle with only one cups-worth of water in it. Most kettles have wide, flat bases (the better to boil water for lots of people quickly). Thus, a single cups-worth barely covers the base, and has a tendency to boil off rather quickly while the kettle makes alarming roaring noises. The result is rather uncertain - will so much water boil away that you only have enough for an eggcup of tea? Or will the kettle simply melt?

Let us, therefore, make a kettle with a conical base so that the water naturally runs down into the centre. Several heating elements are embedded in the cone in a concentric pattern, so that each one can be turned on and off separately. With wondrous sensor technology the kettle could determine how much water it has in it, and if 'tis only a little, then lo! The kettle only activates the small heating ring in the middle, thus preventing vast amounts of boiling-dryness and producing a reassuring kettle-like noise, rather than the current rather scary jet engine noise.

One nice side-effect would be that it would always take the same amount of time to boil the kettle, thus allowing you time to go watch the adverts on TV.