The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
A podcast exploring the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S2E23 - Come Clean
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Somewhere in your house, a machine takes a full day of work off your hands every week, and you've never once thought about how that happened.
For most of history, laundry was a whole day, every week. Then we handed the day to a machine. Over a couple hundred years, the washing machine evolved and eventually gave people back a day every week.
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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.
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I was about 10 years old when i started doing my own laundry just you know all of it you know wash dry fold and put it away we had a washing machine i'm, fairly sure it was yellow you know our favorite colors harvest yellow top loader right you could i could probably get inside of it you know the classic top with the agitator stands up in the middle of.
Renee:The water all the
Marc:Way up yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. It's like, you know, the post in the middle, right? Yeah. And my mom had written out a note card, you know, like an actual index card with instructions on it. You know, you put the lights at this setting, colors on that one, you know, the dial, turn the dial this way, temperature, whatever. And she taped it, I don't remember, it was like, I want to say it was actually on the lid, but it couldn't have been on the lid. But it was somewhere near the washing machine. So I could see it and, you know, I followed the card, which, you know, brings me to the part that I think about the most in this, this thing. Because I don't remember like doing any individual, you know, laundry load, but I remember one. So one day I get asked to wash my dad's laundry, my dad's police officer. Right. So he had, you know, you know, like real uniform shirts and trousers, you know, and I did what the card said, right cycle, temperature, you know, the whole thing. They came out of the dryer two sizes too small because they're wool, and nobody told the card about the wool oh.
Renee:So it it's terrible i can imagine your dad's like
Marc:Um yeah and they're expensive you.
Renee:Know right so our laundry room was on the on the on the first floor and everything else was on the second floor but we had a we have a laundry chute but that went to the basement and No one went to the basement. At some point, there weren't even any stairs to the basement. Like, we took them out for some reason. So I don't know. There was a ladder there. The cliff. Yeah, right? It was really weird. Plus, there was a wall missing. So if anybody came, you're like, don't turn left. You'll fall through the wall, right? Like, you just didn't go near the basement. That was Dad's thing, and no one went down there. But I remember, like, you didn't throw anything down the chute because it went to nowhere. And so we would pile it in the hallway. And there were three kids. So everybody's piling in the hallway, piling in the hallway. And then it was someone's job to kick it down the stairs and into the laundry room. And I mean kick it. No one picked it up. We were, like, kicking it down, hit the landing, kicking around the corner, hit him down the more stairs. It was ridiculous, right? So, no, I didn't do laundry as a kid. As a matter of fact, I don't start doing laundry until, like, maybe I'm 17 when I had my own uniform from McDonald's. And it made the whole— they're greasy, like they're greasy, right? And so you have to soak them and then you have to, like, and it didn't matter if you put them in the dryer, honest to God, like they didn't change shape or anything. They were, they were industrial. So yeah. So, so that's when I went, but I did work in a group home where I had to teach everybody else how to do laundry, which is always, and then, and there we had cards. Some of them were picture cards, like, like you had to teach people how to be self-sufficient. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's, But what I remember most is just kicking a gigantic pile down the stairs so mom could do them. And then because we lived in Pittsburgh, it would be really cold some mornings going to school. And so you would put all your clothes in the dryer and just stand there freezing for a while because that house was big and it ran on radiators. And it was always cold in the house. And you'd wait for it to get out. You'd wait for it to get out. And then you'd pull your jeans on, but you couldn't button them because the buttons were hot. And so you're just, like, standing there like this. Yeah. Yeah. So I have fond memories, I guess, of laundry. But even today, even today, I do not do Sam's laundry. And Sam does not do mine. We share towels. But we do our own laundry. So, yeah. So even today, like, I still do my own. And Sam thinks it's crazy because I try to jam as much into that stupid washing machine as I can get. And he doesn't do it like that. He sorts crap. Like, why? Who cares? Just throw it all in, right? So, yeah. Yeah, we're still doing that. And we've been married, what? Like, we've been together 36 years. We're still doing it that way. Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, Beth does all of it for the house. I mean, you know, if I need to do it, I'll do my own and, you know, whatever. But she does... You know, because everything for her is very regimented. Right, right. That's how she is. And so, like, you know, on the weekend, because Tara's got uniforms and all that. So, and, you know, if you're not careful, you can't mess them up. So, but, yeah.
Renee:But you messed it up. You messed it up good.
Marc:Well, yeah, for the records, right? I've never accepted blame for the uniforms. I was given the task, right? I followed the instructions. The instructions were wrong about wool. And so, in my opinion, that's a documentation failure.
Renee:Oh, yeah. Okay.
Marc:But I never got asked to do anybody else's stuff after that. Like, never.
Renee:You know, okay, so that's how my brother used to get out of everything. Do it wrong and you never have to do it again, right? So, all right. Okay, we'll see how that goes. All right, go ahead.
Marc:Yeah, okay. So, there's this other thing I remember as we moved into our own place. Beth and I were moving into our own place. And it's the detergent. And when I was a kid, you opened the box and there was the scoop in it with a, you know, small, you know, shovel, basically. Right. And you dumped an enormous heap of powder into the machine. And that was that. And there was even instructions on my card, like, make sure there's some water in there before you dump it so that it dissolves. You don't just dump it. You know, whatever. Right. But at some point it changed and the doors moved to the front. Right. The machines got gentler. they got quieter and the detergent came with these tiny measuring lines and everything had he printed on it, and that was when i was you know when we first got married that was kind of what was coming out, and i had i just you know i don't remember what it meant but today we're going to find out about you know what what that shift was and what it meant where laundry came from how the machine actually gets you know clothes clean who built it who got hurt building get.
Renee:Because someone always does get hurt.
Marc:That's right. It wouldn't be one of our stories unless somebody gets hurt. Right. And what it did to ordinary life, which turns out to be, you know, actually quite a lot.
Renee:You know, I've been waiting for this one because a few weeks ago, we were on this podcast and you told everyone the refrigerator was the most important appliance in human history. More important than the washing machine, you said to my face, and I let it go. So, I'm happy. I'm happy to do it.
Marc:I did say that. I did say that. But I still think refrigeration is right. Yeah.
Renee:Of course you do.
Marc:Yeah. Okay. Like the fridge wins, you know, I'm happy to defend it again, but I grant you the washing machine actually has a better story.
Renee:It is the better story and the better machine. And by the end of this, I don't know, you might come around. Men in the 1800s weren't washing clothes, Marc. It's still, you know, it's no sewing machine. But the labor savings for women who were doing all the washing by hand, that's a big deal. I mean, we're not in the rivers hitting stuff on rocks anymore. Yay.
Marc:Yeah, well, you said that last part, you know, the last time too, so.
Renee:Yeah, and I stand by every word. Hey everyone, welcome to the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. So before we get to the machine, I want to do what we did with the fridge. I want to stand in the world before it, because I don't think people understand what laundry actually was. I mean, we say a chore, but this wasn't a chore. This was a whole day. It had a name. Monday was wash day. Across America, across Britain, across the world, Monday was the day you lost to laundry.
Marc:Yeah, and it took the whole day because every part of it was physical.
Renee:Yeah, so walk through with me. You start by hauling water. You don't get to turn on the tap. You haul the water, carrying it bucket by bucket from a well, a pump, or a stream into the house. And you need a lot of it because you're going to boil it. You can't just use it. You've got to boil it. So now you're building a fire under a big copper tub and then feeding it to get to the hot water. Then the clothes go in with the soap. And the soap at this point was usually lye, which is harsh enough to take the top layer off your hands.
Marc:Yummy lye.
Renee:Right?
Marc:Then you work the cloth by hand or against a washboard, scrubbing each piece. Then you lift it out. It's soaking wet. And, you know, a wet wool blanket or a basket of wet cotton sheets is, like, super heavy. Right? You wring it out by twisting it. You rinse it in clean water, which you also hold and which you also have to change. Sometimes you do it twice. Then you wring it again. Then you hang it. And you've been bending, lifting, scrubbing, and carrying since before dawn.
Renee:And then Tuesday was ironing. Because of course it was. The point of this was it's brutal all day, physically punishing work. And it was done overwhelmingly by women. If a family had any money at all, they paid out to a washerwoman, who did this for other people all day for almost nothing, a laundress, was one of the most common jobs a working woman could have, and it wrecked your hands and it wrecked your back.
Marc:Yeah, people had been doing this for thousands of years, and they were very good at it. And not, you know, not one of them could have told you why it worked. They beat the cloth on rocks down by the river. The Romans ran professional laundries where workers trod the cloth underfoot in vats. Everyone knew that, you know, if you agitated the fabric, you worked it, you beat it, you scrubbed it, it came clean. Nobody really knew why. They knew that it worked, so that's what they did.
Renee:I know you're going to make me wait for the why.
Marc:Yeah, I'm totally going to make you wait for the why, though. Yeah. All right. So the first move is the obvious one here. Take the motion a person does by hand and build a machine to do it. So we're going to talk about the crank, right? The earliest washing machines going back to the 1700s are wooden tubs with a hand crank and a set of paddles or a ridged board inside. You turn the crank, the paddles drag the cloth through the water, and the machine is doing the agitation instead of your arms. So in 1797, an American named Nathaniel Briggs gets one of the very first patents for a washing machine. We don't even have the drawings. It's too bad, you know? Right. Because they burned in a fire at the patent office decades later.
Renee:So the very first washing machine patent is, fittingly, lost to history.
Marc:But it's too bad. But yeah, lost in a fire. Then it iterates for decades and the designs get smarter while the basic, you know, deal stays exactly the same.
Renee:And the names are here if you want them. In 1851, a man named James King patents a machine with a rotating drum, a cylinder that the clothes actually go inside, which is the first one that really looks like the thing that's in your house right now, right? A few years later, in 1858, Hamilton Smith patents a rotary washing machine. Clever. But the power source is still you.
Marc:You.
Renee:You're still standing there turning a handle.
Marc:Yeah, which is the whole point, right? The shape of the machine is basically modern at this point. So what did we say? The 1700s, that's when you get the first sort of mechanical scenario. But 1850s, 1860s now, you've got kind of the basic shape, but the labor hasn't moved at all. It's still the same.
Renee:Yeah. So we've invented the machine and none of the relief, which we don't usually do, right? Usually we get the machine and we're like, oh, nope. we got a machine and
Marc:Yeah there's still a lot of work.
Renee:Yeah from your knuckles to your shoulders right like you're just it's just bigger muscles i guess right
Marc:Bigger muscles yeah yeah yeah that's exactly it for about 100 years the washing machine is a thing that makes you know the scrubbing slightly easier and changes really nothing about your your monday the wash day, Yeah. So before electricity shows up, let's talk about the part that got the water out because it's the dangerous part of the story here. So getting the water out of the cloth is half the battle. Twisting by hand is slow and it never gets enough out. And it's, you know, it's like your hands cramp up.
Renee:Right. And I can't imagine with lye, like your hands must have. Remember, remember that woman who came to do wiring?
Marc:Were you? Oh, yeah.
Renee:And her hand, like, and like, I was really impressed with her because she worked for the union and she, she was actually like the woman you called that would come in and do wiring in the building. And her, my God, she needed a manicure. Like her hands were just, just, and I, yeah, that's what this was like. I can't imagine. I can't imagine. Yeah.
Marc:So the answer to this mechanical ringing here is the mangle or the ringer. Wow. Yeah.
Renee:It sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
Marc:Yeah, foreshadowing here. Two rollers, and I'm sure people have seen pictures of these, two rollers pressed tight together with a crank. You feed the wet cloth in on one side, the rollers grip it and squeeze, and the water runs out as it comes through the other side.
Renee:And that sounds like a real improvement. That sounds like the first part of this whole process that I'd actually, I'd want that. I'd want that.
Marc:Right. Yeah. It was an improvement. It saved an enormous amount of effort. Right. More water came out for less effort. Right. But the rollers don't know the difference between a shirt and a hand.
Renee:Yeah, we got to the dark part, haven't we? All right. So if your fingers went in with the cloth, the rollers just kept pulling and they draw your hand and then your whole arm right through it. It happened often enough that the hospitals had a name for it. They called it ringer arm.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:And it happened to children a lot because children back then did labor and they helped with the wash and a roller turning on its own, you know, must be really fascinating to a small kid. Right. And so I could see how.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah. They would bring her arm. You know, if you think about it mechanically, it could be a one-person job, but it's probably more likely a two-person job. And so one person is feeding in and another person is cranking. So, you know, you think, oh, well, why don't you just stop cranking when your fingers get caught? It's like, no, it's another person that's cranking. And they just keep going and poor Renee's fingers get smashed. Yeah. Anyways. So later machines added a release bar you could slap to pop the rollers apart. And this isn't really ancient history. So just so everybody knows, ringer machines were still in millions of homes well into the 1950s and 60s. It's the same shape as the refrigerator latch, right? A thing built to make life easier with a hazard built right into it. And that job got fixed in the end by adding a safety part and eventually by the machine moving on from there.
Renee:Why does it every time we do one of these about an appliance, someone ends up dead or mangled?
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:I didn't know housework was so dangerous back in the day. So not only were we doing all the labor, but we were risking our lives doing it and the lives of our children. Of our children, Marc.
Marc:Well, you know, it's funny because, I don't know. Like, there aren't too many innovations that we think about today where we say, oh, you know what? There's an acceptable loss of life, you know, associated with that. Right? You know? Autonomous cars.
Renee:We're totally, no, we're totally all in on autonomous cars.
Marc:You're right. You're right. And I think that is one of, that was one of the examples that did come into my head. Like, we're, you know, we're, and I think that that's because things like cars in general do have, you know, they're one of the leading causes of death. So you know but washing machines like washing machines aren't a leading cause of death you know, but i guess you know if you're spending two days of your life every week you know maybe you know you know a couple of knuckles a couple of knuckles here and there you know yeah.
Renee:Yeah i i'd give a finger for that for sure like that's a pain yeah
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:Especially my left hand who cares like take a finger from the left hand who cares i'm good
Marc:It's the spare right.
Renee:Yeah right exactly
Marc:Let's talk about electricity so you know we'll move on from you know the the mangler here uh thank you yeah so now the electricity 1908 chicago, The Hurley Machine Company. An engineer named Alva Fisher designs a machine called the Thor. I love that. Yeah, I know. It's the first electric washing machine sold commercially. The idea is, you know, simple and it's huge, right? Take the enormous crank off and put an electric motor on the tub. The motor does the agitation now. The patent comes through in 1910, by which point several competitors have already copied it, which tells you how badly people really wanted this.
Renee:You know, of course people copied it. You were offering to take the single worst day of the week off of somebody's hands. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. Like that money would be falling from the sky. Of course, of course they did.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. And it's sold, right? So by the late 1920s, there were hundreds of thousands of electric washers in American homes. Maytag becomes a giant, you know, in this period. And for farms that had no electricity yet, Maytag even sold washers driven by a little petrol engine. with an XIA. When I saw this, when I figured this out in the research, I was like, oh, wow, that's funny. The exhaust pipe, you ran it out your window, right? So if people wanted this badly enough to put a small running engine in their laundry room.
Renee:Dear Lord. It would be my luck that it would fall out of the window and we'd all die of carbon monoxide poisoning. So again, I can be killed by my washing machine. The motor does the agitating, fine. But you're still standing right there the whole time. You fill it. You watch it. You stop it. You feed everything through the wringer by hand. You drain it. You refill it for the rinse. And you do the whole thing again. The machine runs on electricity now, sure. But you're standing over it from start to finish. The machine got stronger. But you, my friend, did not get to leave.
Marc:Yeah. Which is, you know, that's the line of the next machine finally crosses, right? So moving from, hey, you still got to stand there to, Yeah, maybe you don't have to spend all day doing it.
Renee:All right, so you promised me the why. 10,000 years of people beading cloth on rocks. Why does that work?
Marc:Okay.
Renee:Why does that work?
Marc:Okay, so the rock beaters never knew this part, right? But getting cloth cleaned is three jobs happening at the same time. And the beading is only the first part, okay? So start with the dirt. There are two kinds. There's particle dirt, you know, like dust and mud and grit, whatever. You know, it physically lodges down in the weed between the threads. And then there's greasy dirt, oils from your skin and your food that chemically, you know, grabs onto the fibers. It's a major simplification, but that's, you can generally put everything into sort of this debris or this, you know, kind of greasy idea.
Renee:Yeah, okay, fair enough.
Marc:You know, and what happens is they chem, the greasy kind of, you know, dirts and things, they chemically grab onto the fibers. And so here's the problem at the center of all laundry for all eternity. Water on its own can't lift grease because oil and water don't mix. You could rinse a greasy shirt and clean water all day and the grease just sits there.
Renee:So plain water and a strong arm only ever solved half the problem. And it sure as heck didn't clean my McDonald's uniform.
Marc:That's right. Half the problem at best. So you need three things to work together. The first is the mechanical action. So beating it against the rocks, right? When you flex and bend the cloth, you pump water through the weave. And that physically knocks the trapped particles loose and breaks the grip the dirt has on the fiber. So this is what the rocks were doing, right? The second part is the soap. And the soap is doing something, you know, different here. The soap molecule— Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, no, you go.
Renee:I was just going to say that the soap molecule is a sneaky little thing because it has two ends. One end loves water and the other end loves oil. So it surrounds a droplet of grease and from my mcdonald's uniform um perhaps it with the oil loving end and points the water loving end out into the water and now finally the water can carry the grease away it also lowers the surface tension on the water so the water actually soaks into the fiber instead of beating up and sitting on top of it so between the two of you the bending and the soap The dirt comes loose, and the grease lets go.
Marc:Right. And the third thing is the simplest of all. You keep the dirty water moving. So the loosened dirt and the water leaves with the water instead of settling back into the cloth. Mechanical action, chemistry, moving water. That's the whole game. And it's been the whole game ever since the river.
Renee:So when someone beat a shirt on a rock they were only ever doing the first one the mechanical part right the brute force with that with that
Marc:Rock yeah yeah brute force with a rock right, and the agitator and you know my my mom's yellow machine is that you know that post in the middle does the exact same thing you know it shoves the clothes back and forth through the water You watch it. You know, you ever watch it? It's sort of slightly hypnotic, right? It moves back and forth through the water so the fibers flex and the water drives through them. A front loader does it kind of a different way. It has paddles inside the drum that lift the clothes up as it turns and then drops them down into the water over and over. That's the tumbling you watch through the glass. You know, same job as the rock. You flex the cloth, drive the water through it.
Renee:So the agitator and the rock are the same machine.
Marc:Yeah. The agitator is the rock. You don't have, you know, you don't have to swing. And there's a nice way to tie all this together. So a chemist at Henkel, the German detergent company, a man named Herbert Sinner, laid it out in the late 50s. He said cleaning is four things working together. Mechanical action, temperature, chemistry, and time. People call it Sinner's Circle.
Renee:It's a perfect thing to name something that has to do with laundry. Sinner's circle.
Marc:Yeah, there you go.
Renee:They trade against each other. Turn one of them down and you have to turn another up to get the same result. Wash cooler, you need more time. Or more detergent. Use less detergent, scrub harder. It's one idea and it explains the entire history that we've been walking through.
Marc:Yeah. It also explains my dad's uniforms. Wool plus heat plus mechanical agitation, is the recipe for felting. The wool fibers, yeah, they have tiny scales on them. And when you agitate them hot and wet, the scales lock together and they never let go. The fabric shrinks and mats and it's permanent. So the machine did exactly what the cards, you know, my little index card told it to do. I turned every lever up, the heat, the agitation, and the one fiber that needed all of them turned down.
Renee:Oh, so it really was the documentation's fault.
Marc:Yeah, exactly. Definitely a documentation error. I have the chemist from 1959 on my side now. I'm entering that into the record.
Renee:We'll call your mom and tell her. And your dad.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Renee:All right, the big one. The moment you actually get to leave the room. You get to leave the room.
Marc:I know. Up until, like, this is a long time. Thousands upon thousands of years, you know. And a couple hundred years of machines, and then not till 1937. So a company called Bendix introduces the first automatic washing machine. It washes, it rinses, and it spins the water out, the whole cycle on its own, without a person standing over it and moving the clothes from step to step. You load it, you start it, and you walk away. The early ones shook so violently during the spin that you had to bolt them to the floor. But the idea was complete The ringer is gone The standing there is gone now too.
Renee:Can I just tell you, my husband always knows when I had the laundry the last because I fill it up so much that it does move when it looks like, and it'll be like, was this you? Because it's all like sideways and like you got to wrestle it back. Yeah, that's me. It was me. I did it. And I'm not afraid of or ashamed of it. Up till now, the machine got stronger, but you still had to stay in the room. This is the first time the machine sits for the whole cycle with no human intervention. None.
Marc:Yeah, the war slows the process down. So remember what time period we're talking about. you know, the 30s and going to the 40s, because factories were making other things in the early 40s. But after the war, you know, it kind of comes back into homes.
Renee:And GE, God bless them, brings out a top-loading automatic in the late 1940s, and the top-loader with the agitator becomes the American default for the next 50 years, and none of it works without the other half of the story, which is what you're actually putting into the water.
Marc:Yeah okay go for it.
Renee:Because for all of human history the thing you washed with was soap and soap That has a real problem, which is hard water. Most water has minerals in it, calcium, magnesium, and the soap reacts with those minerals, and it turns into a curd, like a gray scummy gunk. It's the ring around your bathtub, and it doesn't rinse out of fabric cleanly, so it builds up and leaves your clothes really dingy and gray. That's a real thing, right? That's a real thing.
Marc:Do you guys have hard water in the desert there?
Renee:Oh, my gosh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think most of California is hard water.
Renee:Right? Yeah. It was really treated, like hard water treated. Yeah.
Marc:Yeah. So that dingy and gray, right? You know, it's why your grandmother's whites going gray was a chemical event. It had nothing to do with how hard she might have scrubbed.
Renee:No, it was a chemistry problem all along. So the chemists go to work and they come up with a synthetic detergent, which you're built to clean without forming that curd. And the first big household one is Dreft from Procter & Gamble in 1933. We still have Dreft, you know. Dreft, and I don't buy it, but we still have it. Dreft was a breakthrough because it worked in hard water, but it was gentle and It couldn't handle heavy soil ground and close. And then in 1946 comes the one that changes everything. Want to guess? Want to guess? Tide. Tide. Tide in 1946. It changes the game.
Marc:With the giant scoop.
Renee:Yes, the giant scoop. Procter & Gamble called Tide the wash day miracle. And it was the first heavy-duty synthetic detergent that could really clean filthy laundry. It was so much better than anything else that sold out. Stores had to ration it, a box per customer. Within a few years, it was the best-selling detergent in the country. That box with that shovel-side, remember the shovel, the shovel-side scoop, that is the thing you grew up with.
Marc:Yeah. Like, when you said that, when you said Tide, like, I could smell.
Renee:Right.
Marc:I could smell it, you know, and I could, yeah, you got that taste in your mouth, you know. Not that I ever tasted the soap, but you could taste it. Yeah, the dust in it. Yeah.
Renee:I don't know. We probably all have white lung from it or something. Yeah, I know. Rad.
Marc:Right. So the machine got automatic and the soap got, you know, super strong. My brother still uses drift because, like, he's, you know, he has, his skin is so sensitive. He has to use the drift. Oh.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:So the machine gets automatic. The soap got powerful. You know, almost the same moment in time. You know, late 30s into the late 40s. Yeah, late 30s into the late 40s. So about a decade at a time. Together, that's the thing we actually mean when we say, you know, the washing machine arrived. But there's a bit of a turn here, the same kind of, you know, turn we hit with Freon. Oh, who could have seen this happening?
Renee:Right.
Marc:What made Titan the detergents after it so powerful came down to more than just the surfactant, right? Surfactant is what breaks the surface tension. It was the builders, the helper ingredients, and the best builder anyone had was a phosphate. Phosphate. Phosphate softens the water, ties up those minerals, and makes the whole thing more effective. So by the late 50s and 60s, detergents were loaded with phosphate. Huge amounts of it. And all that phosphate went, where'd it go? Down the drain, through the sewers, and out into the lakes and the rivers.
Renee:Oh, I know where this is going because phosphate is a fertilizer. We were fertilizing every lake downstream of the city. And in water, that feeds algae. They bloom. They explode right across the surface and they die and rot. And the rotting pulls the oxygen out of the water and everything else. The fish suffocate. Okay, and people. So if you ever see an algae bloom, I'm just gonna say this, like don't stick your head over that lake. There's no oxygen there. You will pass out, fall into the lake and drown. Like just don't. Yeah, it sucks it up. I have to tell my husband that. Like, if you see it now, don't do it. Oh, Lake Erie is famous for that one in the 1960s. And people talked about, oh, yeah, because Lake Erie had a giant bloom, didn't it? And it was like, yeah, they were like, this lake is dead. Nothing's ever going to live in it again. I remember that. I remember that. And people talked about the lake dying.
Marc:Yeah. Erie was always the one that people said it was like the nastiest of the Great Lakes. Yeah. So, yeah. So somebody proved it was the phosphates, though, with a large-scale experiment. So, you know, you're going to like this one, hopefully.
Renee:Oh, I love this one because it's the rare, clean experiment. Up in Canada, scientists at a place called the Experimental Lakes Area, of course it was called that, wanted to prove it was the phosphorus. So they took a whole lake, an entire lake shaped a bit like a figure eight, and they ran a curtain across the narrow middle to split it in two. Both halves got fertilizer. Only one got phosphorus, and they photographed it from the air. The phosphorus half is bright, sick, soup green, and the other half is clear and clean.
Marc:Kind of like the reflecting pool.
Renee:Yeah, right, like the reflecting pool. Don't get me started. You can't argue with it. You clearly can't argue it. The phosphorus made the algero for sure.
Marc:And it worked the way the ozone story worked. So if you remember, we talked about that, you know, in the refrigerator with Freon, CFCs and that. The science was really clear here. People fought it. And then we actually did something. Sears put out a phosphate-free detergent in 1970. You know, the states started banning phosphate and laundry detergent in the early 70s. The Great Lakes states first, obviously. And eventually the industry phased it out of laundry detergent across the country. Guess what? Lake Erie came back. It's another rare environmental good news story like the ozone layer.
Renee:Twice now, on two different appliances, the chemistry that solved the problem turned out to have a second bill attached. And both times, both times, we actually paid it down. Yeah, I'll take it. And I'll go back to say that the 70s were probably our greatest decade when it came to environmental awareness and then doing something about it. We were good at it in the 70s.
Marc:Superfund, ozone.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah. I mean.
Renee:That was the time.
Marc:Yeah. The crying Indian. I'm just saying, though.
Renee:Don't, don't. Don't. Nothing gets me madder than that ad. Don't do it.
Marc:All right. So that brings us to the HE thing. By the 2000s, front loaders come back hard because they use a fraction of the water that a top loader does. But less water creates a new problem. If you dump a heap of old-style sudsy powder into the front loader, there isn't enough water to dilute it or rinse it away. And the machine just churns it into a thick foam that cushions the clothes and stops them tumbling the way they should. So the foam actually stops the cleaning. So the answer is HE detergent, high efficiency, low sudsy and concentrated. And that's why the shovel turned into the little line, you know, the inside of a cup. You know, and if you use high-efficiency detergent and you're dumping more in, you're messing up your clothes. Don't do it.
Renee:Oh, there you go. Advice. Advice you could use. Which is center circle all over again. You took the water lever way down, so you had to change the chemistry lever to match, right?
Marc:Yeah. It's also why, you know, you're doing more, see, yeah, you do more harm if you add too much soap into your machine.
Renee:There you go. Hey, you remember when, because you had to fill the cup, so the detergent was like in this five-gallon jug that sat on his shelf. And you would just like push the button and fill the cup and then chuck it in. Yeah. Okay, now I get to make my case. And I'm going to make it with a man named Hans Rosling, who was a Swedish doctor and statistician. He gives a talk, and he talked about something he called the magic washing machine. And he talked about the day the washing machine came into his family when he was a boy. His mother had been heating the wash water with firewood and doing the laundry by hand. And the day the machine arrived, his mother said to him, Now, Hans, we have loaded the laundry and the machine will do the work. And now we can go back to the library.
Marc:Yeah, because the machine gave her the afternoon back.
Renee:Yes, it gave her the afternoon back. And she spent it taking her son to the library and reading to him. That's the entire show right there. The washing machine cleaned the clothes. It also handed back the afternoon, hours and hours, every single week, to half of the human race that was doing the work. And what you do at that time is the whole point. You read, you learn, you earn money, you go to school. Rosling's case is that the washing machine is one of the greatest machines of the Industrial Revolution because of what it freed people to do instead. Oh, maybe. Yeah.
Marc:Yeah. I mean, I'll give you this much, right? We argued the fridge changed what you could eat. The washing machine changed what you could do with your day. They're not, to me, they're not the same size of claim, but I do see your claim here.
Renee:Yeah. And there it is. Men in the 1800s weren't washing clothes. So when you tell me the most important appliance is the one that kept the meat cold, I hear you. Nobody wants salmonella. I get it. But the one that gave women back their Mondays for generations is the one that changed who got to do everything else. That's my case. I rest.
Marc:I rest. All right. But the footnote is that it isn't finished here. A large part of the world still washes clothes by hands right now. Rosling's whole point was that billions of people are still on the far side of the line, still spending their days at the water, waiting for the machine that the rest of us forgot that we had. Well, we don't really forget, but you know, you know what I mean.
Renee:I don't think about it. You know, I don't think I could be out in the river. Like, I don't think about it like that. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, which is the thing we always end up at, right? Like, the technology that disappears for us is still a daily, you know, miracle somewhere else, you know, that doesn't have access to that, which, you know.
Marc:Yeah. All right. Okay. I get my design section here because, you know, I love design. Yeah. Because the washing machine has the same kind of visual life the fridge does. The early electric ones look like equipment, you know, galvanized metal tub on legs with a ringer bolted on the top. They're kind of menacing, you know. Then after the war, they get the same treatment everything else in the kitchen got. They got enameled and rounded and friendly.
Renee:Oh my God. I know where this is going because you did this to me with the fridge. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Marc:Yeah. I'm going to the colors, right? The same area as the fridge, the late 50s through the 70s, Harvest Gold, Avocado Green, my favorite pink, and yellow, which is the one that my mom had as a kid. See, we had a yellow fridge and we had yellow. I'm pretty sure it was yellow from what I remember. I don't remember it as well as the fridge.
Renee:We always had white washing machines. We never had a color. They were always white.
Marc:Yeah. I mean, I kind of have the soft spot for the yellow. But yeah, the whole laundry was meant to be, coordinated, colorful set, right? Then in the 80s and 90s, you get a swing back to plain white and boxy. And, you know, the appliance was trying to pretend it to be invisible.
Renee:And then the front loader comes back and turns into a design object, a big round glass door. You can actually watch brush steel, a little, you know, pedestal underneath to raise it up so you don't have to even bend down. And the colors creep back in deep reds and blues. The thing that started as a menacing metal tub ends up being a showpiece you put out on a platform.
Marc:And not everybody had one, you know, at home at all, right? Which is a whole, you know, piece of this on its own, right? There's an entire social world, you know, in not owning the machine at all.
Renee:The laundromat. The first self-service laundry opens in Fort Worth, Texas in 1934. They called it a washerita.
Marc:Washateria.
Renee:Oh, washateria.
Marc:Like a cafeteria, yeah. Or a carniceria.
Renee:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you pay by the hour to use someone else's machine. And it becomes this whole shared space with maniacs. Because we used to do it in Santa Monica. And there were maniacs in that place. Just maniacs. A room full of strangers all washing their clothes go around with nothing to do but wait. Yeah. So the apartment on Westgate. You remember that apartment, right? Like the one we lived in for like 15 years or whatever, that had one, two, maybe two washing machines and one dryer. And there were like 30 of us.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:Yeah. Most of them were graduate students who, when they did laundry, they needed, it was just a ton all at once. So we would be like, we'll just, we'll go down to the laundromat. And then, and so we would wash clothes. So we would be taking like five clothes baskets with us, you know, and doing laundry down there. And it It was right down on Santa Monica Boulevard and every crazy person come down the road and that was the one place that was open all night. Right. And so they would hang out there and it was terrifying. I also remember doing it a lot at Penn State because our apartment at Penn State didn't have didn't have a washer dryer. And it was such a big apartment building. You'd think they would have had a laundry room, but they didn't. We had to go. We had to go use the yeah, the the the laundromat.
Marc:Yeah, I remember the coin machines and stuff at Occidental and, And, you know, each floor had, like, one or two machines or whatever. And they were always full. They were always being used. Right. People never were respecting, you know, your stuff. They'd take it out.
Renee:And throw it on top of the dryer or throw it on top of the, yeah. Yeah. Church. Yeah. Then, because it's us, let's talk about this because we have to talk about what they're what we're doing now right like like what's a washing machine today
Marc:Yeah yeah yeah yeah this is gonna be yeah we know where this is the smart washing machine hey wi-fi in the machine, you know an app on your phone so you can start you know a load from the sofa or from the office, like yeah okay yeah we'll get to that right the machine sends you a notification when the cycle is done. Some of them, you know, dose the detergent automatically out of a tank, you know, and will happily reorder more for you. We've been here before. It's a smart fridge conversation wearing, you know, different clothes this time.
Renee:I just can't work out what the app's for. The clothes are wet in a machine in my house. I can't fold them from the office. I can't even put them in. Like, unless you're going to take, unless there's some magic machine that takes it from the washer and puts it in the dryer, what the hell's the point, right? Starting to wash remotely just means the clean clothes sit in the drum and smell, you know, while I drive home. You move the chore, but you haven't removed. Okay. I just want to say this though. I am hard of hearing now. And I have a house that's three times bigger. And I have a laundry room that has a door that closes. So I don't hear it when it dings. I don't know when it's done.
Marc:I'm okay with alerts. I'm okay with alerts.
Renee:Yeah, maybe if I got a text, I'd be like, oh, oh, because I'm in the other room. I'll just go, yeah, yeah, I could, okay.
Marc:Okay, yeah, yeah, but, you know, it's the same worry I have about the fridge, though, right? It's just one more thing on the home network. It's software that needs security updates on a machine I expect to own for, you know, 15 years. Nobody's patching a 15-year-old washing machine.
Renee:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you have a forgotten little computers sitting on your network full of holes that also happened to be, you know, plumbed into the wall.
Renee:And the auto reordering detergent is the part that gets me because we both know how that story ends, right? It doesn't reorder the cheap detergent that works fine. It reorders the brand that paid to be the default. And then the smart fridge is ordered an expensive butter, except now it's plumbed in and it's making foam. And what a nightmare. You know what? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I don't need my washing machine to have opinions. I needed to do the three things Herbert Sinner told us about, you know, quietly in the other room for 15 years.
Renee:There you go. So that's the version of smart that I don't want. But there's another direction this is going. And some of it is the machine is getting better at the actual job, The washing. It's getting better at it.
Marc:Yeah, the sensing part is pretty cool. And I like that, right? So the newest machines from Samsung and LG, they weigh the load. Like my Bosch does that. It does that. It reads the fabric. Mine doesn't do that. That's too cool for me for now. Yeah, it actually reads how dirty it is, and then it sets the water, the detergent, and the time, you know, themselves. So some of them dose the detergent out of the tank so you never pour it in.
Renee:So it's doing the job your mom's note card did, except it knows what's actually in the drum. And it does, because mine does that. It'll spin a couple of times, and then it'll set everything, and then it just runs, right? And it knows when it's like really thin fabrics and it says, oh, well, this is delicate, so I'm going to do that. And so, yeah, it's actually pretty smart. Mine's pretty smart. I don't really think about it at all, actually.
Marc:Yeah. Ours is pretty new and it doesn't do all that. But, you know, we optimized for a different variable when we bought this one. We bought – because we have six people in the house. So we bought, you know, the one with the biggest drum.
Renee:There you go. Fair enough.
Marc:Yeah. But, you know, when you don't do all that extra work, right, it's center circle automated. The machine setting the four levers for you, temperature, you know, soap, whatever, you know, but load by load. And a machine that can spot wool and refuse, you know, to cook it is the machine that would have saved my dad's uniforms. But, you know, 40 years too late. But whatever.
Renee:That's the AI I'll take. The one that does the deciding for me. The screen that wants to tell me that detergent can stay home. That's a good use of AI. I'm just going to put it out there. Like, that's a good way to use it,
Marc:Right? Yeah, yeah. Again, the deciding is the useful part, right?
Renee:And the chemistry is moving in the same direction this whole episode has pointed. Cold. Ty just put out a thing called Evo. It's this little tile detergent. It's spun into fibers, built to work in cold water. No powder, no jug, no pod, right? It's just, yeah, and it works in cold water.
Marc:Yeah, soap, then powder, then liquid, then pods. Now a dry tile thing with no water and no plastic bottle. And the reason it can run cold is enzymes.
Renee:Dude, tell people about the enzymes.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. They're like little biological scissors. They're proteins that each, you know, cut up one specific kind of stain. One goes after proteins like blood, grass, and eggs. One goes after starches. One goes after grease. He used to do a lot of that work, but the enzymes do it now in cold water. So you turn the temperature lever all the way down and the chemistry lever, you know, picks up the slack.
Renee:Can I just tell you, though, I haven't had cold water since May because I live in the desert. So, like, this time of year, everything gets washed in hot water because it's just, that's how it comes out of my path.
Marc:Even if it's cold, it's hot.
Renee:Even if, yeah, if it's hot, it doesn't really matter. It makes running bath water super tricky. You got to figure that out and then let it sit for a while. Anyway, that's sinner again. That's sinner again.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. Those four levers, it's always sinner. Yeah.
Renee:There's the one I keep noticing. Front loaders, one for years. Less water, gentler on clothes. And now people are going back to top loaders. Why are they doing that?
Marc:Yeah. Mmm, yum. Mold.
Renee:Oh, yeah. Mine stinks if I don't run vinegar through it once in a while.
Marc:Yeah, the front loader seals it shut with a rubber gasket, and the gasket stays warm and wet and grows mold, and the machine starts to smell. So about one in six front loader owners report it. A top loader sits open. Gravity pulls the water down and it goes out and it doesn't build up in the same way. So the market starts to swing back.
Renee:So we spent 20 years teaching everybody the front loader was the smart, efficient choice. And now we're walking it back because it stinks. You know, we don't close our door, actually. Like we don't shut it all up again because it does. It gets weird. We let it all evaporate out.
Marc:Yeah. I mean, with the front loader, we do the same thing. Leave the thing open. And, you know, and Beth, you know, wipe it as well. She's got a little thing. She just wipes it. And then we also take the drawer out, you know, where you pour the stuff in. You take the drawer out because if you don't take that out, then stuff grows in there, too.
Renee:There you go. Yeah. And I do run it with vinegar. I just run vinegar through it. Yeah. When you put the detergent, you just let it run through there and it cleans it all out.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:So, you know, you think about it, this is kind of the same as the refrigerants going back to the old gases, right? Going back to this, you know, top loaders. Nothing in the story stays solved forever.
Renee:And now there are machines that barely use water at all. A company called Xeros built one that cleans with a couple of handfuls of tiny polymer beads, a cup of water, drop of detergents. The beads grab the dirt. It cuts the water by about 90 percent, which when you live in a desert, that might be good. It might be good.
Marc:It might be good. Yeah. It's the same move as the fridge, right? We spent the whole episode on whether you can make cold without cold. And this is whether you can wash without water. So right now it's mostly, you know, hotels and commercial laundries, not really residential, but the idea does work.
Renee:But the real what's next is the bill coming due, you know, again, again, because this is why we can't have nice things. So go ahead.
Marc:Yeah. What's coming next? The microplastics.
Renee:Oh, every time you wash with synthetic clothes, polyester, fleece, all the active wear, the fabric sheds thousands of tiny plastic fibers. They go out with the water, through the treatment plant, into the rivers. All drains lead to the ocean. So it goes to the ocean. A big, big share of the microplastic in the water comes from doing, yeah, you said it, laundry. Laundry. It's coming from your laundry.
Marc:Yeah. It's the phosphate story again. You know, almost beat for beat, right? The machine's making a problem nobody was measuring for decades until, oh, somebody looked. France passed a law that every new washing machine has to have a microfiber filter built in. In the U.S., Oregon is headed there by 2030, and there's a bill in Congress for it as well. Yeah, good luck with that.
Renee:Yeah, good luck with that. So, I'm not going to say anything. So, that's the actual frontier. The filter you can't see catching the plastic you didn't know your laundry was even making.
Marc:I think this is the one people need to watch out for and look at. The last 20 years, we're fighting about water and energy. The next one is about what the wash actually leaves behind.
Renee:Plain practical future is already in the store. The washer and dryer becoming a single machine. Have you ever used one of those? I've never used a washer dryer combo. I have a friend who had one, but I've never used one.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. The heat pump combo, one drum that washes and then dries, no vent, plugs, you know, plugs in a normal outlet. GE and LG both sell them now. They use a fraction of the water and the energy of a separate washer and dryer because the heat pump recycles its own heat instead of blowing out the hole in the wall. This is actually a big thing in the UK for a long time. So like when I first moved to the UK 10 years ago, my first apartment, it was right there. And the machine was in the kitchen.
Renee:You know, that's what's always weird. Like anytime I watch like British TV shows and the washing machine's in the kitchen, I'm like, why? Why? You guys don't have another water pipe anywhere in the house? It almost makes more sense if it's in a closet in the bathroom. Like that would make sense. Like why the kitchen? And then I think it's the plumbing. But then I think, no, there's a bathroom somewhere. Like, oh, I don't understand that.
Marc:I'm sure there's a reason for it. I'm sure there's some, you know, strange Britishism reason for putting it in the kitchen. I don't, I don't, yeah.
Renee:I don't know.
Marc:I don't get it.
Renee:I don't get it. So the load you forgot in the washer, I still forget. Like, I have to wash it again. Yeah. You don't move it. It dries itself. Okay. At that point. Yeah. Now the app is helpful. Yeah. The app is helpful.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it dries itself, which solves, you know, the one real problem we found, you know, on the show, right?
Renee:Yeah, that's the future I'm sold on. The one where wet clothes stop being, you know, my fault because I left them in there overnight twice. And now I have to wash them again. Yeah. Yeah, that's me.
Marc:And then Sam says, yeah, it's my turn. Get your clothes out.
Renee:Right? And then he puts all my clothes on top of the washer one more time. It's like getting a laundromat.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah, it's like college. Yeah. It's sort of the point of this whole thing, right? The best version of the machine is the one you forget about. It runs in the other room and you don't think about it. at all, ever.
Renee:And I keep coming back to Rosling's mother at the library. Clean clothes, yes. And every Monday that somebody got back, right, all those people, the ones who turned the crank by hand, the ones who fed the ringer and lost fingers to it, Alva Fisher and his motor, the chemist who got the curd out of the water, the Canadians who split a lake in half to prove a point, They handed an entire day back to half the human race every week. And for most of us, most of us never learned a single one of their names.
Marc:Yeah. And a 10-year-old somewhere is reading a note card taped to a wall, right? Learning to do this for himself or herself, right? With no idea of anything that's behind it.
Renee:All right. So what was your takeaway on this one personally? Like, what was your favorite part?
Marc:Yeah, it was my favorite part. I think, you know, it's the machine that bought time. And, you know, what do you do with that time is the part that counts. And, like, if you think about the course of human history, how much time was spent, and now how much time is, you know, saved. Yeah. That's crazy. My mom gave me the card, you know, on the job at 10, you know, it was a small thing, but it was a real thing. Right. And the machine did most of the work so a kid could learn to run, you know, run my own life. And that's to me, that's the whole arc, you know, on a kind of tiny scale, that little yellow box in our laundry room.
Renee:I guess I think about like, yes, it gave somebody a day back and yes, they could decide what they wanted to do with it. But in a lot of ways, it's like AI, right? Like this idea that, you know, I'm just going to have so much more time. I'm going to work one day a week less. And it turns out, no, you found another way to use that time. It's the fact that there's no dishwasher yet, right? Like that's what you're going to go spend your time doing, right? So, yeah, you know, I don't know. But I will say. it sure beats standing in a river smacking your clothes on a rock
Marc:Yeah that's for sure.
Renee:It is an amazing thing that we probably don't think about a lot anyway that's our episode thanks for spending time with us which we know is the most valuable thing you have we just talked about that because the whole show is about that today if you learn something tell a friend if you want to argue with Marc about whether the fridge or the washer wins he is as ever available on the interweb Yeah,
Marc:I haven't conceded this one here. I've just acknowledged a strong contender, but I haven't conceded.
Renee:Yeah, he hasn't conceded. Send us a topic. Send us your own watchday memory. We read all of it. Email us at nostalgicnerdpodcasts at gmail.com. You can find us everywhere you get your podcasts. Rate us, review us, leave us notes. It helps people find the show.
Marc:And if there's a piece of everyday technology you've always wondered about, that's the whole job, right? Tell us and we'll go and we'll find out.
Renee:So I'm Renee.
Marc:And I'm Marc.
Renee:And this has been the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. Now go and move your wash over from the dryer. Because if you don't, it's going to stink.
Marc:You have some in the laundry room right now, don't you?
Renee:Yeah. Yes, of course. And it probably smells. I'm going to have to wash it again. Don't tell Sam. Oh, my God. I don't want to hear it.
Marc:All right. Thanks, Renee.
Renee:Thanks, Marc.
