A Question Of Orientation
September 1997

Mechanization came very early to wash day, with the bright idea probably many, many centuries ago that it would be more efficient (and also kinder to the hands) to stir the clothes around the tub with a stick or paddle.

Today's high-tech, silicon-chip controlled washing machines are really only a development of that early idea: using more and more complex arrangements of levers, wheels, cranks, gears, belts and control systems to swish the washing around in the suds. The chemical evolution of the detergents used in them has kept pace with the mechanical evolution of the machines: from hand-chopped soap and the crude compositions of the 19th century to today's complex formulations, starting with the launch of Persil in 1907. The inauguration of Persil utilized the important development of the stain-removing properties of borates and other chemicals.

But two developments stand out in the evolution of the domestic washing machine. The first, electricity and the motors it could drive, took away a lot of the drudgery - but at the risk of regular water-slosh induced short circuits, not to mention the occasional washer-person electrocution.

The other, revolutionary in the 90-degree sense, took the traditional wash tub... and turned it on its side.

The first patent on a machine to 'wash, press out water and to press linen and wearing apparel' was taken out by a Mr. Rogerson of Lancashire in 1780 during England's industrial revolution. Joel Houghton and Hamilton E. Smith in the U.S. separately invented cylindrical machines with 'agitated water' and revolving paddles in 1858, and four years later London's International Exhibition displayed several domestic and American washing machines. By 1884 Thomas Bradford of Manchester, England was making a combined washing and wringing machine.

Electricity made its wash day debut in 1906, when Chicago's Alva J. Fisher filed a patent for an electrically-powered machine. This was manufactured and marketed by the Hurley Corporation in 1910 as the 'Thor': it had a wooden vessel, with a paddle arrangement driven by an unprotected electric motor mounted below the tub. Electrical machines, however, were slow to be adopted in quantity probably because until World War I households without servants rarely had an electricity supply, and those with electricity usually had servants as well, and therefore no need for mechanized washing machines.

Then, and for another third of a century, the basic pattern was still modeled on the traditional tub: you dumped dirty clothes in at the top, and they were washed by rotating or reciprocating paddles. But in 1937 the Bendix Aviation Company of Indiana started to produce a machine that rotated in the horizontal plane - you put the washing in through a watertight door at the front.

Why? There were several reasons. The front-loaders take up less space in that they can be installed under a work surface, or you can put things on top of them. Unloading them is easier: the clean wash can be pulled out straight into a basket to be dried, rather than the heavy, damp articles having to be lifted up and over the side. Their action is gentler on fabrics, with a tumble-squelch action, not a violent round-and-round, back-and-forth battering. Most of all - although this was perhaps less of an environmental imperative in the 30s - they used far less water, and hence less energy was needed either to pump it around, agitate it or to heat it, than in a vertical-axis machine.

Extraordinary, then, that this invention took off not in the continent of its birth, but in Europe. There are now almost 83 million washing machines in domestic use in the U.S. - and only 1.5 percent of them are front-loading; similarly in Japan. In Europe however the percentage reverses - in 98 percent of households the washing goes in at the front.

However a leading U.S. firm of market analysts, Colin A. Houston & Associates, sees the American wash day scene moving rapidly toward the European situation, which will at the same time favor the adoption of more sophisticated European-type detergents. These usually contain perborate, a borate-based oxygen bleach, which is less aggressive than the U.S.-favored hypochlorite bleach, and is capable of safely removing stains from white and colored garments. Borates in the wash water have other benefits too: water softening, buffering the alkalinity needed by the other wash ingredients, dissolving and leaching stains from fabrics, and stabilizing stain-digesting enzymes and some of the newer additions to wash formulations that derive from renewable sources, like complex sugars.

Hypochlorites do not provide any of these additional benefits and are indeed incompatible with most of the enzymes used in modern detergents.

In its paper given to the American Oil Chemists' Society 1997 Annual Meeting, Houston Associates sees the U.S. market penetration of horizontal-axis front loading machines expanding to a third or more in less than 15 years: equivalent to more than 30 million U.S. households making the top-to-side switch. By the year 2003, predicts Houston, all new machines sold in the U.S. will be front-loading, energy-efficient models: the driving forces being the U.S. Department of Energy's program radically to cut the energy consumption of domestic machinery, and concurrent financial incentives from local utility companies.

"An accepted way to achieve an energy factor of 3.07* or greater with current technology is to build clothes washers with horizontal-axis rotation tubs, similar to European-style washers," says Houston. "These machines use only about one-third the amount of water, which offers large energy savings since heating wash water is a major portion of energy consumed in the laundry process."

And, as Houston believes, the reduction of water volume will be a major challenge to detergent producers, as the quantity of clothes in the average family wash will remain the same.

The smaller water volume means that the concentration of the detergent is equally higher: an environment that favors the stain removing of perborate activity over hypochlorite, especially as hypochlorite in greater concentrations is known to damage cotton fabrics over time and also has an odor unpleasant to some. Many enzymes are stabilized too, rather than destroyed.

Although front-loading machines are presently something of a novelty in the U.S. (just over a million of the 83 million machines in use), 'High Efficiency' powder formulations have been made specially for them and are already being marketed in the U.S. With a potential switch to a borate-type wash, more are bound to follow.

* The energy factor is the cubic feet of washing capacity per kilowatt of electricity used. The D.o.E has set 3.07 as the target for 2003; the present standard is 1.18.

Wash Days

Antiquity:
A river, lake, pond, or tub and a pair of arms: later, a wooden paddle or 'dolly' used.

2,500 BC:
Sumerian tablet records washing of woolens with soap.

1780:
The first patent for a machine to 'wash, press out water and to press linen and wearing apparel' filed by a Mr. Rogerson of Lancashire, UK. Whether the machine was made is not recorded.

1858:
Cylindrical hand-operated machine with 'agitated water' developed by Joel Houghton, USA; a 'box-like tub containing revolving paddles operated by a hand crank' independently made by Hamilton E. Smith of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

1890:
Ratchet-slat machine invented and in production in Newton, Iowa.

1906:
'Thor', the first electric washing machine, patented by Alva J. Fisher of Chicago; marketed in 1910.

1907:
Hamilton Smith develops a 'reversible' type of machine to prevent tangling.

1909:
Production begins of Persil, the earliest washing powder to contain a perborate bleaching agent.

1911:
An electric machine 'which would revolutionize the industry' invented, made in Newton, Iowa marketed by Frederik L. Maytag.

1914 - 18:
'Modern' detergents developed in Germany.

1937:
Bendix of Indiana begins production of the first front-loading (horizontal axis) machine.

1968 - 70s:
Development of 'biological' washing powders. Application of electronics and microprocessors.