April 4, 2015

"The most important invention is the washing machine. Any other technology comes second."

Said the 95-year-old German woman, who lived through the Nazi era and is doing an ask-me-anything on Reddit today.

And somebody says "So that TED talk was right after all!" and links to:
What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine.... Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.
That made me think about the description of wash day in "The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I":

The wash was done outside. A huge vat of boiling water would be suspended over a larger, roaring fire and near it three large “Number Three” zinc washtubs and a dishpan would be placed on a bench.

The clothes would be scrubbed in the first of the zinc tubs, scrubbed on a washboard by a woman bending over the tub. The soap, since she couldn’t afford store-bought soap, was soap she had made from lye, soap that was not very effective, and the water was hard. Getting farm dirt out of clothes required hard scrubbing.

Then the farm wife would wring out each piece of clothing to remove from it as much as possible of the dirty water, and put it in the big vat of boiling water. Since the scrubbing would not have removed all of the dirt, she would try to get the rest out by “punching” the clothes in the vat— standing over the boiling water and using a wooden paddle or, more often, a broomstick, to stir the clothes and swish them through the water and press them against the bottom or sides, moving the broom handle up and down and around as hard as she could for ten or fifteen minutes in a human imitation of the agitator of an automatic— electric— washing machine.

The next step was to transfer the clothes from the boiling water to the second of the three zinc washtubs: the “rinse tub.” The clothes were lifted out of the big vat on the end of the broomstick, and held up on the end of the stick for a few minutes while the dirty water dripped out.

When the clothes were in the rinse tub, the woman bent over the tub and rinsed them, by swishing each individual item through the water. Then she wrung out the clothes, to get as much of the dirty water out as possible, and placed the clothes in the third tub, which contained bluing, and swished them around in it—this time to get the bluing all through the garment and make it white — and then repeated the same movements in the dishpan, which was filled with starch.

At this point, one load of wash would be done. A week’s wash took at least four loads: one of sheets, one of shirts and other white clothing, one of colored clothes and one of dish towels. But for the typical, large, Hill Country farm family, two loads of each of these categories would be required, so the procedure would have to be repeated eight times.

For each load, moreover , the water in each of the three washtubs would have to be changed. A washtub held about eight gallons. Since the water had to be warm, the woman would fill each tub half with boiling water from the big pot and half with cold water. She did the filling with a bucket which held three or four gallons—twenty-five or thirty pounds. For the first load or two of wash, the water would have been provided by her husband or her sons. But after this water had been used up, part of washday was walking— over and over— that long walk to the spring or well, hauling up the water, hand over laborious hand, and carrying those heavy buckets back. 1 Another part of washday was also a physical effort: the “punching” of the clothes in the big vat. “You had to do it as hard as you could— swish those clothes around and around and around. They never seemed to get clean. And those clothes were heavy in the water, and it was hot outside, and you’d be standing over that boiling water and that big fire— you felt like you were being roasted alive.” Lifting the clothes out of the vat was an effort, too. A dripping mass of soggy clothes was heavy, and it felt heavier when it had to be lifted out of that vat and held up for minutes at a time so that the dirty water could drip out, and then swung over to the rinsing tub. Soon, if her children weren’t around to hear her, a woman would be grunting with the effort. Even the wringing was, after a few hours, an effort. “I mean, wringing clothes might not seem hard,” Mrs. Harris says. “But you have to wring every piece so many times —you wring it after you take it out of the scrub tub, and you wring it after you take it out of the rinse tub, and after you take it out of the bluing. Your arms got tired.” And her hands— from scrubbing with lye soap and wringing— were raw and swollen. Of course, there was also the bending— hours of bending—over the rub boards. “By the time you got done washing, your back was broke,” Ava Cox says. “I’ll tell you— of the things of my life that I will never forget, I will never forget how much my back hurt on washdays.” Hauling the water, scrubbing, punching, rinsing: a Hill Country farm wife did this for hours on end— while a city wife did it by pressing the button on her electric washing machine.

50 comments:

SteveR said...

Man, that was exhausting

Patrick said...

That part of the Caro book was also the first thing I thought of. Really cut down on my distaste for folding laundry.

rhhardin said...

They didn't have exercise bikes either.

robother said...

The LBJ book quote also provides a clue to why late 20th Century obesity and bone density problems might be an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution. Try to imagine the workout routine that would duplicate the weightlifting and aerobic values of the washday routine.

Skyler said...

Nonsense. It was refrigeration. Keeping clean clothes is a nice thing. Keeping edible food saved untold numbers of lives.

rhhardin said...

``The washing machine is so conceived that, having been filled with a heap of ignoble tissue, the inner emotion, the boiling indignation that it feels from this, when channelled to the upper part of its being, falls back down on the heap of ignoble tissue turning its stomach - more or less perpetually - it being a process that should end up with a purification.

``So here we are at the heart of the mystery. The sun is setting on this Monday evening. Oh housewives! And you, near the end of your study, how tired your backs are! But after grinding away all day long like this look at what clean and proper arms you have, your pure hands, worn by the most moving toil!

``Certainly the linen, once it went into the washing machine, had already been cleansed, roughly. The machine did not come into contact with filthiness as such, with snot, for example dried out, filthy, and clinging to the handkerchiefs.

``It is still a fact, however, that the machine experiences an idea or a diffuse feeling of filthiness about the things inside of itself, which, through emotions, boilings, and efforts, it manages to overcome - in separating the tissue : so much so that, when rinsed in a catastrophe of fresh water, these will come to seem extremely white.’‘

``And here, in effect, is the miracle :

``A thousand white flags are suddenly unfurled - attesting not to defeat, but to victory - and are not just, perhaps, the sign of corporal propriety among the inhabitants of the neighborhood.’‘

(excerpts from Derrida, Signsponge)

rhhardin said...

Derrida is citing Francis Ponge, I should have added.

Skyler said...

And the description points out that the real advance was proper soap and softer water.

Laslo Spatula said...

Some women have been known to sit atop a vibrating washing machine to achieve orgasm.

So there is that in its favor, also.

For men there are warm laundered socks from the dryer.

I am Laslo.

Bill Harshaw said...

Texans never heard of a hand wringer? Still available through Amazon.

Of course women were judged by their washing, since everything was on line (no privacy in those days, unlike now). And bluing was only for whites, IIRC.

Hagar said...

Today, washing machines are designed to comply with the diktats issued by the EPA rather than for washing your clothes clean.

wildswan said...

What about air conditioning which made the whole South livable? (Why was fire invented 200,000 years ago and air conditioning only invented about sixty years ago? )

And what about cell phones which brought communication without the need for expensive wiring to the whole Third World?

David said...

Most people had only one or two changes of clothes, so you couldn't put it off while you wore something else. This was equally true in cities. Tenements had communal laundries (and often communal toilets) in courtyards. In somewhat less impoverished neighborhoods, the local laundry was a common business, because there were usually no facilities in the homes (other than the kitchen sink or a bathtub if they had one) to wash clothes in.

traditionalguy said...

And the Obama gang is taking executive actions without Congressional approval that remove cheap electricity here and will totally price electrical generation out of reach of the third world nations so a few can capture all world's wealth for themselves.

buwaya said...

No electricity, no washing machines.
No steam turbines, no electricity
No precision lathes, no steam turbines.
etc.
Nobody is taught real history. Which is why the public is stupid. Few people bother to wonder why the light goes on when they flip the switch.

cubanbob said...

If technology stopped at 1920 we would still have most of what we need to sustain our current population. While we wouldn't have the medical and communications advances along with travel advances nevertheless we would have an electric grid and the benefits of that which include refrigeration of food and washing machines. Also if I am not mistaken by 1920 city water systems were using chlorine to kill infective agents in the water.

J. Farmer said...

I thought it was conventional wisdom by now that the technological innovations of the first half of the 20th century, and not just domestic gadgets but medical innovations like birth control pills and antibiotics, engendered the women's movement. As usual, the politics was catching up to the technology.

Swifty Quick said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Fernandinande said...

To paraphrase somebody -
"95 year-old Nazis - is there anything they don't know?"

buwaya puti said...
No electricity, no washing machines.


Point taken, but The Ancients had their tricks:

By the mid-1850s, steam-driven commercial laundry machinery were on sale in the UK and US.

Fernandinande said...

Zeb Quinn said...
I remember on that old afternoon TV show Queen for a Day, ...


My "girl"friend was on that show. She sold everything she got.

Sydney said...

That had to be hard on the fabric, too.

CatherineM said...

Makes me think of my great grandma. After moving from Ireland to Scotland for a job in a factory for great grandpa, she took in laundry from other workers to make extra money. This was in the 1910s.

buwaya said...

Actually, the wealthy and the mid-to-high bourgeoise had washerwomen and other servants for the remainder of the housework. Most of feminism as a political matter has been about putting women in prestigious positions, not really about permitting, or requiring, working class women to take survival jobs (other than being other women's servants of course)

rcocean said...

Yep washing clothes was hard work. Its why the well-to-do either sent it out to a laundry or had the maid do it.

Krumhorn said...

We all have some interest in the communication of ideas, otherwise we wouldn't congregate around a blog like this. While we are submerged in commercial advertising, some of which is surprisingly good ("Guess what day it is! Guess what day it is. Huh?") and political communication that is living misery, we desperately need to be able to communicate complex facts that are accurate in a way that that actually works if we are going to avoid the quagmire of idiocy through which we are slogging today.

The Hans Rosling TED presentations are just wonderful. Without vouching for the accuracy of his stats or his conclusions, this and this are great examples of how complex ideas can be communicated effectively.

- Krumhorn

Michael K said...

Sewage treatment trumps all of those. It was late 19th century before city populations were stable without immigrants. Before that, more people died in cities than in the countryside.

John Snow and the Broad Street Pump.

Michael K said...

Snow was not "an obstetrician," as the article says but did become Britain's earliest anesthetist and provided chloroform for Queen Victoria's labours.

n.n said...

I vote for indoor plumbing. The winters in Russia are brutal and the conditions are harsh. The invention of indoor plumbing and the humble toilet brought us out of the cold, noxious conditions of an outhouse or less, and contributed to improved health and increased leisure time.

That said, the invention of the washing machine was critical for people who live and work in close proximity, including cities and office buildings. But, then again, indoor plumbing, and the humble toilet, was a first priority there too.

Krumhorn said...

I would love to see a similar analysis of correlations using the invention of penicillin. It's undeniable that in peace and war, antibiotics had to be a significant benchmark.

- Krumhorn

Methadras said...

"Skyler said...

Nonsense. It was refrigeration. Keeping clean clothes is a nice thing. Keeping edible food saved untold numbers of lives. "

This, but she's a woman so it makes sense she wold choose a washing machine.

ken in tx said...

My grandmother washed her clothes in a black cauldron-like wash pot in the side yard, over a fire. She used a wooden canoe paddle to agitate the clothes. She carved off slivers of Octagon soap into the water. One of the reasons to boil the laundry was to to control bedbugs and lice. It worked mostly. People who had bedbugs and lice were considered lazy, because they didn't boil their laundry and soap was cheap.

I remember watching her do this in the early 50s in Walker Co. Alabama; however she had been doing it this way, every week, all of her adult life. It was probably an easier job for her then because her seven children were all grown up and gone.

Unknown said...

Anyone who is anyone knows the most important invention is the Thermos.

Gahrie said...

I'd vote for language as man's most important invention.

William said...

Sometime back there was a show on PBS where a married couple and their children agreed to live for a period exactly as a 1900 family would. This included the food, food preparation, housecleaning and recreation as practiced in 1900.. The man complained that the heavy woolen clothes were uncomfortable and that he sometimes got nicked by the straight razor. His wife was not sympathetic. The woman complained that household chores took more than twelve hours a day to complete. The producers granted her a maid,but he work was still onerous. Laundry was the worst. Apparently lots of people were badly injured doing laundry. Heavy cauldrons of boiling water are dangerous.......About the fifth week into it, the woman took the straight razor and cut her husband's throat. It was great television.

William said...

The greatest invention of my lifetime was the tv remote control. That invention fulfilled all of mankind's highest aspirations and made life, at long last, worth living.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Make up.

sinz52 said...

Skyler:

Refrigeration, in the form of the "icebox," was a 19th century invention.

And if you were wealthy enough, you even had it sooner.

Thomas Jefferson loved ice cream.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
n.n said...

William:

What came first, the remote control or the couch potato? If the former, then can we conclude that the evolution of a human being to a couch potato represents the optimal solution to the human fitness function? Assuming, of course, that an evolutionary process is both progressive (i.e. monotonic change) and positive as a prevailing consensus has concluded in the popular culture.

I am couch potato. Here is my remote control. Hear me cough, sputter, and wheeze.

ErnieG said...

I heard that the greatest invention of the 20th century was the Thermos™ bottle. not only does it keep hot things hot and cold things cold, how does it know what to which?

Rockport Conservative said...

I am not as old as LBJ but I know that I can remember to back as far as 1939. I grew up in a family that was poor at that time and I remember my mother had an electric wringer washer. she also did laundry for others on it. During WWII and probably before, my grandmother took her laundry to a washateria where there were rows and rows of wringer washers, all had their two rinse tubs. I remember seeing those. After WWII my mother got one of the first automatic washers, one of those with the real rubber tubs that squeezed the clothes as the water was pumped out. Then clean water was pumped in for the rinses, 2 rinses if needed. That was a big change from the wringer type. They were dangerous, many fingers and even arms and long hair could be trapped in them. Clothes could be caught in them and torn to shred. Nothing like the pushing of buttons I do. In fact they arent' even buttons and dials anymore they are little led lights you touch. Progress marches on. All because we have electricity.

Beldar said...

The electric washing machine referenced here isn't at all like the one we have in our homes or even laundromats today.

The electric motor worked the agitator, but the tub didn't spin. Instead, another electric motor worked the wringer rollers, which squeezed water out of the clothes after they'd been washed (agitated) in the tub.

Here's a good set of photos showing the evolution: http://www.maytagclub.com/page-16.htm

My father's appliance store in Dawson County, Texas, continued to sell Maytag wringer-style washing machines into the late 1970s. Oftentimes we were replacing machines bought by farm families from my father's father's appliance store in the 1920s and 1930s.

Growing up, one of the most pithy and evocative phrases I recall hearing was a description of someone who'd made a serious mistake or misstep as "having caught his teat [pronounced "tit"] in the wringer." It was a reference to these machines.

Kevin said...

I vote for either the iron plough or canned food over the washing machine, refrigeration, or air conditioning. Antibiotics and germ theory/sterilization are up there pretty close though.

stlcdr said...

So much for sliced bread.

Mace said...

Not the remote control, but the MUTE button on the remote control

Daniel J. Artz said...

I still remember the old wringer style washers - my mother had one in the basement in 1960. And a wash board, and a big old bar of Fels Naptha Soap. With 4 children, 3 still in diapers, just doing load after load of the old cotton diapers was a huge chore, and not just once a week, either. I was only 4, but I remember the joy my mother had when Grandpa told her to get a diaper service and send him the bill. Of course, that was still in the days when the Milk Man made deliveries three times a week.

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Shilpa said...

Yes, the Washing Machine made our lives much easier. I totally agree with you. Nice Article.
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