Doughnuts didn't come into their own until World War I, when millions of homesick American doughboys met millions of doughnuts in the trenches of France. They were served up by women volunteers who even brought them to the front lines to give soldiers a tasty touch of home. When the doughboys came back from the war, they had a natural yen for more doughnuts. (The name "doughboy," though, didn't derive from doughnuts. It goes back to the relatively doughnut-less Civil War, when the cavalry derided foot soldiers as doughboys, perhaps because their globular brass buttons resembled flour dumplings or because soldiers used flour to polish their white belts.)

The first doughnut machine did not come along until 1920, in New York City, when Adolph Levitt, an enterprising refugee from czarist Russia, began selling fried doughnuts from his bakery. Hungry theater crowds pushed him to make a gadget that churned out the tasty rings faster, and he did.

Levitt's doughnut machine was the first sign that the doughnut, till then merely a taste sensation, could, in production, become a public spectacle. And so generations of kids like me, and adults, too, have stood transfixed by the Willy Wonka-like scene behind the glass of doughnut shops, learning in the process that the doughnut hole is built in, not cut out. There before them a circle of dough, shaped like a perfect smoke ring, and about the diameter of a baseball, dropped off into a vat of boiling oil, circulated, got turned over to brown on the other side, and emerged from the oil on a moving ramp, one by one like ducks in a row.

The machines grew more refined. The idea spread. By 1931, the New Yorker was whispering to its readers, "We can tell you a little about the doughnut-making place in Broadway," and described how "doughnuts float dreamily through a grease canal in a glass enclosed machine, walk dreamily up a moving ramp, and tumble dreamily into an outgoing basket."
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By then, Adolph Levitt's machines were earning him a dreamy $25 million a year, mostly from wholesale deliveries to bakers around the country. A company spokesman breathlessly reported that Levitt's machine had pulled the doughnut "out of the mire of prejudice that surrounded the heavy, grease-soaked product . . . and made it into a light, puffy product of a machine."

By the 1934 World's Fair in Chicago, doughnuts were poster material, billed as "the food hit of the Century of Progress." Seeing them produced "automatically" somehow made them part of the wave of the future. A doughnut cost less than a nickel, within reach of most of the Depression's victims. They were base and beloved. In the 1934 film It Happened One Night, rugged newspaperman Clark Gable actually has to teach runaway heiress Claudette Colbert how to dunk. Often, doughnuts were sold with their own can-do philosophy. Singer Cindy Hutchins' mother recalls buying them after seeing movies at Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Theater. They came with a slip of paper to bolster the downtrodden: "As you go through life make this your goal: Watch the doughnut, not the hole."

It was in the 1930s, too, and half a country away from Levitt's busy Harlem bakery, that a Frenchman named Joe LeBeau made his way up from New Orleans to Paducah, Kentucky. Probably the hard times led him to sell his secret recipe (written out longhand on a slip of paper), and the name Krispy Kreme, to a local store owner named Ishmael Armstrong, who hired his nephew, Vernon Rudolph, and put him to work selling the treats door-to-door.

In 1937 young Vernon and two friends found themselves in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with just $25 between them. They borrowed ingredients (potatoes, sugar and milk) from a kindly grocer, stripped down to survive the heat of baking in July, and emerged with a fresh batch of Krispy Kremes, which they delivered in their 1936 Pontiac. That year, Joe Louis was heavyweight champ, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific, the Golden Gate Bridge was completed, and a popular song was proclaiming that you can live on doughnuts and coffee if "you're in love."

North Carolinians soon found their way to Rudolph's operation, and because it's hard to stay wholesale when the fragrance keeps issuing retail flyers for every batch, Rudolph, like Levitt before him, boosted local sales by letting the public see, as well as buy. Krispy Kreme still uses this wholesale/retail system, selling to grocery stores and to passersby who watch for the neon "Hot Doughnuts Now" sign to light up, signaling a fresh batch.

Vernon Rudolph returned from military duty with thoughts of expanding his doughnut chain. And it was right about then, in the early 1950s, that the first Ring King started churning away in the back room.

By the late 1950s, in 29 Krispy Kreme store-factories in 12 states, individual Ring Kings like the Smithsonian's model were turning out something like 75 dozen doughnuts an hour. They faced stiff competition. Dunkin' Donuts, started in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1950, has been flourishing ever since.

By the early 1980s, the Ring King Jr. was obsolete; a fond memory for doughnut aficionados, it was replaced by newer and more elaborate equipment. Sadly, for a while there, the doughnut itself seemed to be going into decline, especially in New York where it was being challenged by the more urbane bagel.