Popular Science has an excellent article on how Josephine Cochrane transformed how dishes are cleaned by inventing an automated dish washing machine and obtaining a patent in 1886. Dishwashers had been attempted before, but hers was the first with the revolutionary idea of using water pressure to clean dishes placed in wire racks, rather than relying on some sort of physical scrubber. The very first KitchenAid household dishwashers were based on her machines, making modern dishwashers direct descendants of her original design.
It wasn’t an overnight success. Josephine faced many hurdles. Saying it was difficult for a woman to start a venture or do business during this period of history doesn’t do justice to just how many barriers existed, even discounting the fact that her late husband was something we would today recognize as a violent alcoholic. One who left her little money and many debts upon his death, to boot.
She was nevertheless able to focus on developing her machine, and eventually hired mechanic George Butters to help create a prototype. The two of them working in near secrecy because a man being seen regularly visiting her home was simply asking for trouble. Then there were all the challenges of launching a product in a business world that had little place for a woman. One can sense the weight of it all in a quote from Josephine (shared in a write-up by the USPTO) in which she says “If I knew all I know today when I began to put the dishwasher on the market, I never would have had the courage to start.”
But Josephine persevered and her invention made a stir at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, winning an award and mesmerizing onlookers. Not only was it invented by a woman, but her dishwashers were used by restaurants on-site to clean tens of thousands of dishes, day in and day out. Her marvelous machine was not yet a household device, but restaurants, hotels, colleges, and hospitals all saw the benefits and lined up to place orders.
Early machines were highly effective, but they were not the affordable, standard household appliances they are today. There certainly existed a household demand for her machine — dishwashing was a tedious chore that no one enjoyed — but household dishwashing was a task primarily done by women. Women did not control purchasing decisions, and it was difficult for men of the time (who did not spend theirs washing dishes) to be motivated about the benefits. The device was expensive, but it did away with a tremendous amount of labor. Surely the price was justified? Yet women themselves — the ones who would benefit the most — were often not on board. Josephine reflected that many women did not yet seem to think of their own time and comfort as having intrinsic value.
Josephine Cochrane ran a highly successful business and continued to refine her designs. She died in 1913 and it wasn’t until the 1950s that dishwashers — direct descendants of her original design — truly started to become popular with the general public.
Nowadays, dishwashers are such a solved problem that not only are they a feature in an instructive engineering story, but we rarely see anyone building one (though it has happened.)
We have Josephine Cochrane to thank for that. Not just her intellect and ingenuity in coming up with it, but the fact that she persevered enough to bring her creation over the finish line.
As someone who lived in an apartment without a dishwasher for several years all I can say is thank goodness. Washing dishes by hand is not fun and very time consuming. I wonder when modern plumbing and water pressure came to be?
Washing dishes by hand is trivial. Get a spray bottle, fill it with water and add 1 spoon of sodium bicarbonate. Right after eating, while the dish is still warm, spray it with this mixture and remove any food remains with paper towel. Now that the dish is almost clean, it can be left in a stack to be properly washed later. It won’t stink, decompose or attract flies.
When it’s finally time to wash the dishes with proper food-safe dish soap and water, it’s quick and not very messy – because there’s almost zero food remains on them already. And the sponge remains clean too!
It’s such a chore though, I agree it’s far less work intensive than laundry was before washing machines.
But my word is it the world thing to contemplate after getting home from work, taking the time to cook. And then to have to wash up 😩
it is trivial, that why it makes sense to do it with a machine that does it better using less resources
What a water waster a dishwasher is. Personal habits are why dishwashing is “so hard”. Make-work is a time waste. The sink will be left at all times without any object or substance left after rinsing used dishes. No dishes will be left with food not rinsed off after eating not later, milk is worst. When it comes time to wash get everything wet with a hot water wetting first, wait a few minutes then wash without immersion in captive water which is another big waste of water and detergent. Concentrated detergent on a cloth or pad then will get things cleaner quicker than that sink-soup that some people think is “clean”. It’s even possible to do this without getting your hands wet if that is a problem.
so you waste both time an water for a worse result
Dishwashers use less water than hand washing dishes.
When our original dishwasher, the one the original owners of the house installed, was 45 years old and still going strong, my wife said, “It’s ugly! I want a new dishwasher!” So we got rid of a working dishwasher and got a modern one. The new one did not use enough water or energy to get the dishes clean, and sometimes I would take them out and wash them by hand.
It failed after only ten years, which I understand is the normal life expectancy for modern appliances, so I concluded they don’t know how to make them anymore, and I’m not buying another one. Then I read that dishwashers, particularly with the rinse agent to prevent spotting, leave a toxic film that gets into your food. For the last 2½ years, I’ve washed every single night, by hand. I’ve learned efficient ways to do it so I get better results in half the time it took when I was required to do them my mom’s way when I was a kid.
Ha. It’s so trivial you have to wash it twice! Thanks, I’ll let the machine whir away while I type Internet comments instead of washing dishes.
It is trivial effort, but it costs time. Say a dishwasher saves me 10 minutes per day for my family of 3. That is 60 hours every year which I can automate for a one-time payment of $600. Unless you literally enjoy washing dishes, it’s an easy choice.
and it uses a lot less water
Depends on how you do it. Washing by hand can potentially get them cleaner with no additional water.
“modern” plumbing and water pressure long predates electricity, was first used in the Roman era
As “Technology Connections” noted: “Not known relationship with Zefram” :-D
Dishwashers are indeed awesome and the story of how this inventor stayed with it is really inspirational. Thanks for great write up.
Probably most of us lived in a bunch of apartments without a dishwasher for a long time before graduating to a big boy/girl residence with a dishwasher. As a single person or even with roomates it was easy enough to wash the one pot and plate used to make dinner and be done with it but once you start adding members to the family, the amount of dishes created seems to go up exponentially! A good, quiet dishwasher is a godsend.
Hmm… when I think of “the modern dishwasher” I think of a box that containing awkward plastic parts that break within a year, so you need to fix it with a tie-wrap in order to prevent the drawers to fall out every time you insert a cup or a dish. Replace the tie-wrap every 2 years and it may last for 15 years. Eventually all plastic parts will start to turn to mush and the thing just gradually falls apart. That is if you are lucky, if you are not you have a machine that has a bad solder joint within a year or two, causing all sorts of silly unpredictable faults, or water ingress in the electronics section causing havoc or fogged up displays.
I find it hard to believe that this all was invented in 1886, since electronics and plastic were non existent. So I would like to suggest to change the title from “modern dishwasher” to “functional dishwasher”.
Meanwhile, I’m doing the dishes in the shower, killing two birds with one stone. It feels like doing the dishes like its 1886 again. I do need to think of something for the knives and forks as I keep stepping onto them when reaching for the soap so I can relate to the people who say that doing the dishes is a pain.
I have a “modern” dishwasher that’s around 20 years old. So far, I’ve had to replace the racks and one other minor issue (steam vent flap thingy in the door). Technically, yes it was plastic that failed. Had I stayed on top of it and sealed the cracks in the coating as they showed up then rusted, I’d probably still have the original racks. (Staying on top of maintenance just isn’t me, unfortunately.)
So, I believe that it’s possible to have a long lasting appliance, but it’s equally possible that all of the luck allotted to me in life is being used up by that dishwasher.
It’s also possible that if I were at the mercy of “trained service personnel”, all of my appliances would long ago have been deemed “better off replacing”. So, there’s that issue.
The reason it hasn’t failed yet is it was built 20 years ago. Can confirm the latest and “greatest” are unrepairable money pits.
Yep. And when I called for a repairman for our only-ten-year-old dishwasher, I apparently got someone in a call center in India, and he wanted my credit-card number to charge for the repair. I said there’s no way I’m giving my CC number to someone in India, so I’ll go back to washing them my hand, and we’ve now been enjoying cleaner dishes.
…and I should have added: The dishwasher’s filters got clogged up so easily, and were such a pain to clean out, that we practically had to wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher anyway. With our original one, made in the mid-1960’s, I joked that you could throw everything in, bones, corncobs, and all, and it just took care of it all. That’s an exaggeration; but it did have something that amounts to a garbage disposer in it, able to handle reasonable chunks and put them down the drain. It still worked when it was 45 years old, but my wife said it was ugly and she wanted a new one. So we got another one, and it only lasted ten years, and did not get things very clean.
Dishwashers have been around for a century and still haven’t fixed basic design flaws. Door seals don’t seal. The level sensor that shuts off the water at a certain level eventually fails, flooding your kitchen if you have left the machine unattended. There should be redundant sensors working different mechanisms and energizing an error light or buzzer.
I am 43 years old and have never experienced any of these problems. And I run a dishwasher two, sometimes three times a day. In my experience they are some of the most reliable machines ever made. Are american dishwashers all that bad?
Please let’s not go back to the world described here. If she had to work so extra hard to bring this idea to life just imagine how many great ideas were not brought to life during that time period.
That’s a good observation. For every story of someone overcoming obstacles to find success and create something with a ton of work, one can wonder how much more hidden potential there is that — for reasons unrelated to how good the idea is — just doesn’t end up crossing the finish line.
We’ve also added plenty of modern obstacles to invention. Imagine trying to build and sell a new mechanical device from your home today without a legal team on hand to fend off all the trolls wielding patents for devices they never even tried to build.
The article mentions that part of the reason this didn’t have initial success is because women did the chore, but didn’t have the spending power. Maybe this is not as wide spread as I thought, but dish washing was also seen as an easy chore for kids to do. (Another group that had tasks assigned, but no spending power.) This is also where the (dark humor) joke came from re: parents saying they owned a ‘belt-driven dishwasher.’
“If I knew all I know today when I began to put the _____ on the market, I never would have had the courage to start.”
Apt quote from most of my projects. Simple concepts that get complicated when designed and created.
I think that philosophy applies to a lot of life in general. I might paraphrase it as “a little ignorance will take you a long way”.
All these inventions are effectively useless without a power source and that had to wait until a reliable electrical supply was available (which was at least the turn of the century). The dishwasher drawing has a picture of a small electric motor driving the pump through a belt, something that wouldn’t have been readily available in the 1880s. The original concept likely copied what would have been common factory practice at the time with power from a central engine being distributed to all the machines using a system of overhead shafts with belts driving each machine. This would have been practical for a large institution like a hotel or hospital because the power could also be used to drive clothes washers etc.
Victorian life was very labor intensive. If you could afford a house that needed appliances then you could afford staff to do the work. A lot of domestic labor was “womens’ work” simply because the men were fully occupied with other chores — people worked typically six and a half days a week for ten hours a day — and because there were a lot more children around (“family planning” was seriously discouraged, if not downright illegal, until after this era). Domestic appliances started showing up during the period prior to WW1 but really didn’t get going till the 1920s when the middle classes found that there just wasn’t the supply of affordable domestic labor any more.
The early machines were hand-cranked, no need for a motor. But what was a bit of a limiting factor was making enough hot water to load the machine (the early machines did 200+ dishes at once.)
Of course hot water was easy to make, but not everyone could make it readily in the quantity needed. For restaurants, hotels, etc (the early adopters) this wasn’t a problem.
Things have changed a lot since then but the main operating principle (hot soapy pressurized water cleaning dishes in a wire rack) remains unchanged.
…and then paper plates were invented.
I think of myself as painfully pragmatic and resistant to peer pressure. But even I judge the one adult friend I have who eats all his meals from paper plates.
Technically I could save time and money by not wearing clothes in the summer, but clothing is such a deep social cue that it would be silly to forego it. Like plates.
Not to mention how practical a metal knife is compared to a disposable plastic one.
I also look down on disastrous alcoholics and people who do meth. I find that eating all your meals off paper plates is somewhat correlated
LOL. But what I find to be the most work to wash by hand are the pans which may not fit in the dishwasher, or may have stuff stuck on them that the dishwasher won’t remove anyway, possibly followed by forks and by food-storage containers’ lids that got stuff stuck in the groove, and I use a brush to get these clean. The easiest are the plates and spoons.
Is “eating all your meals off paper plates” cause, or effect? I don’t have that paper plate habit, but wondering how vigorous I should be in avoiding it.
another misplaced, disassociated reply. it can’t be my fault every time I see it happen
As I heard the story, Mrs. Cochrane came up with the idea of a dish-washing machine because she was tired of her servants breaking her expensive dishes while washing them.