Technology has taken us a long way from the rock, used to pound clothes at
the riverbank, to the modern rectangular-shaped white box with a variety of
buttons equally able to deal with heavy soiling and delicate fabrics. All
washing works by squeezing water through the fibres of clothes; sand was
traditionally used as an abrasive to free garments of dirt and soap was
discovered at Rome’s Sapo Hill where ashes containing the fat of sacrificial
animals was found to have good cleaning powers.
More than a
millennium later ,washday was still man, or rather, woman-powered. Catherine
Beecher called laundry “the housekeeper’s hardest problem”, and with good
cause. At the beginning of the twentieth century even the most simplified
hand laundry used staggering amounts of time and labour. One wash, one
boiling and one rinse used about 50 gallons of water. In addition, laundry
day – traditionally on Monday as it followed the Sabbath when women would be
relatively rested - incorporated sustaining fires, scrubbing the clothes
with soap, then stirring for hours with “washing sticks” to lift and agitate
the boiling clothes. Whites, coloureds and flannels would have to be washed
separately, after which items would be forced through a mangle and then
hauled wet and dripping outside to be hung up to dry. No wonder it was seen
as the most gruelling day of the week and, where possible, farmed out. (It
also wasn’t a task that could be left undone: when Florence Nightingale went
to the Crimea she made laundry her first mission. In a hospital rife with
disease she found that only six shirts had been washed in a month.)
The
earliest form of an automatic washing machine as we know it was the nautical
practice of towing dirty laundry behind the ship. The combination of
agitation and a constant flow of clean water washed the clothes quite
efficiently. Several centuries would pass before such ease in the pursuit of
cleanliness would be achieved.
The first manual washing machines
appeared in the 1760s, the most popular type being a wooden box, which was
filled with clothes and rotated. This type of washer was first patented in
the US in 1846 and survived as late as 1927. In 1874 William Blackstone
built a washing machine, a tub that moved clothes in soapy water back and
forth by an arrangement of pegs and gears, as a birthday present for his
wife. Five years later he moved his company to New York where it still
produces washing machines to this day. Competitors moved in quickly; by 1875
more than 2000 patents were issued for washing devices. Not every idea
worked; one company built a machine designed to wash only one item at a
time.
Laundromats also sprung up – one of the first, opened in
California in by a gold miner and a carpenter, washed 12 shirts at once and
was powered by 10 donkeys.
By the early 1900s the washing machine
had fully entered the electric age. Powered by electricity, steam and
petrol, these worked reasonably well as far as cleaning clothes went but had
one major drawback: the motor was bolted to the side of the tub where it
often became wet, delivering powerful electric shocks in the process. After
several people literally fried in the process of washing their clothes the
drum was enclosed into a case.
The first fully automatic machine was made by a US company called Seeburg
who mostly made jukeboxes. The machine was a failure but Seeburg carried on
making timer switches for other companies and by 1947 General Electric
claimed it had produced the first automatic machine with an agitator to
rotate clothes. It took a decade before automatics reached the UK and, when
they did arrive, were as expensive as a small car. Automated washing
machines remained a luxury product until the 1960s when companies started
producing twin tub machines and this style of washer sold millions. In the
mid-60s 44% of UK households owned a washing machine. By 2002 it had risen
to 93%.
The modern automatic washing machine, although not
dissimilar to the nautical practice of towing ones’ clothes, is a great deal
more sophisticated. The speed that the drum goes round is critical; the
clothes should just get round to the top of the drum before falling. This is
why most automatics have a two minute wash cycle. The clothes go one way –
pause – and then go back round the other. This stops them from getting
tangled. For synthetics a gentler wash is achieved by halving the rotating
time and doubling the time of the pauses while for wool – the gentlest wash
action – simply more water is let into the drum. This has a buffering effect
on the clothes as they tumble over each other.
Although automatics
can have dozens of wash programmes they are all just different combinations
of these three different wash actions at different temperatures. But
technology marches on. In the past decade fuzzy logic was the cleaning
watchword: meaning that the appliance is controlled by electronics, often
using sensors and used for, in no particular order, calculating load,
appropriate water quantity and temperature, spin speed, foam control, rinse
time and fabric mix. Then came the Dyson engineers with the astonishing
claim that 15 minutes of hand washing got clothes cleaner than 67 minutes in
the best washer available. (The problem, they explained, was the “drop and
flop” pattern explained above; a pattern that fails to flex the fabric and
open the weave to the detergent solution. The twin tumbling action of the
Dyson appliance makes the clothes more active, moving them around in an
infinitely variable pattern, without tangling.) If you hadn’t noticed your
hand washing being cleaner than your machine’s, then consider this latest
technological advance: in 2001 Electrolux launched a talking washing
machine, known as the Washy Talky, in India.
The top-loader speaks
in a soft, Indian middle-class female accent and uses 90 different phrases
in Hindi and English, gently giving instructions to the accompaniment of a
tinkling piano, such as "drop the detergent, close the lid and relax".
It’s a far cry from being bent double over a boiling vat, stirring
your smalls with a stick. And worth remembering as you set the dial to
“non-crease” before heading off to the gym.
