An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 95 ppsx

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least until the 1890s, were the cheaper pan closet or long hopper closet, both of
which were inadequately flushed and so became very soiled. Over the years
foul smells and gases permeated the house from such noisome appliances.
Even more hazardous to health were the sewage disposal methods before
the 1860s and, for many years, the introduction of the WC made this
situation worse. Closets were tucked into the corners of rooms, even into
cupboards with almost no ventilation. The waste pipe emptied into a
cesspool as before, but the connecting pipe provided an easy entry into the
house for foul gases. Safety measures came only slowly. In 1792 a stink trap
was invented to keep out undesirable odours and, by the 1840s, cesspools
were made illegal and the WC had to be emptied into the sewers. There
were problems here also, as town sewerage systems were less than
satisfactory until later in the century.
A widely used alternative in the nineteenth century was the mechanical
earth closet invented in 1860 by the Revd Henry Moule, vicar of Fordington in
Dorset. His contrivance was a wooden box with seat, below which was a
bucket. Above, at the back, was a hopper full of dried earth or ashes. When a
handle was pulled, these would be released to cover the contents of the bucket.
Such closets were still on sale in 1910, price £1.10s. Portable versions were
used in bedrooms.
In the 1870s new designs of WCs were invented which gradually replaced the
100-year old Bramah type. Twyford produced his Washout Closet in which
water was always present in the pan, but a strong force of water was needed to
flush it. There was also a syphonic closet with two flushes on the market, but it
was the washdown system which finally triumphed and is still in use.
CLEANING IN THE HOME
Before twentieth-century technology brought labour-saving appliances into the
home, keeping the surfaces and utensils in a house clean and bright was extremely
hard work: it was monotonous, unremitting labour. The surfaces themselves—

plain and polished wood, tiles, bricks, stone and metal—were kept clean by
sweeping, dusting and scrubbing with soap and water. All the equipment to do this
work was made from natural, easily obtained materials. Brushes and brooms were
made from twigs, bristles or hair, mops of wool, cotton or linen, dusters of soft
cloth or feathers; wooden handles were attached as needed.
The cleaning of textiles and carpets, the polishes for furniture and metals,
the removal of stains, were achieved, somewhat imperfectly by today’s
standards, by the use of a wide variety of substances and chemicals which, it
had been found empirically, worked to a limited extent. For example, carpets
were sprinkled with tea leaves to lay the dust and lend fragrance to the room;
they were then swept and/or beaten. Furniture polishes were made from a
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number of different recipes but were mainly based upon linseed oil, vinegar,
turpentine or spirits of wine. Pastes were made from beeswax, curd soap and
turpentine. Black lead was used to polish the cast ironwork of fireplaces and
fire-irons. Emery paper was rubbed on the blackened fire bars. Household
silver was cleaned by the application of hartshorn powder, a substance which
was obtained from shavings of a hart’s antlers mixed into a thick paste with
spirits of wine or water. The paste was applied to the silver, allowed to dry,
then polished off with a brush and leather. The application of the paste was a
weekly ritual. The silver was also rubbed up daily with plate-rags. These soft
cotton rags had been impregnated by being boiled in a solution of new milk
and hartshorn powder: the forerunner of a silver-cloth.
Until the mid-nineteenth century almost all the cleaning equipment and
agents were made at home. Even soap was not generally purchased until
William Hesketh Lever’s attractive manufactured soap became available later
in the century. Home-made soap came from animal fats rendered down in the
kitchen then boiled for hours with home-produced lye which had been
obtained by pouring water through wood ashes contained in a lye dropper.

The resulting soap was very unattractive. It was greasy, the consistency of
putty and smelled unpleasant until flower perfumes had been added.
Mechanical cleaning devices
Knife-cleaners
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of a number of
rather primitive and usually unwieldy mechanical aids to cleaning. The knife-
cleaning machine was an important household asset. Before the manufacture of
stainless steel domestic knives in the 1920s, steel knives required careful
regular cleaning to keep them bright and unmarked. The centuries-old method
had been to polish them, after washing, on a knife board. This board was
covered with leather and the knife blades, with the addition of emery powder,
were stropped on this.
The Kent Knife Cleaner, patented 1870 and later, was typical of the rotary
knife cleaning machines introduced in the later nineteenth century (Figure
19.3). It consisted of a circular wooden drum mounted on a cast iron stand.
Inside the drum was an inner wheel fitted with leather leaves or alternating felt
pads and bristle attachments. The washed knives were inserted (up to twelve at
a time) into holes around the edge of the drum. Abrasive powder was poured
into the machine, a crank handle was turned and the knives were cleaned and
polished. Unfortunately the action of the machine was so drastic that the knife
blades became progressively thinner and shorter. By 1890 alternative designs
of machine appeared on the market. These were smaller, more convenient and
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less hard on the knives. Characteristic was the Uneck model which resembled
a miniature metal mangle with rubber rollers. It could be clamped to a table
and the knives were cleaned and polished by being passed through the rollers.
The sweeper
A machine to sweep floors was patented as early as the beginning of the
nineteenth century and by 1865 a number of carpet sweepers were available.

These were not very efficient as they consisted of cast-iron boxes running on
two rollers and containing roller brushes rotated by a belt pulley attached to
the back roller. This belt drive was not powerful enough to counteract the
frictional resistance of the brush as it moved over the carpet.
Melville R.Bissell, the owner of a china shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
was allergic to dust and suffered greatly when unpacking his china from its
straw and sawdust wrappings. This encouraged him to design the first really
satisfactory and effective carpet sweeper (patented 1876). Though less
streamlined than a modern one, it worked on the same principles. The brush
was rotated by means of the friction of four rubber-treaded carrying wheels
Figure 19.3: Kent knife cleaner, c. 1900.
Drawing by Doreen Yarwood.
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against the drum to which it was fitted. Frictional carpet resistance was
minimized by setting the brush spirally in tufts round the drum so that only a
few bristles at a time could be in contact with the carpet. By 1880 the Bissell
carpet sweeper was becoming a success.
In Britain the Ewbank sweeper (a similar design) was the best-known make.
In 1911 it retailed for 10s 6d. One of the early models of the Bissell sweeper
possessed ‘sidewhiskers’, that is, rotary brushes at the corners of the sweeper,
so placed to clean the edges of skirting boards and alongside furniture. This
feature has been revived in the modern Bissell sweeper.
The suction cleaner
During the second half of the nineteenth century there were many attempts to design
a machine to blow away or suck up dirt; several such, not very efficient, types of
apparatus were made, including a foot-operated model designed by Sir Hiram Maxim.
It was, however, the construction engineer Hubert Cecil Booth who produced the
first successful machine in 1901: this was a powered suction cleaner.
Booth’s interest in the matter had been aroused the previous year when he

was invited to attend a demonstration at St Pancras Station in London of a
new machine to clean railway carriages. This blew the dirt from one end of the
carriage to the other by means of compressed air. Booth did not believe this to
be a good way of cleaning and thought sucking to be better than blowing. In a
now well-known domestic experiment he placed a piece of damp fabric over
the arm of his easy chair and sucked it. The resulting black ring on the cloth
proved the point to his satisfaction.
He patented (and named) his vacuum suction cleaner in 1901 and formed
the Vacuum Cleaner Co. to manufacture the machines (now Goblin BVC
Ltd). But, although his machine worked very well and was in demand, it
suffered the handicap of all machines being designed at that time to relieve
drudgery in the home: lack of a small electric motor to power it. Large electric
motors had been available since the early 1880s but it was not until the
Yugoslav-born American inventor of the prototype AC motor, Nikola Tesla,
designed the first small one-sixth hp (0.125kW) motor to drive a Westinghouse
fan in 1889 that the means of using electricity to power household appliances
became a possibility (see Chapter 6). Even so it was the twentieth century
before motors were manufactured to service such appliances.
The first Booth cleaner was 1.25m (4ft) in length. Painted bright red and
costing £350, it was powered by a 5hp (3–75kW) piston engine and was
transported through the streets on a horse-drawn van. A team of white-coated
operators accompanied it to clean, for a fee, carpets, curtains and upholstery:
the process was too costly for all but a few. Among the select clientele was
Westminster Abbey where, in 1902, the Booth cleaner removed an enormous
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quantity of dirt from the previously un-vacuumed carpet laid down for the
coronation of Edward VII and Queen Alexandria.
Attempts were made on both sides of the Atlantic to produce a more
convenient and cheaper cleaner but the stark choice remained: between a large,

expensive, heavy, powered machine and a small, cheaper one without power
and needing two persons to operate it. Booth’s produced one of the former
type, the Trolley-Vac, powered by an electric motor and drawn round the
house on a trolley. This was still too expensive (35 guineas in 1906) and too
heavy to take upstairs. It was plugged into the electric light sockets. There
were several models of the second type, many of them American. Nearly all
worked by means of one person powering a bellows by hand or foot and
another operating the suction device on the end of a long handle. There was
also a one-personoperated design which resembled an overgrown bicycle pump
(Figure 19.4): it was very hard work and not very efficient.
Figure 19.4: Sir Hiram Maxim’s ‘Little Giant’ dust extractor, 1909. Dust is
trapped in the canister which contains sawdust as a filter. Suction obtained by
working long handle. Canister stands on top of a diaphragm pump. The
springloaded valve in the lid acts as a safety valve and measure of suction is
obtained. Price in 1909 5 guineas.
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The first person to succeed in marrying a small electric motor to a convenient
suction cleaner was J.Murray Spangler of Ohio who devised in 1907 a prototype
which worked. It consisted of a sweeper inside a tin canister and a dustbag
supported on a long handle. Spangler lacked the capital to put his invention on
the market, so he sold the rights to a firm of saddlers who developed it and
manufactured in 1908 the first one-person-operated, electrically-powered
domestic vacuum cleaner. The machine was an instant success and became so
well-known that the name of the firm became synonymous with the machine’s
function: if Spangler had not sold out to W.H.Hoover, people might well talk
about ‘spanglering’ the carpet instead of ‘hoovering’.
By the 1920s the characteristic Hoover triple action had been incorporated into
the design of the machine. This vibrated the carpet to loosen the dirt deep in the
pile; it was an agitating action achieved by combining the suction with a revolving

brush. In 1926 the action was improved by the addition of revolving bars which
helped the brush action by beating the carpet on a cushion of air. This gave rise to
the company’s well-known slogan, ‘It beats as it sweeps as it cleans’.
Hoover’s success was followed by many other designs developed by
different companies, notably the Magic of 1915, the British Vacuum Cleaner
Company’s version of 1921, and the Bustler of 1931. Electrolux then
pioneered the horizontal canister type in 1917, followed quickly by BVC under
the trade name of Goblin. Both upright and canister designs are still made.
There are also turbo-powered cleaners and, since 1980, many machines are
electronically controlled.
Carpet shampooers and floor polishers
The increased adoption after the Second World War of wall-to-wall carpeting
and of modern floor coverings led to the introduction of the upright
shampooer/polisher. First developed in 1958 under the presidency of Melville
R. Bissell (grandson of the inventor of the Grand Rapids carpet sweeper and
founder of the firm) this was quickly followed by the Hoover version. Both
designs are easy and efficient to use. They are fitted with interchangeable
heads, which enable the machine to shampoo, scrub or polish.
Dishwashers
As with so many labour-saving appliances in the nineteenth century, many of
the new ideas came from the USA: American ingenuity was spurred on by an
urgent need as there was not available, in this newer culture, the vast army of
servants which European homes were able to employ. Patents were issued for
dishwashers as early as the 1850s but before 1914, when the first dishwasher
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powered by an electric motor became available, the mechanism required
almost as much labour to operate it as washing up by the traditional means.
Water still had to be heated on the kitchen range then carried to the machine
in jugs or buckets. Homemade soap then had to be cut up and put in to the

water. To wash the dishes one turned a handle to operate paddles or a
propeller. Finally the dirty water had to be emptied out manually.
After the introduction of the first electrically powered machine several years
had still to pass before other processes were mechanized. Between 1920 and
1940 improvements were made. Machines were plumbed in and increasingly
were automated. In Britain the public was slow to enthuse about the dish-
washer. Even today, for the small family, it does not rate high on the list of
home essentials.
LAUNDERING
Washing
In the years before about 1775–80 the cleaning of fabrics, whether in
household or personal use, was a great problem. It was very hard work to heat
enough water and to carry it to fill and empty the washing tubs and cauldrons.
Soap was very expensive and was, therefore, mostly home-made. Also, many
fabrics were unsuited to washing. Velvets, brocades, silks (often fur-lined) were
shaken or beaten and marks imperfectly removed by various cleaning fluids,
often derived from grapes. The most common cleaning agent was fuller’s earth
which might be combined with lye.
The traditional washing method, in use from Roman times, was to agitate
the fabrics in hot water and soap in immense iron cauldrons; the water might
be heated in the kitchen and carried out in ewers or a fire was lit under the
cauldron. Particularly dirty fabrics were first buck-washed, that is, steeped in a
solution of lye. They were put into wooden tubs which had holes in the base;
lye water was poured over them and the material beaten or stamped upon with
bare feet to loosen the dirt, with more lye water periodically added. After
washing, the fabrics were rinsed in clean water and wrung out by hand. These
methods were fairly satisfactory, though wearing, for linens and cottons but
had a disastrous effect on woollens which quickly became felted.
Because of the hard work involved and the deleterious effect of the washing
methods upon the garments, washdays were infrequent, generally monthly or

less often in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but a little more often in the
eighteenth. Washdays lasted two or more days. Large country houses had special
laundry rooms containing water heating equipment and sinks for rinsing.
Better facilities and equipment to help in the washing process gradually
became available from the late eighteenth century onwards. The copper was
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introduced, the word deriving from the fact that early examples were made
from this metal; later ones were of cast iron and, by the mid-nineteenth
century, had become wash boilers, that is, a fire burned beneath them to heat
the water. When gas was piped into homes, gas-heated coppers replaced the
solid fuel versions. A tap was fitted to empty the vessel but, until the end of the
century, it was still filled manually. The galvanized, zinc-coated copper
appeared in the twentieth century and, in the 1930s, enamelled coppers
powered by electricity or gas were in use.
Other aids gradually introduced included the wooden dolly stick used to
pound the washing up and down in the wash-tub and so force the soapy water
through the clothes, the later posser with its conical metal head which had a
similar function and, the most characteristic nineteenth-century aid, the
wooden washboard; this was faced with zinc-covered corrugations against
which the clothes were rubbed to remove the dirt.
During the nineteenth century many and varied attempts were made to
design a washing machine. The first patent for a machine to ‘wash, press out
water and to press linen and wearing apparel’ was taken out as early as 1780
by a Mr Rogerson from Warrington, Lancashire, but it is not clear whether the
machine was ever made. Other ideas followed, but it was after 1850 before
serious attempts were made to manufacture a working machine.
Between 1850 and the early years of the twentieth century, a number of
different washing machines were manufactured but they were all powered by
human energy. The filling and emptying had to be done by hand and, in most

models, the water had to be heated first. Soap was chopped up manually and
added to the hot water.
The design of these nineteenth-century machines varied considerably,
but they were all based on a mechanical means of imitating the
contemporary traditional method of washing, using a dolly stick and
washboard. The mechanisms which were devised to achieve the agitation of
the water ranged from a machine which could be rocked by the foot like a
cradle to one which incorporated a dolly stick attached to the lid or base of
the tub; in others the washing was churned round by paddles or pegged
wooden rollers (Figure 19.5). Apart from the rocking model, the motive
power was provided by a lever operated by hand. Many designs had
corrugated interior walls and floors to simulate the washboard action. Most
were made of wood and shaped like a tub or box. Metal was used for
stands and fittings.
By the 1880s a few machines were being made which could heat the water
in the tub; gas jets were used for this, alternatively a coal-fired boiler. The first
electrically-powered machines were made in the USA soon after 1900. In early
models the existing machine was adapted to the addition of an electric motor
and this was often sited beneath the tub—a dangerous proceeding, as many
tubs leaked and machines were rarely earthed.
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It was the late 1920s before the American washing machine was redesigned
to take full advantage of electrical power and to meet the needs of a mass
market. An all-metal tub replaced the wooden one and this was then enclosed
in an enamelled cabinet. There were two chief methods of creating the washing
action. One agitated the water by a revolving disc fitted with fins mounted in
the base of the tub and operated by a driving mechanism beneath. The other
was a perforated cylinder which was driven to rotate, first in one direction,
then in the other.

In Britain washing machines sold in small numbers in the 1920s and 1930s;
only after 1945 were they manufactured and sold in quantity. The automatic
washing machine with programmed cycles of washing, rinsing and spin-drying
became a widespread success in the 1960s. Since then models have steadily
become more sophisticated, including a choice of programmes to suit different
Figure 19.5: Wooden washing machine, late 19th century. Handle is moved
backwards and forwards to agitate washing by means of a swinging wooden
gate. Rubbing boards fitted on each side. Large mangle with wooden rollers
turned by handle on wheel.
Drawing by Doreen Yarwood.
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fabrics and biological control as well as economy. Many models now have
microprocessor control.
Drying
For centuries the only method of drying laundry was to stretch out the
handwrung garments over bushes or frames to dry in the sun or upon airers
around the kitchen fire. In large houses of the later seventeenth century onwards
part of the laundry building was devoted to drying and finishing. The drying
compartment was heated by a solid fuel stove round which were immense
drying racks of wood and metal which could be run on wheels towards or away
from the heat. The racks could accommodate blankets, sheets and large curtains.
The clothes were aired on a creel, or wooden airer, suspended by pulleys from
the ceiling. Wooden tables which were used for starching, ironing, finishing and
crimping, extended round the walls of the rest of the room.
Many attempts were made from about 1780 onwards to design equipment
which would extract water from fabrics by mechanical means. The urgent need
for this stemmed from the textile and dyeing industries and most
nineteenthcentury ideas concentrated on utilizing centrifugal force to do this. An
early, successful machine was that built to the order of Angela Burdett Coutts in

1855 to be sent out to the Crimea to handle linen for hospital army casualties.
This iron and wood machine measured 1.8m (6ft) square and was 2.1m (7ft)
high, cost £150 and was shipped out in parts and reassembled on the spot. It
comprised a washing copper and a drying closet. The latter functioned on the
centrifugal principle; it could dry 1000 linen articles in less than 25 minutes.
With the introduction of the small electric motor, a domestic spin drier, on
centrifugal principles, was developed in the USA in the 1920s. Improved
models followed and, after 1945, washing machines were incorporating spin
driers. Tumble driers were also developed.
Pressing, mangling, ironing
During the last two millennia a number of ideas have been put into practice to
smooth household linens and personal garments after they have been washed.
In Europe, until the early sixteenth century, fabrics were not sufficiently fine to
benefit from the use of a heated iron, so the equipment was designed chiefly to
press and smooth out creases from the material by unheated means. The
wooden clothes press—called a prelum by the Romans—followed the same idea
as a press for wine or olive oil. It could be made as part of a stand or could
stand upon a table. Many designs incorporated drawers to hold the finished
linen. The press consisted of two heavy, smooth wooden boards between