Blowing innovation bubbles
- John Bessant
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
The 150-year overnight success story behind the humble dishwasher
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past couple of days washing up. Old school. Rubber gloves halfway up my arm, scrubbing brush or dishcloth in hand, trying to fight my way through the accumulated debris of another family meal.
The reason I’m stood, 1950s style at the sink, is that our dishwasher has gone on strike. All I get are surly messages through the liquid crystal display suggest its dissatisfaction and the desire for a few days off plus a service.
My sink-side posture reminded me of a (possibly fictitious) story about Alastair Pilkington, inventor of the float glass process by which most of the world’s windows today are made. Legend has it that while he was daydreaming, like me, at the sink he noticed the way a dinner plate floated on the surface of the water and imagined the possibility of doing the same with molten glass. Floating it carefully on top of the water and setting like a layer of skin on its surface. He surmised that underneath the skin would be perfectly flat, perfectly smooth – exactly the characteristics needed to make glass for window panes.
Whilst I’m happy to acknowledge the possible value of a soapy sink as an aid to brainstorming, my experience is that doing the washing up by hand is a clear cut case of necessity screaming out loud for some serious procreation!
I’m not the first to want some assistance; creating a machine to take out the drudgery has been on the innovation agenda of a lot of people for a long time. The earliest aids were brushes, mops and other hand-wielded devices which made for easier separation of the dirt and waste from the surfaces.
But the first recorded invention of a machine to do the job was probably the patent filed by Joel Houghton in 1850 in the USA. A wooden machine with a hand-turned crank which sprayed water on to the dishes (and apparently everywhere else). The user would load dishes, heat up some water on the stove and then pour it into the machine. Having loaded it they would then turn the handle with one hand, causing the paddle wheel to hurl water in the general direction of the plates.
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