From Bill Barlow's Budget in 1897. I wouldn't have guess dishwashers even existed in any form at the time.
A really surprising item on A Hundred Years Ago:
I had no idea whatsoever that electric dishwashers existed in 1926. It really surprises me.
It's another example, however, on how domestic machinery was entering the home at this point in time, the impact of which was about to revolutionize economics and how people simply lived.
We've discussed this in the context of the introduction of domestic machinery into the home in the 40s and 50s. We've also noted before that this process, which had started early in the 20th Century, was delayed by the Great Depression. This is a good example of that.
I took a look at this topic, which I've never even considered before, and it appears that one American socialite, Josephine Cochrane, was instrumental in the invention of machine dishwashers and was working on it in the late 19th Century. She went into commercial manufacturing of them in 1898.
Cochrane was a widow at the time, and she passed away in 1913 at age 74. In the 1920s a new type of design was introduced by William Howard Livens, a British professional soldier of an inventive mind who is known for his military inventions related to chemical warfare and flame throwers.
His front loading dishwasher introduced the modern form of the device. Introduced in 1924, he continued to work on it and by 1940 had introduced the drying element to the machine. A man of independent means, he served in both World Wars and died in 1964 at the age of 74.
On the same day that this advertisement appeared, December 12, 1941, this was the headline in the same paper:
If Romeo hadn't bought his dishwasher by that time, he was waiting at least four more years to get one.
In 1926 Cochrane's company, which still existed, was sold to the Hobart Manufacturing Company. Using the name KitchenAid, it introduced the first house specific dishwasher in 1949, reflecting a period during which the introduction of domestic machinery, much of it improved by the advances of technology during the Second World War, were rushing into households. Still, dishwashers were still regarded as a luxury item well into the 1970s, and as a kid not only did we not have one, none of the people whose houses I'd visit as a child had them either. They were regarded as really bougie
Indeed, my parents never had a dishwasher, and it would never have occured to me to actually buy one myself. However, the first house we lived in, that is rented, when we were first married had one, which was my introduction to them. When we bought our house (we've only ever had the one), it had one, and when it broke, we bought a new one. Everyone has one now.
Which gets back to the point I made in the Maytag entry noted below. It's not like washing dishes ever seemed like a huge chore to me, but we were a small family. I'm sure for the homes of my parents, which featured large families, they were, particularly when combined with all of the other domestic chores that had to be done in a less automated world.
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