The technologies that created the 20th century's laborsaving household devices owe a huge debt to electrification, which brought light and power into the home. Then two major engineering innovations—resistance heating and small, efficient motors—led to electric stoves and irons, vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, and dishwashers. In the second half of the century advances in electronics yielded appliances that could be set on timers and even programmed, further reducing the domestic workload by allowing washing and cooking to go on without the presence of the human launderer or cook.
| 1901 |
Engine-powered vacuum cleaner British civil engineer H. Cecil Booth patents a vacuum cleaner powered by an engine and mounted on a horse-drawn cart. Teams of operators would reel the hoses into buildings to be cleaned. |
|
| 1903 |
Earl Richardson of Ontario, California, introduces the lightweight electric iron. After complaints from customers that it overheated in the center, Richardson makes an iron with more heat in the point, useful for pressing around buttonholes and ruffles. Soon his customers are clamoring for the "iron with the hot point"—and in 1905 Richardson’s trademark iron is born. |
|
| 1905 |
Electric filaments improved Engineer Albert Marsh patents the nickel and chromium alloy nichrome, used to make electric filaments that can heat up quickly without burning out. The advent of nichrome paves the way, 4 years later, for the first electric toaster. |
|
| 1907 |
First practical domestic vacuum cleaner James Spangler, a janitor at an Ohio department store who suffers from asthma, invents his "electric suction-sweeper," the first practical domestic vacuum cleaner. It employs an electric fan to generate suction, rotating brushes to loosen dirt, a pillowcase for a filter, and a broomstick for a handle. Unsuccessful with his heavy, clumsy invention, Spangler sells the rights the following year to a relative, William Hoover, whose redesign of the appliance coincides with the development of the small, high-speed universal motor, in which the same current (either AC or DC) passes through the appliance’s rotor and stator. This gives the vacuum cleaner more horsepower, higher airflow and suction, better engine cooling, and more portability than was possible with the larger, heavier induction motor. And the rest, as they say, is history. |
|
| 1909 |
First commercially successful electric toaster Frank Shailor of General Electric files a patent application for the D-12, the first commercially successful electric toaster. The D-12 has a single heating element and no exterior casing. It has no working parts, no controls, and no sensors; a slice of bread must be turned by hand to toast on both sides. |
|
| 1913 |
First refrigerator for home use Fred W. Wolf of Fort Wayne, Indiana, invents the first refrigerator for home use, a small unit mounted on top of an old-fashioned icebox and requiring external plumbing connections. Only in 1925 would a hermetically sealed standalone home refrigerator of the modern type, based on pre-1900 work by Marcel Audiffren of France and by self-trained machinist Christian Steenstrup of Schenectady, New York, be commercially introduced. This and other early models use toxic gases such as methyl chloride and sulfur dioxide as refrigerants. On units not hermetically sealed, leaks—and resulting explosions and poisonings—are not uncommon, but the gas danger ends in 1929 with the advent of Freon-operated compressor refrigerators for home kitchens. |
|
| 1913 |
First electric dishwasher on the market The Walker brothers of Philadelphia produce the first electric dishwasher to go on the market, with full-scale commercialization by Hotpoint and others in 1930. |
|
| 1915 |
Calrod developed Charles C. Abbot of General Electric develops an electrically insulating, heat conducting ceramic "Calrod" that is still used in many electrical household appliances as well as in industry. |
|
| 1919 |
First automatic pop-up toaster Charles Strite’s first automatic pop-up toaster uses a clockwork mechanism to time the toasting process, shut off the heating element when the bread is done, and release the slice with a pop-up spring. The invention finally reaches the marketplace in 1926 under the name Toastmaster. |
|
| 1927 |
First iron with an adjustable temperature control The Silex Company introduces the first iron with an adjustable temperature control. The thermostat, devised by Joseph Myers, is made of pure silver. |
|
| 1927 |
First garbage disposal John W. Hammes, a Racine, Wisconsin, architect, develops the first garbage disposal in his basement because he wants to make kitchen cleanup work easier for his wife. Nicknamed the "electric pig" when first introduced by the Emerson Electric Company, the appliance operates on the principle of centrifugal force to pulverize food waste against a stationary grind ring so it would easily flush down the drain. |
|
| 1930s (Mid) |
Washing machine to wash, rinse, and extract water from clothes John W. Chamberlain of Bendix Corporation invents a device that enables a washing machine to wash, rinse, and extract water from clothes in a single operation. This eliminates the need for cumbersome and often dangerous powered wringer rolls atop the machine. |
|
| 1935 |
First clothes dryer To spare his mother having to hang wet laundry outside in the brutal North Dakota winter, J. Ross Moore builds an oil-heated drum in a shed next to his house, thereby creating the first clothes dryer. Moore’s first patented dryers run on either gas or electricity, but he is forced to sell the design to the Hamilton Manufacturing Company the following year because of financial difficulties. |
|
| 1945 |
Magnetron discovered to melt candy, pop corn, and cook an egg Raytheon Corporation engineer Percy L. Spencer’s realization that the vacuum tube, or magnetron, he is testing can melt candy, pop corn, and cook an egg leads to the first microwave oven. Raytheon’s first model, in 1947, stands 5.5 feet tall, weighs more than 750 pounds, and sells for $5,000. It is quickly superseded by the equally gigantic but slightly less expensive Radarange; easily affordable countertop models are not marketed until 1967. |
|
| 1947 |
First top-loading automatic washer The Nineteen Hundred Corporation introduces the first top-loading automatic washer, which Sears markets under the Kenmore label. Billed as a "suds saver," the round appliance sells for $239.95. |
|
| 1952 |
First automatic coffeepot Russell Hobbs invents the CP1, the first automatic coffeepot as well as the first of what would become a successful line of appliances. The percolator regulates the strength of the coffee according to taste and has a green warning light and bimetallic strip that automatically cuts out when the coffee is perked. |
|
| 1962 |
Spray mist added to iron Sunbeam ushers in a new era in iron technology by adding "spray mist" to the steam and dry functions of its S-5A model. The S-5A is itself an upgrade of the popular S-4 steam or dry iron that debuted in 1954. |
|
| 1963 |
GE introduces the self-cleaning oven General Electric introduces the self-cleaning electric oven and in 1967 the first electronic oven control—beginning the revolution that would see microprocessors incorporated into household appliances of all sorts. |
|
| 1972 |
First percolator with an automatic drip process Sunbeam develops the Mr. Coffee, the first percolator with an automatic drip process as well as an automatic cut-off control that lessens the danger of over-brewing. Mr. Coffee quickly becomes the country’s leading coffeemaker. |
|
| 1978 |
First electronic sewing machine Singer introduces the Athena 2000, the world’s first electronic sewing machine. A wide variety of stitches, from basic straight to complicated decorative, are available at the touch of a button. The "brain" of the system is a chip that measures less than one-quarter of an inch and contains more than 8,000 transistors. |
|
| 1990s |
Environmentally friendly washers and dryers Environmentally friendly washers and dryers that save water and conserve energy are introduced. They include the horizontal-axis washer, which tumbles rather than agitates the clothes and uses a smaller amount of water, and a dryer with sensors, rather than a timer, that shuts the appliance off when the clothes are dry. |
|
| 1997 |
First prototype of a robotic vacuum cleaner Swedish appliance company Electrolux presents the first prototype of a robotic vacuum cleaner. The device, billed as "the world’s first true domestic robot," sends and receives high-frequency ultrasound to negotiate its way around a room, much as bats do. In the production model, launched in Sweden a few years later, eight microphones receive and measure the returning signals to give the vacuum an accurate picture of the room. It calculates the size of a room by following around the walls for 90 seconds to 15 minutes, after which it begins a zigzag cleaning pattern and turns itself off when finished. |
Seven decades later American women averaged 4 hours of housework a day, only a moderate decline since 1930, accompanying the movement of large numbers of women into the workforce. What changed—and had been changing since the beginning of the century—was the dramatic easing of drudgery by new household appliances. Effort couldn't be engineered out of existence by stoves, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and other appliances, but it was radically redefined.
Consider cooking. In practically all American households by the turn of the 20th century, the work was done on cast iron stoves that burned wood or coal. A few people mourned the passing of fireplace cooking—"The open fire was the true center of home-life," wrote one wistful observer of the changeover in the middle decades of the 19th century—but the advantages of a stove were overwhelming. It used substantially less fuel than a blaze in an open hearth, didn't require constant tending, didn't blacken the walls with soot, didn't spit out dangerous sparks and embers, and, if centrally positioned, would warm a kitchen in winter much more effectively than a fireplace. It was also versatile. Heat from the perforated fire chamber was distributed to cooking holes on the top surface and to several ovens; some of it might also be directed to a compartment that kept food warm or to an apparatus that heated water. But the stove could be exasperating and exhausting, too. The fire had to be started anew each morning and fed regular helpings of fuel—an average of 50 pounds of it over the course of a day. Controlling the heat with dampers and flues was a tricky business. Touching any part of the stove's surface might produce a burn. Ashes were usually emptied twice a day. And a waxy black polish had to be applied from time to time to prevent rusting. In all, an hour or more a day was spent simply tending the stove.
As a heat source for cooking, gas began to challenge coal and wood in the closing years of the 19th century. At that time piped gas made from coke or coal was widely available in cities for illumination, but incandescent lights were clearly the coming thing. To create an alternative demand for their product, many gas companies started to make and market gas stoves, along with water heaters and furnaces. A gas stove had some powerful selling points. It could be smaller than a coal- or wood-burning stove; most of its surface remained cool; and all the labor of toting fuel, starting and tending the fire, and removing the ashes was eliminated. The development of an oven thermostat in 1915 added to its appeal, as did the increasing use of natural gas, which was cheaper and less toxic than the earlier type. By 1930 gas ranges outnumbered coal or wood burners by almost two to one.
Electric stoves were still uncommon. Although they had originated around the turn of the century, fewer than one U.S. residence in 10 was wired for electricity at the time; moreover, such power was expensive, and the first electric stoves used it gluttonously. Another deficiency was the short life of their heating elements, but in 1905 an engineer named Albert Marsh solved that problem with a patented nickel-chrome alloy that could take the heat. In the next decade electric stoves acquired an oven thermostat, matching an important feature of their gas rivals. Meanwhile America was steadily being wired. By the mid-1920s, 60 percent of residences had electricity, and it was fast falling in price. As electric stoves became more competitive, they, like gas stoves, were given a squared-off shape and a white porcelain enamel surface that was easy to clean. They continued to gain ground, receiving a major boost with the introduction in 1963 of the self-cleaning oven, which uses very high temperatures—about 900°F—to burn food residue from oven walls. Today, many households split the difference in stove types, choosing gas for the range and electricity for the oven.
The electric stove is just one of a host of household appliances based on resistance heating—the production of heat energy as current passes through an electrically resistant material. Others that appeared in the early days of electrification (especially after Albert Marsh developed the nickel-chrome resistor) included toasters, hot plates, coffee percolators, and—most welcome of all—the electric iron. The idea of a self-heated iron wasn't new; versions that burned gas, alcohol, or even gasoline were available, but for obvious reasons they were regarded warily. The usual implement for the job was a flatiron, an arm-straining mass of metal that weighed up to 15 pounds; flatirons were used several at a time, heated one after the other on the top of a stove. An electric iron, by contrast, weighed only about 3 pounds, and the ironing didn't have to be done in the vicinity of a hot stove. In short order it displaced the flatiron and became the best selling of all electric appliances. Its popularity rose still further with the introduction of an iron with thermostatic heat control in 1927 and the appearance of household steam irons a decade later.
Another hit was the electric toaster. The first successful version, brought out by General Electric in 1909, had no working parts, no controls, no sensors, not even an exterior casing. It consisted of a cage-like contraption with a single heating element. A slice of bread had to be turned by hand to toast both sides, and close attention was required to prevent burning. Better models soon followed—some with sliding drawers, some with mechanical ways of turning the bread—but the real breakthrough was the automatic pop-up toaster, conceived by a master mechanic named Charles Strite in 1919. It incorporated a timer that shut off the heating element and released a popup spring when the single slice of toast was done. After much tinkering, Strite's invention reached the consumer market in 1926, and half a million were sold within a few years. Advertisements promised that it would deliver "perfect toast every time—without watching, without turning, without burning," but that wasn't necessarily the case. When more than one slice was desired, the timer didn't allow for heat retention by the toaster, producing distinctly darker results with the second piece. The manufacturer recommended allowing time between slices for cooling—not what people breakfasting in a hurry wanted to hear. Happily, toasters were soon endowed with temperature sensors that determined doneness automatically.
Electricity revolutionized appliances in another way, powering small motors that could perform work formerly done by muscles. The first such household device, appearing in 1891, was a rotary fan made by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company; its blades were driven by a motor developed chiefly by Nikola Tesla, a Serbian genius who pioneered the use of alternating current. The second was a vacuum cleaner, patented by a British civil engineer named H. Cecil Booth in 1901. He hit on his idea after observing railroad seats being cleaned by a device that blew compressed air at the fabric to force out dust. Sucking at the fabric would be better, he decided, and he designed a motor-driven reciprocating pump to do the job. Soon the power of the electric motor was applied to washing machines, sewing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, can openers, coffee grinders, egg beaters, hair dryers, knife sharpeners, and many other devices.
At the turn of the century, only about one American family in 15 employed servants, but having such a source of muscle power was devoutly craved by many and was seen as a key indicator of status. As housework was eased by electric motors and the number of servants dropped, such views changed, but some advertising copywriters insisted on describing appliances in social terms: "Electric servants can be depended on—to do the muscle part of the washing, ironing, cleaning and sewing," said a General Electric advertisement in 1917; "Don't go to the Employment Bureau. Go to your Lighting Company or leading Electric Shop to solve your servant problem."
The electric servant brigade was rapidly improved. In 1907 an American inventor named James Murray Spangler created a vacuum cleaner that basically consisted of an old-fashioned carpet sweeper to raise dust and a vertical shaft electric motor to power a fan and blow the dust into an external bag. Manufactured by the Hoover Company, which bought the patent in 1908, it was hugely successful, especially after Hoover in 1926 extended the fan motor's power to a rotating brush that "beats as it sweeps as it cleans." Meanwhile, the Electrolux company in Sweden grabbed a sizable share of the market with a very different design for a vacuum cleaner—a small rolling cylinder that had a long hose and a variety of nozzles to clean furniture and curtains as well as carpets.
No aspect of housework stood in greater need of motor power than washing clothes, a job so slow and grueling when performed manually that laundresses were by far the most sought-after domestic help. In the preelectric era, Mondays were traditionally devoted to doing the laundry. First, the clothes were rubbed against a washboard in soapy water to remove most of the dirt; next they were wrung out, perhaps by running them through a pair of hand-cranked rollers; they were then boiled briefly in a vat on top of the stove; then, after removal with a stick, they were soaped, rinsed, and wrung out again; finally they were hung on a line to dry—unless it was raining. The arrival of electricity prompted many efforts to mechanize parts of this ordeal. Some early electric washing machines worked by rocking a tub back and forth; others pounded the clothes in a tub with a plunger; still others rubbed them against a washboard. A big improvement came in 1922 when Howard Snyder of the Maytag Company designed a tub with an underwater agitator whose blade forced water through the clothes to get the dirt out.
The following decade saw the introduction of completely automatic washing machines that filled and emptied themselves. Then wringers were rendered unnecessary by perforated tubs that spun rapidly to drive the water out by centrifugal force. An automatic dryer arrived in 1949, and it was soon followed by models that were equipped with sensors that allowed various temperature settings for different fabrics, that measured the moisture in the clothes, and that signaled when the drying job was done.
Like the vacuum cleaner and washing machine, most modern appliances have a long lineage. One, however, seemed to appear out of the blue, serendipitously spawned by the development of radar during World War II. Much of that work focused on a top-secret British innovation called a cavity magnetron, an electronic device that could produce powerful, high-frequency radio waves—microwaves. In 1945 a radar scientist at Raytheon Corporation, Percy Spencer, felt his hand becoming warm as he stood in front of a magnetron, and he also noted that a candy bar in his pocket had softened. He put popcorn kernels close to the device and watched with satisfaction as they popped vigorously. Microwaves, it turned out, are absorbed by water, fats, and sugars, producing heat and rapidly cooking food from the inside. From Spencer's discovery came the microwave oven, first manufactured for commercial use in 1947 and ultimately a fixture in millions of kitchens, although the household versions were not produced until the mid-1960s.
The magic of electronics has now touched virtually every household appliance. Washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers offer a variety of cycles for different loads. Bread machines and coffeemakers complete their work at a time programmed in advance. Some microwave ovens hold scores of recipes in their electronic memory and can download more from the Internet. Robotic vacuum cleaners have made their debut. Where appliance technology will go from here is no more predictable than how habits of housework will be altered by it, but a century's worth of progress suggests that an eventful road lies ahead.
Roland W. Schmitt
President Emeritus, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Retired Senior Vice
President, General Electric Company
Before joining General Electric, I'd never really thought of household appliances as "high tech." The functions they perform—heating, cooling, cleaning, blowing, mixing—are as old as civilization itself. In my youth our kitchen had an icebox that was periodically supplied with 25-pound blocks of ice. We also had a wood stove in the kitchen, a fireplace in the living room, and space heaters scattered about elsewhere. My grandmother, who lived next door, had an electric-powered washing machine that sloshed clothes in a rotating drum. (She would always scrub the clothes on a washing board before putting them in the washer, not totally trusting this newfangled machine!). And she mixed the ingredients of the cakes she baked with a sturdy wooden spoon in a bowl.
Today, our kitchen has an electric range replete with electronic controls, a microwave oven similarly endowed, a toaster oven, several mixers, a dishwasher that's sometimes smarter than I am, a refrigerator-freezer, and a sturdy disposal. Our utility room has a brainy clothes washer, a smart dryer, a freezer, and a vacuum cleaner. Another refrigerator-freezer resides in the basement along with the equipment for central heating, dehumidifying, and air conditioning. But all of these fancy pieces of equipment still only heat, cool, clean, blow, and mix!
We take high tech for granted in household appliances and hardly notice it while seeing it prominently in our "electronic" appliances: televisions; audio equipment; mobile telephones; VCR, CD, and DVD recorders and players; digital cameras; pocket organizers; GPS devices; and, of course, in our Internet-connected computers. These items do things that our ancestors couldn't even dream of. So our household appliances live as sturdy, functional "wall flowers" among the active, glamorous, dancing electronic crowd.
The high tech of household appliances is a lot more than "under-the-hood" electronics. New and improved materials enable designs of convenience and efficiency. High performance plastics, especially, allow us to build style as well as functionality into our appliances. Household appliance engineers have just as rich an array of "high technologies" to feed their inventive minds as any other engineers. Innovation continues: cooking food to perfection up to eight times faster than with conventional ovens, using light. Washers and dryers that "talk" to each other, letting the dryer know what's coming, improving clothes care and saving time. The opportunity for innovation is as great as ever in this world of classical functions.
There is yet another dimension of high tech in household appliances: the way we make them. I've often thought it curious that Wall Street distinguishes between high-tech industries and manufacturing industries. Walk through any plant that makes household appliances and you're likely to see robots, lasers, intelligent conveyors, electronically controlled machine tools, computer-driven assembly stations, and smart test equipment. And, behind the scenes will be software that keeps track of everything, from incoming orders, in-process and final inventory, custom orders, shipments, and supply chain status. And when these products leave the factory into the hands of marketing and sales, they increasingly will be tracked and supervised by more and more sophisticated systems controlled by software with an array of acronyms that would make the U.S. Department of Defense envious: CRM, PLM, PDM, CIS, BPM, etc. (Customer Relationship Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Product Data Management, Customer Information System, Business Process Management. New categories and acronyms pop up faster than computer systems crash!)
The incorporation of high-tech advances into the realm of classic functions makes household appliances one of the great achievements of modern engineering. For the engineer there is something especially alluring about doing something that is functionally very, very old with ideas that are the newest of high tech.