Adolph Levitt was born in Bulgaria, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 8 with his family. The Levitt family settled in Milwaukee, and to help his family, Adolph first sold newspapers, and then became a stock boy in a retail department store. By the age of 30, Levitt had become the operating head of a chain of department stores in Wisconsin.
In 1916, Levitt moved to New York, and established a chain of retail bakeries. His donuts were very popular, and demand for them grew. Regardless of how quickly he baked, Levitt could not keep up with demand by hand-baking his donuts. To speed up the baking process, Levitt teamed up with an engineer, Walter H. Tomlinson, and invented his Wonderful Almost Human Automatic Doughnut Machine. The machine was patented as U.S. Patent No. 1,320,662.
The machine would form and plop perfectly shaped rings of dough into a vat of oil, then flip them at a time interval, and push them out when baked. In a stroke of marketing genius, Levitt put the operating machine in the window of his bakery, creating a spectacle. Additions to his machine would allow the machine to send the donuts down a belt to be coated in glaze, sugar, or other types of coverings.
The automated machine led Levitt to found the Doughnut Corporation of America, through which he began manufacturing and selling automatic doughnut equipment and prepared flower mixes. Eventually the corporation expanded into an ice cream division and frozen waffles. The corporation is credited with contracting “doughnut” into “donut.” Foreign subsidiaries included the Canadian Doughnut Company, Ltd.; the British Doughnut Company, Ltd.; the Downyflake Food Corporation of Australia, and Cia Donas de Mexico. Levitt also organized the Mayflower Doughnut Corporation, which operated a coast-to-coast chain of Mayflower coffee shops and donut manufacturing plants. Levitt even spearheaded a National Dunking Association to answer questions on the propriety of such an act – after audiences watched Clark Gable teach runway heiress Claudette Colbert how to dunk, in the film It Happened One Night.
By the 1930s, Levitt’s machines were earning him $25 million a year, mostly from wholesale deliveries to bakers around the country. At the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago, donuts were poster material, billed as “the food hit of the Century of Progress.” A donut cost less than a nickel, within reach of most of the Depression’s victims.
By the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, 20 million donuts were sold.
Levitt and his wife, Rebecca, had a son and two daughters. Levitt was a founder of Temple Beth-El in Great Neck, New York; North Shore Hospital in Manhasset, New York; and Long Island Jewish Hospital at Lake Success.
Now go enjoy a donut in honor of Adolph.