According to the innovation historian Massimo Temporelli (by the way, today is his birthday: best wishes!), if there were a ranking of the inventions that have changed society the most, we shouldn’t be surprised to find the washing machine in first place. He writes Temporelli in a book dedicated to the topic: “What today seems to us a simple appliance, which we keep in the bathroom or in the washroom and whose technology we take for granted, was the undisputed protagonist of one of the most important social revolutions in history, women’s emancipation”.
The fact is that the very invention of the washing machine is quite a headache. On March 28, for example, in 1797, between the end of the French revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, and long before electric current had any practical application, the first patent for a “washing machine” was recognized. A washing machine. I always quote Temporelli: “Washing clothes has always been a strenuous and time-consuming activity. In the poorest families this task was carried out by the women of the house, while in the richest ones it was delegated to real professionals, the washerwomen … First Industrial Revolution, we witnessed the initial attempts to automate this activity, to the application of steam and, in parallel, to a first rudimentary development of the chemistry of detergents “.
The fact is that very little is known about the patent of 28 March 1797. It is known that it was granted to Nathaniel Briggs, who lived in New Hampshire and that in his life he could boast several patented inventions. And yet we know nothing of those patents, because they went lost following a fire in December 1836. Of all the inventions preceding that date, only the titles remain.
In short, to understand how the washing machine was really invented, all that remains is to consult the usual Temporelli: “According to some sources, the first attempts to build a compact machine capable of washing clothes date back to the end of the seventeenth century. It would have been the English nobleman John Hoskins to conceive in 1670 the first compact all-in-one system for doing laundry, a contraption consisting of a basket of woven rope that was rotated manually, passing under a jet of water. According to other historians, however, the origin of the idea of the washing machine can be traced back to an English patent of 1691 which spoke, very generically and without an accurate technical description, of a machine capable of carrying out a long list of tasks, including washing clothes. However these washing machines, like other proposals in those years, however far-sighted, did not no industrial or social fallout and they remained private and isolated facts. Much more important and structured were the initiatives born in the mid-eighteenth century, in particular that of the Englishman James Moulton with his Washing Engine, which was emphatically advertised on October 16, 1752 in The Salisbury Journal with these words: A useful machine, in various sizes, made in the most refined way, both for ease of use and for the safety of your finest linen. Judged far superior to any previous invention, being able to wash more laundry in 20 minutes than can be done manually in two hours. The same year another English newspaper, The Gentleman’s Magazine, reported extensive information and even a technical scheme of a compact washing machine (the Yorkshire Maiden) very similar to the one proposed by Moulton. Numerous historians refer to the Londoner Edward Beetham as the first true inventor of the washing machine. In 1787 his Washing Mill, which we could translate with the fascinating name of Mulino per il Lavaggio, was presented in detail in the Derby Mercury newspaper … “.
Finally, one last thing must be observed: “The difference between the latter and the machines built all over the world during the First Industrial Revolution lies in the size. In fact, current washing machines are designed to be compact and take up a limited space while the first machines were several meters long and cluttered entire rooms … Furthermore, our washing machines use electricity, while the first automatic washing machines, even though using gears, levers and other mechanisms, still based their operation on human muscle strength “.