Today I learned that the washing machine is more than 250 years old.
After reading the lead article in this morning's
Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, I briefly thought it was exactly 250 years
old. This purported Feb. 23 anniversary is being celebrated all over the
German news media this week, but it can't be right, given that there's a
full copy online of the book in which German pastor and professor Jacob
Christian Schaeffer made his invention known, and it's dated Oct. 16, 1766.
Not only that, but Schaeffer also writes in the book's
foreword that he got the idea from a magazine article about an English washing
machine that some guy in Copenhagen had successfully reconstructed. What's
more, according to the German Wikipedia page on washing machines -- which is
much better on the device's early history than the English-language one -- a
man named John Tizack was granted a British patent in 1691 for an
"engine to be worked by one or more men" that could be: “applicable
to the raiseing of water, washing of cloathes, milling of sugar canes, pounding
of minerals, and pounding and bruising of all sorts of seeds, pounding
charcoale to make powder of, and pounding and making rags fit to make paper and
the like.”
Schaeffer had actually been looking for a better way
to make paper, and he thought the washing-machine design he read about in
the Berliner Magazin might serve that purpose. The device is a bit reminiscent
of a hand-crank ice-cream maker, minus the ice:
The illustration is from Schaeffer's 1766 book,
which has such a great title that it's worth attempting to translate in full:
"The Convenient and in All Household Aspects Highly Beneficial Washing
Machine: How This Was Established in Experiments, How the Machine Can
Be Used More Safely and Expediently, and How It Could Be Altered and
Improved." In it Schaeffer reports that he (or, more likely, a
servant) had rinsed and soaped some dirty clothes, deposited them in the
machine, "left them to their fate for 12 minutes" (while someone,
presumably that servant, turned the crank) and then discovered to all-around
amazement that all the dirt was gone.
Schaeffer's subsequent publications on the topic included
"Letters from a Woman to Her Friend in St** Concerning the Washing
Machine, in Which Not Only a Better Version of Said Machine but also a Triple
Washing Machine Is Discussed" and "Collected Good and Bad News
About the Regensburg Washing Machine, as a Second Supplement to
Its Uses and Applications."
Patents
As already noted, patents existed back then. They
were not, however, granted or enforced in any especially consistent
way -- certainly not across national borders. The sort of permissionless
tinkering that Schaeffer engaged in was typical of the day. He clearly wasn't
looking for exclusive rights, either. A handy-enough person could build
his or her own washing machine from the plans described in Schaeffer's
books. The man wanted to get the word out, not start a washing-machine
factory.
To some extent he succeeded; his design was still being
recommended in German publications nearly a century later. But there's
little indication that Schaeffer's or anyone else's washing machine took the
world by storm in the 1700s or 1800s. The grooved metal washboard, first
patented in the US in 1833, seems to have had a far greater impact on
household practice. It was cheap, it was durable, and it was a distinct improvement over
earlier methods.
It was only with the invention of the electric washing
machine by Alva Fisher in Chicago in 1907 that something dramatically better
than the washboard came along, and even then it took decades more for the
machines to become cheap and reliable enough to change how people cleaned their
clothes (and of course in much of the world, washboards still rule). In the
U.S., according to a 2013 paper by Benjamin Bridgman of the Bureau of
Economic Analysis, the big gains in household productivity enabled by the
washing machine, dishwasher and other such devices occurred between about 1948
and 1977.
Meanwhile, way back in 1766, Schaeffer was already
addressing the potential job-destroying impact of technological progress:
Would not, one might say, the public disclosure and
coming introduction of the washing machine injure the livelihoods, the
nourishment and the wages of lots of people, namely those who make a
living from washing and aren't able or willing to find another way to earn
their bread?
His response to this rhetorical question was that no,
the machine would allow washerwomen to take on more work and do it with
less wear and tear on their bodies. Indeed, the advent of mass clothing
production in the 1700s was already dramatically increasing the amount of
clothes to be washed.
Meanwhile, according to a futurist cited in the
Frankfurter Rundschau in 2015 (I stumbled across the article while looking for
today's anniversary piece online), young people are increasingly hiring
others to do their wash for them. Quoth Sven Gabor Janszky of the 2b AHEAD
ThinkTank in Leipzig:
Owning a washing machine, which our grandparents'
generation felt was a great freedom, is perceived by many in the younger
generation to be more of a time-consuming burden.
I don't entirely believe this, but I do think there's an
important lesson here about technological change, and how hard it is to predict
the adoption of new technologies and their impact on the world. I'll leave it
to you to figure out exactly what it is, though.
This column does
not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and
its owners.
Justin Fox is a
Bloomberg View columnist. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business
Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of
“The Myth of the Rational Market.”