Washing machines took decades to catch on | Hacker News Reader

Washing machines took decades to catch on

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51 pointsherbertl73 comments

My grandmother had a washing machine with a manually fed electric wringer until she moved into assisted living. It would've likely been no newer than the immediate postwar era, as that's when she moved into the house she lived in. I doubt she would've owned it earlier (steel being needed for the war).

It was a bit of a production to do laundry with it. I can buy the argument that it was tough to sell machines that weren't fully automated. It looked fun as a kid, but I can't imagine it's fun for more than a load or two!

Edited to add: they lived north of the Mason-Dixon in an area with very few Black residents.

When I was young I did summer work for a woman who described how difficult it was getting to find a new washer with a wringer, which if you are not familiar is a pair of rubber rollers above the washtub to really squeeze out the water. This was a wealthy woman who just couldn’t change her workflow.

The wheeled suitcase for traveling also feels like such a no-brainer in retrospective, yet seemingly took longer than expected to catch on. One example:

> Sadow spent months attempting to sell his wheeled suitcase to various New York City department stores, but was met with resistance. Most department stores, according to him, refused to sell his invention due to a "macho feeling" that men would consider rolling their luggage "wimpy" and that women who travelled would have their husbands around to carry their suitcases for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase#Late_19th_century_to_...

I would like to read more why people avoided using wheeled luggage.

I looked in archive.org and found nothing on that specific topic, but learned that wheeled luggage existed in the 1940s, at https://archive.org/details/sim_quote_april-13-19-1947_13_16... from 1947:

"INVENTIONS: Wheeled suitcase can be rolled instead of carried. Two small wheels, attached on one end near the bottom when case is standing in ordinary position, touch the floor when suitcase is tilted by means of extensible handle on the top near the other end [Science Service]"

But I'm also thinking about the wheels available at the time - 1950s rollerskates used metal or wooden wheels, as I recall. Rubberized polymer wasn't available for another decade. Metal wheels on luggage seems a poor combination.

I also think porters were much more common, which meant many of those "macho" men could easily pay someone to carry their bags to the room, or airplane.

I mean, I was "there" for a lot of it in the modern-ish era, basically when air travel was like bus travel, buy ticket, get on plane.

FAR less distance and time between "car" and "plane." Closer parking, curbside service, but even if not, you're just physically closer to the gate. No TSA, etc.

But if you paid someone else to carry your luggage, then you're no longer "macho", no?

One aspect of "macho" is social dominance, in a culturally defined manner.

What is more macho, getting coffee yourself, or telling the (almost certainly female) secretary to do it for you? Getting coffee is a menial job.

What is more macho, changing your baby's diaper, or expecting your wife to do it? Changing a diaper is a woman's job.

What is more macho, polishing your own shoes, or paying the shoeshiner?

What is more macho, carrying your own luggage, or paying a porter?

These are menial jobs, often done respectively by poor children ("shoeshine boy") and Black people. (White train passengers once called each Pullman porter "George", following the slaveholder tradition of referring to a slave by the master's name!)

By using a porter you show social dominance, and imply you are rich enough that their payment is a trifle.

(On a tangent, "Qué es más macho, pineapple o knife?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d9YAz3A4pc by the inestimable Laurie Anderson.)

> Second, the semiautomatic washing machines themselves may have taken some of the drudgery out of clothes washing, but they did not really save time. Scott explains that the person washing “had to manually feed each item of clothing through the powered wringers between each part of the cycle.” You could not just close the door and turn the machine on and leave.

Second? Why not first? This could be the entire article. Why would I buy a machine that doesn't actually provide meaningful value? Everything else in this article is ragebait for HN.

It still seems like that would save a ton of unpleasant work, if not time.

I own a pasta machine where I have to hand-feed the pasta sheets, and it's so much easier and more fun to make pasta compared to rolling by hand, even though it doesn't save me any time.

Simply feeding an item into a wringer is easy and a bit meditative; wringing by hand is a lot of work and a lot of wear on your skin.

It saved your muscles from the very tiring work of agitating the contents of the washtub.

as someone that has washed his clothes in his bathtub in college.....i agree

I still hand-wash a lot of my stuff. I do not find such washing to be tiresome in any way.

There is a method to it that produces good results (definitely better than the machines) with little effort. To start with, I pre-soak the clothes in good washing powder. I also do not let clothes pile up. I wash a bit at a time.

Now do it for a family of six, four of who are children running through muddy streets. There's no robot vacuuming and wet mopping your home. A broom is all that keeps the dirt out.

Today, clothes don't even get dirty by those standards.

Oh, so that wasn't just me that did that.

On the show Pioneer House, the drudgery and physical toll of hand-washing clothes was the #1 complaint.

I stayed a couple of months at a place that listed laundry facilities that turned out to be a couple of deep sinks with a built in wash board. I didn't find it physically difficult but it was very boring work. Key lesson I learned, don't use more soap than necessary. Excessive soap just increases the time spent rinsing.

For which you might use a tool called a 'posser'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posser

They are weird devices, if you didn't know what they are for you (someone) might never work it out.

It says they didn't save time, not that they didn't save effort.

Clothes were more expensive (relatively to income), while manual labor offer was in excess, and washing machines were big, not particularly good at their job, and needed constant supervision. So, all in all, there's no hard questions here. Meanwhile, authors made an impressive work trying to spice up otherwise bland text with as much "social and racial dynamics" ritualistic mentions as possible.

I read Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. The first volume talks about conditions in rural Texas. He describes the nonstop, grueling labor for women supporting a farm family. One of the chores was washing clothes. In Caro's view, rural electrification changed womens' lives dramatically, and the electric washing machine was a nontrivial factor.

Now, that happened starting in the late 1930s, so there wouldn't have been any use for electric washing machines before that. And installing a wash machine in a city probably required being able to afford a detached house. Maybe the people who could afford that could also afford to have their wash done for them.

Maybe urban women had easier lives. That wouldn't shock me. My middle class grandparents in Europe had servants. When I lived in a house with no wash machine, while in grad school, I took my wash to the nearby laundromat, and picked it up the next day, folded, ironed, the works. It cost me just a few bucks.

Urban women definitely had easier lives. In a certain class, of course, you had a servant, but even below that professional laundresses existed. Only the poorest did all of their own laundry.

This extends to a whole lot of things. Rural life historically meant having to do much of what you need yourself.

And the servants and professional laundresses aren't to be considered as humans?

They certainly are, but the question is about the adoption of washing machines. It required a lot of things to come together: Electricity, plumbing, space, money, availability of comparative services, etc.

Great user name. ;)

Even then things were pretty dire. Talking to female relatives who grew up in Europe in the early 1950s, for girls your life path was to go to school until the age of 13 or 14 (no point in educating a girl past that age, why do they need an education) after which your future was either domestic servant/baby machine or, for a select few, school teacher or nurse. That was it. That was your life prospects. You often couldn't vote, couldn't drive, and needed to get your husband's permission for various things that we take for granted today. The only thing missing was a burqa.

Oh, I'm not saying it wasn't awful. I'm just saying that generally speaking, rural living involved more backbreaking labor than city living.

Yes! People should be reading those books in school to understand the transition of society in the 20th century. The Power Broker is of course Caro’s most famous book but the LBJ series are incredible and underrated.

Something that many people don’t appreciate is that plumbing wasn’t necessarily universal.

People with disposable income in NYC and other places would just go to a Chinese laundry. Folks without alot of money were in a variety of living arrangements that weren’t standardized in the same way things are today. It was very common into the 1970s for rural homes in upstate NY where I spent half my childhood to have outhouses and manual pumps.

In the era I grew up (early 70s), stay-at-home moms were not uncommon. I knew several families that either did not have washing machines, or had them but did not use them, because a lot of the women enjoyed the communal aspect of socializing at the town’s laundromat. I’m sure the rise of 2 income households also drove the adoption of in-home washing machines.

The first laundromat opened shortly afterward in 1934. For most, it was cheaper to haul your clothes there and back.

If electricity gets any more expensive in the UK (it will), I might have to start hand washing clothes!

From what I understand, the dryer is a bigger concern. In the UK and in Europe, you are already ahead of the curve by reducing use of the electric dryer.

A heat pump dryer is 4x as efficient as a resistive electric dryer which would reduce your operating costs by 75%.

The heat-pump crowd never miss an opportunity to spread fanciful figures. They just take the power draw, assume they dry as quick as the old dryers, and multiply time by power to get a nonsense figure. [0]

In the real world, to get my clothes dry, my heat pump dryer uses ~1.5 kWh (at at least 2 hours) vs ~2-4 kWh with an older dryer. Yes, I've used watt meter.

I'm sure /yours/ is magic tough :-)

They're good at reducing peak load on the grid, sure, which is useful.

[0] The manufacturers join in the with this nonsense by lying about the clothes being dry, and gating the "actually dry" setting behind some advanced menu. They expect you to do the last 10-15% of drying in your wardrobe or something.

Your washing machine is likely an order of magnitude more efficient than you. A cycle in my machine consumes something like 0.2kWh.

Last I checked humans don't consume electricity what's-o-ever.

Unfortunately food is not free.

Five finger discount! Or wear some shabby clothes and go to a food bank :)

technically fruit would be free in tropical countries all year round, though in somewhere like Europe you would need to preserve it (drying would be cheapest long term preservation)

Technically I could survive on rats and pigeons, but that strategy doesn’t scale as easily as washing machines and electricity. I would also need to figure out an energy efficient way of cooking them if I wanted to beat the washing machine on emissions.

It is much easier to pick up fruit with zero skills and you can eat it it raw compared to rats/pigeons + it scales with no issues, there is enough fruit for everyone.

I'm pretty sure cities have a lot more calories in form of rats than fruit.

You make a good point but I do have some excess fat stored that I need to shed lol

And 0.2 kWh? Always cold water and barely any spin? I'm firmly middle aged and can't get my head around people washing bed linen etc at cold temperatures and not worrying about dustmites etc.

But maybe it was a lie all along to get us to use more energy.

The European Energy label is based on the "Eco 40-60°C" cycle.

I don't know about 0.2kWh, but I see a machine at Argos claiming 0.33kWh for this cycle.

Any of these that are electric is where your money is going: heat, water heater, air con (if you have it), clothes dryer, oven. Switch them to Russian natural gas for the savings.

But the eco crowd keep telling me that electricity will get cheaper next year!

Hm, come to think of it, they've been saying that for quite a few years now.

Any year now, I'm sure

(I'm not pro-russia)

This is a Jeff Bezos lecture on electricity, please watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKNUylmanQ

The machines were supposed to save us time and make our lives easier which initially they did, but instead that time got filled with other things to do for someone else.

From observation there is definitly a difference in attitude regarding automation between the sexes on average. Men seem much more eager to automate chores than woman.

We should have put more research into clothes fabric technology so that clothes never get dirty, no washing machines needed.

There's polyester sports clothing which seems to be more stain resistant (because it doesn't really absorb moisture), but for some reason bacteria seem to stick to it even better, so it gets smelly.

Or paper clothes you wear them one or twice then throw them in recycle think of the energy savings.

My friend (a highly paid tech-bro) wouldn't pay cash money for a cordless Dyson vacuum when I could clearly see it being much more pleasant to use and saving much a lot of time and hassle. It was a matter of $200.

The issue is that people are really conservative spending money on things that are not the status quo. They don't do a first principles analysis using ROI - that's what nerds do.

Its also the same with agentic commerce or agentic anything. Its obvious that's where things are headed. But you will get the same greybeard response "but you don't need it, just use your brain" etc etc.

Not sure which Dyson you recommended, but I understand where he’s coming from. I’ve considered going back to corded because the Dyson:

1. Doesn’t perform as well

2. Battery dies over time (fixable, but annoying)

I’m not willing to give up the lack of cord, but it’s not a clear cut upgrade and end result is a lesser product for some benefits that I could technically do without.

Lots of parallels to vibe coding, actually. I’m worried things are headed in the agentic direction because wealth is consolidating at the top and the rest of us will be left with whatever AI slops out. We won’t be able to afford quality.

Interesting. It was one of the most obvious purchases for me (I have the high end one).

It makes things SO much easier hassle free that I think other people who use the wired ones are strange.

Our houses are ~50m2-100m2 and the battery lasts at least 4 rounds of the house.

That's been my anecdotal evidence with almost every one I spoke to who has a Dyson or equivalent cordless.

I'm not interested in a cordless vacuum.

It's another battery to charge, so I'd have less flexibility of where to store it.

It's less effective than a corded machine.

100m² is reached with the cord plugged into the most central socket.

A €200 machine has so far lasted 10 years and still works perfectly.

> They don't do a first principles analysis using ROI

Related: Every AI model has the same “controversial” take on humans | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50197313

edit: I bought a cordfull British Henry after my dyson died and am very happy with it!

That's only tangentially related. But AI is worse than humans in this aspect - it will always side against any novel take and is heavily biased towards status quo.

The Dyson is convenient yes. It's absolute shit for deep cleaning. The Dyson is good for daily light cleaning. But for a proper clean you still need a corded vacuum.

We have a Miele C3 and a Dyson V8 at home. The Miele cost twice as little as the Dyson and performs twice as much in actual cleaning power, filtration etc. Both machines have great durability and have worked flawlessly for years. If I had to choose only one of them I'd get the C3 over the Dyson without a hesitation.

I imagine there was also the ethical concern of putting all those people out of work...

No there wasn't. Literally nobody worries about the ethical concern of putting people out of work when they do the work more efficiently.

Given that that's all anyone talks about for at least several decades I don't think it's "nobody"

talk =/= worry

only people who are directly impacted by an aspect of automation worry about it, everyone else either doesn't care or is quite happy even as they talk about how bad it is.

(In the US.)

Ruh roh. AI bros and their hundreds of billions of dollars in loans don't have decades.

AI bad because.... people take time to realise its utility? That's new

I never said AI bad, bro.

Me neither, I was quoting someone else

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