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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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

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