a person · NYAdolph Levitt
Sold the machine, then sold the donut, then sold membership in liking them.
The Russian refugee who built the first automated donut machine in New York in 1920 and founded the Doughnut Corporation of America.
The story Cited · wp-doughnut-shop
Levitt's machine cut and fried donuts automatically, which turned a bakery job into a production line and made a shop window into a show. He founded the Doughnut Corporation of America, which later started the National Dunking Association, and opened the Mayflower donut shop in Times Square in 1931. At the 1933–34 Chicago World's Fair the machine was billed as the food hit of the Century of Progress.
The farm stands followed: cider-selling orchards took up the machine quickly, and cider donuts became a roadside product.
Today Cited · wp-doughnut-shop
Every depositor over every kettle in every strip-mall shop is downstream of that machine.
The particulars
| role | inventor |
|---|---|
| state | NY |
| region | New York City |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.