The first automatic washing machine had to be bolted down to stop it walking
In 1937 Bendix Home Appliances launched the first domestic automatic washer, a front-loader that looks familiar even now. It had no drum suspension, so owners anchored it to the floor to keep it from wandering across the room mid-spin. Its heavy two-speed gearbox resembled a miniature car transmission and made it expensive.
Before such machines, laundry swallowed a whole day. Water was hauled from a pump, well or spring, heated over a fire and poured into a tub, and because warm soapy water was scarce, the cleanest clothes went in first and the filthiest last. Everything was soaked, beaten, scrubbed, rinsed and wrung by twisting it into a roll, before drying and ironing even began.
England issued its first washing machine patent in 1691, and Henry Sidgier patented a rotating drum washer in 1782. Early basins had grooves or paddles against which a user pushed clothes with a stick. Once metal drums replaced wooden ones, they could turn over a fire to heat the water. The first US patent, granted to Nathaniel Briggs of New Hampshire in 1797, is a mystery: the Patent Office fire of 1836 destroyed its description. Shaker communities built notable machines, winning a gold medal at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.
Newspapers were advertising electric washers by 1904, yet nobody knows who built the first; Alva J. Fisher is often wrongly credited. American sales hit 800,000 in 1928 before the Depression cut them, and by 1940 some 60 percent of the 25 million wired US homes owned one. After Pearl Harbor, domestic production stopped for the war, though makers kept designing automatics. Hoover later sold a Keymatic model programmed by slotted plastic cartridges.
Automatic sales overtook wringer machines in the US by 1953, while Britain and much of Europe took until the 1950s to embrace electric washers at all, slowed by the war's economic toll. The Swedish statistician Hans Rosling ranked the washing machine as the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution, and its spread is widely credited with improving women's place in society.
Source: Washing machine
