45 Fun Facts About Washing Machines

Which Swedish statistician called the washing machine the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution?

Hans Rosling made the case in his 2010 TED talk 'The magic washing machine': once a machine did the wash, a day of drudgery became time for reading.

In which country did a pastor and naturalist publish an early washing machine design in 1767?

Germany: Jacob Christian Schäffer, a pastor in Regensburg, published the design in 1767; he also spent years testing how to make paper from plants instead of rags.

Which old laundry tool is also played as a rhythm instrument in zydeco, skiffle and jug bands?

The washboard: players tap or scrape its corrugated metal with thimbles, and zydeco musicians wear a frameless version, the frottoir, hung from the shoulders.

What powered Maytag's Multi-Motor washer, sold to farm families in the 1910s?

A gasoline engine: most rural homes had no electricity then, and Maytag sold attachments that let the same machine grind meat as well.

The washing machine brand Beko, widely sold across Europe, was founded in which country?

Turkey: Beko began in Istanbul in the 1950s and takes its name from the first letters of its founders' surnames, Bejerano and Koç.

Which religious community produced the Improved Washing Machine registered in 1858?

The Shakers: mechanic Nicholas Bennett is credited with the wash mill at Mount Lebanon, New York, and the Canterbury, New Hampshire, community patented it in 1858 and sold it.

Which Norse god gave his name to an early electric washing machine built in Chicago?

Thor: from about 1907 Chicago's Hurley Machine Company put the thunder god's name on its electric washer, whose motor did the cranking that earlier machines left to the user.

Which tech founder said his family spent two weeks debating which washing machine to buy?

Steve Jobs told Wired in 1996 that the dinner-table debate ended with a Miele washer and dryer, and that they thrilled him more than any piece of high tech had in years.

In 1874, William Blackstone of Indiana built a hand-cranked washing machine as a gift for whom?

Blackstone built the machine as a birthday present for his wife, then began selling copies for $2.50 each, one of the first home washers made in America.

The word detergent comes from a Latin verb with which meaning?

To wipe away: Latin detergere joins de, 'off', and tergere, 'to wipe', and English has used the word since the early 1600s, long before washing powders existed.

Which company introduced the first domestic automatic washing machine in 1937?

Bendix Home Appliances was a separate South Bend firm that paid to use the name of Bendix, the aircraft and car-parts maker, which never built a washing machine itself.

Why did the first 1937 automatic washer have to be anchored to the floor?

It had no drum suspension, so in the spin the machine would 'walk' across the floor unless it was bolted down.

What did the Hoover Keymatic use to program different wash cycles?

Plastic cartridges with slots were pushed into the machine, where a mechanical reader felt the slots and ridges along the edge and ran the matching wash cycle.

Which cheap brand helped make twin tub machines briefly popular in the UK in the 1960s?

Rolls Razor, run by John Bloom, sold twin tubs direct through newspaper coupons at about half the shop price, until the company collapsed in 1964.

What is the smaller tub of a twin tub machine actually for?

Spinning clothes dry is the smaller tub's job: it is a drum that turns fast enough to fling the water out, while the larger tub does the washing.

Which design dominated the UK by the 1970s, when automatics finally took over?

Front-loading drum automatics took over British homes in the 1970s, fitting under a standard kitchen counter and replacing the twin tubs of the 1960s.

Which design has been dominant in the United States and Canada?

Vertical-axis with a lid: when American makers rushed out automatic washers in the late 1940s, most chose top-loaders, and the layout stuck.

What did Hoover trademark as the Pulsator on its Hoovermatic machines?

A side-mounted impeller: the Pulsator spun fast on the tub wall and whipped up a current that dragged the clothes through the water, in place of a central agitator.

What is typically hidden inside a residential front-loader to dampen vibration?

A 25 kg concrete block is bolted to the tub of many front-loaders to hold the machine steady in the spin; engineers have proposed a hollow plastic weight, filled with water after delivery, so machines ship lighter.

What was unusual about the washing machine James Dyson launched in 2000?

It had two counter-spinning drums: Dyson's ContraRotator turned them in opposite directions, claiming a faster, cleaner wash, but it was costly to build and was dropped in 2005.

Which unlikely liquid did ancient Roman laundries use as a cleaning agent for cloth?

Stale urine supplied ammonia, an alkali that dissolved the grease in cloth as the workers trampled it underfoot.

Most modern European washing machines connect only to which water supply?

Cold: most modern machines are cold-fill only and heat the water themselves with an electric element, so the second, hot-water hose of older models has gone.

How were early automatic washers usually hooked up to the water supply?

Slip-on connectors to sink taps were a temporary hook-up, pushed on for the wash; permanent plumbed-in connections became the norm later.

How does LG's troubleshooting feature send diagnostic data from a washer to a phone?

LG's Smart Diagnosis plays a burst of sound tones that the phone app, or a call-centre system, decodes into fault codes; Samsung's Smart Care has the user photograph the display instead.

What did Whirlpool's founder Louis Upton do for a living before making washers in 1911?

He sold insurance until a failed investment left him holding the patent for a hand-operated washer, which his uncle Emory, a machinist, fitted with an electric motor.

Which retailer made the Upton company its sole supplier of washing machines in the 1920s?

Sears, Roebuck & Co. had sold Upton's wringer washers by mail order since 1916, and the orders grew so fast that Upton merged with another washer maker in 1929 to keep up.

Under which store brand did Whirlpool's automatic spinner-type washer go on sale in 1947?

Kenmore came first: a year later the maker sold the same machine under its own new Whirlpool brand, and that brand later became the company's name as well.

Which brands did Whirlpool acquire in its 2006 Maytag deal?

Jenn-Air and Amana came with Maytag in 2006, along with Magic Chef and Admiral; by the end of 2007 Whirlpool had closed Maytag's Iowa headquarters and its washer plant there.

In which Iowa town did Frederick Maytag and his partners start their company in 1893?

Newton, Iowa: the firm began with threshing-machine feeders, and Maytag built his first washer in 1907 to keep the factory busy in the slow season.

What was the name of the idle repairman character in Maytag advertisements?

Ol' Lonely, first played by Jesse White and later by Gordon Jump of WKRP in Cincinnati, sat idle because Maytag machines supposedly never broke down.

What were Miele's first products, made before its earliest washing machine?

A cream separator and butter churn came first, and it shows: Miele's earliest washing machine looked much like the churn, an oak tub with a hand-cranked paddle inside.

Which family co-owns Miele alongside the Miele family?

Zinkann: Reinhard Zinkann founded the firm with Carl Miele in 1899, handling sales and finance while Miele ran the workshop, and as of 2025 the two families still own it.

In which city was Electrolux's predecessor Elektromekaniska founded in 1910?

Stockholm: Elektromekaniska began there in 1910, and in 1919 it joined forces with Lux, a maker of kerosene lamps, and took the name Elektrolux.

In which city did the first laundromat open on 18 April 1934?

Fort Worth, Texas: the 1934 business was called a 'washateria', and the word lingered in Texas speech as another name for a laundromat.

Where did the first UK launderette open in 1949?

Queensway, London, got Britain's first launderette on 9 May 1949; by the 1960s coin-operated launderettes were a common sight in British towns.

Tide, launched in 1946, was the world's first what?

Procter & Gamble launched Tide in 1946 as the world's first heavy-duty synthetic detergent, pairing synthetic surfactants with phosphate builders to outclean soap flakes in hard water.

Which German company introduced the self-activating cleaner Persil in 1907?

Henkel launched Persil in 1907 and built the name from two ingredients, perborate and silicate; the perborate bleached in the wash, so laundry no longer needed rubbing or separate bleaching.

What were the ancient Roman workers who cleaned cloth by trampling it in tubs called?

Fullones, or fullers, trod the cloth in tubs of water and alkaline cleaners, working the alkali in so that it dissolved the grease; a wall painting of them at work survives from a fullery in Pompeii.

What does a washing machine's pressure switch, or pressostat, sense?

The pressure switch reads air trapped in a hose running down to the tub: rising water compresses the air, and at the set water level in the tub the switch closes the fill valve.

Which manufacturer's Filter-Flo washers were a very popular top-loading design?

General Electric's Filter-Flo top-loaders, sold from the 1950s into the 1990s, recirculated wash water through a lint-filter pan atop the agitator; the motor reversed only to pump water out.

In which US state was Whirlpool founded in 1911 as the Upton Machine Company?

Michigan: the Uptons' shop in St. Joseph lost its first big customer within a few years and had to branch into other goods until a large retail contract arrived in 1916.

Why does no description survive of Nathaniel Briggs's 1797 'Clothes Washing' invention?

A fire destroyed the records in 1836, when the Patent Office burned with almost 10,000 patents inside; fewer than 3,000 were ever restored.

Margaret Colvin's Triumph Rotary Washer was shown at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in which city?

Philadelphia hosted the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, where Colvin showed her washer in the Women's Pavilion; her husband then left farming to manufacture it.

Which gas did Sanyo's 2006 'Air Wash' drum washer use to disinfect clothes without water?

Ozone: the Sanyo machine made it from the oxygen in the air and blew it through the drum to kill bacteria and odours, and it cleaned its rinse water the same way so the water could be reused.

Where did Maytag's 1922 Gyrafoam washer put its agitator?

On the tub floor: earlier washers set the agitator at the top, and moving it down let the Gyrafoam clean by forcing water through the clothes rather than rubbing them.