Wash Day, the Iceman and the Lamp Chimney Nobody Misses

In 1900, an American house ran on a weekly schedule, and the schedule ran on somebody's back. Monday was wash day. Tuesday was ironing. Every morning somebody trimmed the lamp wicks and scrubbed soot off the glass chimneys. Every day somebody emptied the drip pan under the icebox before it ran across the kitchen floor.

Three machines dismantled that week. None of them arrived as a single flash of genius. The people who usually get the credit aren't always the ones who earned it, and a couple of the breakthroughs came with a bill that showed up decades later. It's still one of the best stories this country ever wrote, and almost nobody tells it straight.

Monday

Start with the laundry, because it was the worst.

Wash day began before sunup. Water came from a well, a pump or a rain barrel, carried in buckets and heated in a boiler on a wood or coal stove. Whites went in to boil. Everything got scrubbed on a corrugated washboard with homemade lye soap that split your knuckles, rinsed in a second tub, wrung by hand or cranked through a wringer, and pinned to a line. If it rained, the whole wet load hung in the kitchen.

Then Tuesday brought the sad irons. Solid lumps of metal, heated on that same stove and swapped out as they cooled. In August.

The women who kept diaries on the frontier wrote about wash day constantly, and not fondly. Read them in their own words in The Pioneer Women Who Wrote It All Down. Nobody who did that work ever called it the good old days.

Electric washers started showing up around 1908, when the Hurley Machine Company of Chicago began selling a motorized drum machine called the Thor. Alva J. Fisher usually gets the credit as its designer. Historians argue about who was really first, since several men were building powered washers in those same years.

The early ones had a nasty habit. The motor drove an open wringer on top, and the wringer didn't care what it caught. Fingers, sleeves, a child's hand reaching up to see. Doctors still use the term "wringer injury" because of those machines.

The real turn came in 1937, when Bendix introduced an automatic washer that filled, washed, rinsed and spun by itself. You loaded it and walked away. For the first time in human history, laundry happened while you did something else.

The Swedish statistician Hans Rosling liked to tell the story of his grandmother and the family's first washing machine. She loaded it, then pulled up a chair and watched the entire cycle, start to finish, like it was the most remarkable show she'd ever seen. Rosling argued it was the greatest invention of the industrial age. Spend one Monday with a washboard and you'd sign that petition.

The card in the window

Before the refrigerator, there was the iceman, and before the iceman there was a Boston man everybody thought was out of his mind.

In 1806, Frederic Tudor shipped a cargo of New England pond ice to the island of Martinique. People laughed. He lost money on the trip and on plenty of trips after that. He kept at it anyway, and by the time he died he was known as the Ice King, shipping frozen lake water as far as India.

By the late 1800s, ice harvesting was a winter industry. Crews sawed blocks out of frozen lakes, packed them in sawdust in insulated ice houses and sold them all summer. In town, you put a card in your front window with numbers printed on each edge: 25, 50, 75, 100. Whichever number pointed up told the iceman how many pounds to haul in. The icebox kept milk cold for a day or two. In July, the meat went bad anyway.

Machines that made cold existed long before anyone had one at home. Jacob Perkins patented a vapor-compression machine in Britain in 1834. A Florida doctor named John Gorrie built an ice-making machine in Apalachicola to cool his yellow fever patients and won a U.S. patent in 1851. He couldn't find the money to manufacture it and died a few years later without seeing it succeed. History has plenty of men who were right too early.

Home refrigerators arrived around World War I under names like Kelvinator and Frigidaire. In 1927, General Electric released the Monitor Top, with its round compressor perched on top like a hat. People loved it. There was one serious problem. The gases inside early refrigerators were things like ammonia, methyl chloride and sulfur dioxide, and when a unit leaked in a closed kitchen, it could kill the family.

That danger caught the attention of two physicists you've heard of. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard designed a refrigerator with no moving parts and patented it in 1930. Szilard later said the idea came from reading about a Berlin family killed by a leaking refrigerator.

The fix that actually reached kitchens came from Thomas Midgley Jr., a chemist working for General Motors, which owned Frigidaire. His team developed Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon that was nontoxic and wouldn't burn. At a meeting of the American Chemical Society in 1930, Midgley made his point by inhaling a lungful and blowing out a candle. Refrigerators became safe for every home, and the iceman's route started shrinking.

Now the hard part. Decades later, scientists found that those same chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987 under President Reagan, phased them out. Midgley had also helped develop leaded gasoline. One man solved two real problems and created two bigger ones he never saw coming. An invention can fix what's in front of you and break something you can't see.

The lamp chimney

Kerosene light was cheap, and it was a chore. Wicks needed trimming. Chimneys blackened every night. Lamps got knocked over, and houses burned.

Thomas Edison didn't invent the electric light. Humphry Davy had made an arc glow decades earlier, and Joseph Swan in England had a working carbon-filament bulb around the same time Edison did. The two later combined their British businesses. What nobody had was a bulb that lasted, plus everything needed to power it.

At Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison's team tested carbonized material after carbonized material. In October 1879, a filament of carbonized cotton thread burned for roughly thirteen and a half hours. Later bamboo filaments lasted well over a thousand. His lab notebooks, now published by the Thomas A. Edison Papers project at Rutgers, show page after page of grinding trial and error. It's the same stubbornness that put two bicycle mechanics in the air, which you can read about in The Wright Brothers Didn't Trust the Experts and They Were Right.

Edison's real genius was the system. Generators, wiring, meters, fuses, sockets. On September 4, 1882, his Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan started delivering power to paying customers.

He didn't cover himself in glory after that. When George Westinghouse pushed alternating current, Edison's camp fought dirty. In 1888, an engineer named Harold Brown, quietly helped by Edison's lab, electrocuted animals in public to make AC look deadly. AC won anyway, because it traveled long distances far better. Within a few years Edison had lost control of his own company, which merged into General Electric.

The last mile

Here's the part most histories skip. By the 1930s, most city homes had electricity, and only around one farm in ten did. Utilities said stringing line out past the edge of town cost too much per customer. So farm families went on hauling water and hand-scrubbing laundry while their cousins in the city bought washers.

The Rural Electrification Administration, created in 1935, offered loans. The lines themselves got built largely by electric cooperatives, owned by the farmers who joined them. Neighbors signed each other up, cleared right-of-way and argued over routes at kitchen tables. Many of those co-ops still keep the lights on today. When the power finally came down the road, the washer and the refrigerator could follow.

What all of it bought was hours. Hours that used to go to boiling sheets and scraping soot went to supper at a table, homework under a steady light, a father home and a mother off her feet.

Next time you drop a load in and walk out of the room, remember that you're spending time your great-grandmother never got. Spend it on somebody.