Clumsy servants inspired dishwasher invention

May 16th, 2012

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You’d be forgiven for assuming that a disgruntled housewife must have invented the dishwasher in the 1950’s. And you’d be partly correct.

It was in fact a man who patented the idea even a hundred years earlier but yes, it was because of a woman that the dishwasher as we know it came to fruition. Not because she was tired of doing the dirty dishes, Josephine Cochran was tired of her servants chipping her fine china!

Let’s backtrack a bit. In 1850 Joel Houghton lodged a US patent for a for a wooden hand-powered device that sprayed water onto dishes. It didn’t really take off, until 1886 when one Josephine Cochran apparently proclaimed, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.”

First Cochran measured the dishes before building wire compartments specially designed to fit either plates, cups, or saucers. They were placed inside a wheel lying flat inside a copper boiler. A motor turned the wheel while hot soapy water sprayed up from the bottom of the boiler.

Cochran had engineering and ideas in her blood: she was the granddaughter of John Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat. Being wealthy meant that she didn’t have to concern herself with manual labour, but since her servants weren’t doing a good enough job, Cochran developed a more advanced, practical, yet still hand-powered dishwasher. Later, it was exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World Fair.

It appears that for those not suffering the servant-inspired problems of ‘the one percent’, a mechanical dishwasher was not so important.

Cochran received requests for the machine from fellow friends, as well hotels and large restaurants, but it wasn’t until she founded a company to manufacture the washer did things really take off.

Cochran started the Garis-Cochran Manufacturing Company, which became part of KitchenAid, which then became part of Whirlpool.