The Invention of The Washing Machine

Laundering by hand involves beating and scrubbing dirty cloth. It is hard work even with old fashioned utensils like washboards and soap to help.

Clothes washing technology developed as a way to reduce the drudgery of this scrubbing and rubbing process by providing an open basin or sealed container with paddles or fingers to automatically agitate the clothing. The earliest machines were hand operated. As electricity was not commonly available until around 1930, some early machines were operated by a low-speed single cylinder petrol engine. By the mid 1850s steam driven commercial laundry machinery were on sale in the United States and Great Britain. Technological advances in machinery for commercial and hospital laundries proceeded faster than domestic washing machines for several decades, especially in the UK. In the US there was more emphasis on developing machines for washing at home, as well as machines for the commercial laundry services market which were widely used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Because water often had to be carried, heated on a fire for washing, then poured into the tub, the warm soapy water was precious and would be reused over and over, first to wash the least soiled clothing, then to wash progressively more dirty laundry. While the earliest machines were constructed from wood, later machines made of metal permitted a fire to burn below the washtub, to keep the water warm throughout the day's washing.

Removal of soap and water from the clothing after washing was originally a separate process. After rinsing, the soaking wet clothing would be formed into a roll and twisted by hand to extract water. To help reduce this labour, the wringer mangle was developed, which uses two rollers under spring tension to squeeze water out of clothing and household linen. Each item would be fed through the wringer separately. The first wringers were hand operated, but were eventually included as a powered attachment above the washing machine tub. The wringer would be swung over the wash tub so that extracted wash water would fall back into the tub to be reused for the next wash load.

The modern process of removing water by spinning did not come into use until electric motors were developed. Spinning requires a constant high-speed power source, and was originally done in a separate device known as an extractor. A load of washed clothing would be transferred from the wash tub to the extractor basket, and the water spun out. These early extractors were often dangerous to use since unevenly distributed loads would cause the machine to shake violently. Many efforts have been made to counteract the shaking of unstable loads, first by mounting the spinning basket on a free-floating shock-absorbing frame to absorb minor imbalances, and a bump switch to detect severe movement and stop the machine so that the load can be manually redistributed. Many modern machines are equipped with a sealed ring of liquid that works to counteract any imbalances.

What is now referred to as an automatic washer was at one time referred to as a washer/extractor, which combines the features of these two devices into a single machine, plus the ability to fill and drain water by itself. It is possible to take this a step further, to also merge the automatic washing machine and tumble dryer into a single device, but this is generally uncommon because the drying process tends to use much more energy than using two separate devices; a combined washer/dryer not only must dry the clothing, but also needs to dry out the wash chamber itself.

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