I also have a small collection of vintage electric toasters. It's interesting to see how they've evolved over the decades.
The first toaster in our family was a Morphy-Richards TU1D pop-up model in Primrose Yellow. This lasted from the early 1960s to the late 1970s when it failed to pop up and caught fire
The TU1D was replaced by a Russell Hobbs 5503 pop-sideways toaster with a colourful poppy design. The unique pop-sideways feature claimed to hand the toast to you when it was ready, but it could be a bit violent and throw the toast across the room sometimes. Great fun though. I still have this toaster, in the family since new, but it no longer works properly. A wire broke off the bimetallic strip. I soldered it back on, but the strip becomes hot enough to eventually melt the solder and it broke again. I need to think of another solution.
As a family, we always had automatic toasters, so I was intrigued by the concept of manual ones that you had to watch and flip the bread over yourself. More than 10 years ago, I bought a Swan Brand toaster from a car boot sale exactly like Steve's in post #1. I had seen these in antique shops from time to time, but this one at the car boot sale was being offered very cheap (it can't have been more than a pound or two) so I snapped it up and took it home. On closer inspection, there was a break in the element and the mains lead had crumbling rubber insulation, which meant it was unusable. I kept it as an ornament, but after a few years of looking at it folornly sitting there, I decided to bring it back to life by fitting a new (modern plastic) mains lead. Then I repaired the break in the element by twisting the wires together. Amazingly it worked! There is a hot spot visible where the wires have been twisted together (look near the top of the photo), though the repair has held out thus far.
Another thing you'll notice with these toasters is that the bread is at an angle. It's closer to the top of the element and further away at the bottom. To compensate for this, the turns of resistance wire are wound more densely at the bottom of the element panel, to deliver more heat there and ensure even toasting.
Around 2014 I came across another vintage Hotpoint cat. no. 808 53 electric toaster at a car boot sale. It was ridiculously cheap - the seller didn't even know what it was. This one is unusual - it has glass doors so you can see inside. This sounds like a great idea, but you can't actually see if your toast is ready or not without opening the door. I'm guessing it dates from the 1930s - 1940s.
To complete my collection I bought another Morphy-Richards TU1D in yellow from a local secondhand shop, just like the one our family used to have. That one still appears to work. (I haven't posted a picture).
Finally I have a Tefal Thick-N-Thin toaster I bought new in 1990 which counts as vintage now. The elements are encased in silica tubes, like the Dimplex radiant bar heaters sometimes found in bathrooms. And I have a more modern Hinari Lifestyle toaster oven with mechanical clockwork timer, just visible in the background of one of my photos. It's about half the size of a microwave oven and of similar appearance, but it cooks by conventional radiant heat like an ordinary oven or grill - it's not a microwave. That design has been popular in the USA and Canada for decades, yet strangely it hasn't caught on in a big way over here. I wonder why not.