Today, the birth of the dishwasher. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
We've spoken before of
John Fitch, the
star-crossed steamboat inventor who ran a steamboat
service between Philadelphia and Trenton, seventeen
years before Fulton's boat. Fitch's early marriage
had turned into a disaster, and Fitch had fled from
it. But he left an infant son, Shaler Fitch. Shaler
begat Irene Fitch, who married civil engineer John
Garis. Garis helped to build the city that was old
Chicago -- before the great
fire.
So their daughter Josephine, born in 1839, came
from a strong creative lineage. She married a
merchant and politician named William Cochran and
tried to live the uptown life of a wealthy
socialite in Shelby county, Illinois. She didn't
share her husband's populist thinking. When she
spelled her married name, Josephine Cochrane
fancied it up by adding an e on the end.
Writer J. M. Fenster tells how, when she was 44,
Josephine found that her fine china tableware was
chipping. It'd been in the family since the 17th
century, and the servants were being careless with
it. So she took to washing her own dishes and
chafed at the indignity of it. There had to be a
better way around the servants.
She sat down with a cup in her hand, thinking.
Water jets offered the best means for cleaning it.
The trick would be to aim jets on china held firmly
in some sort of rack. She and her husband, who was
ailing, had been scheduled to go off for a rest
cure, but now she had a cause. She stayed home to
work out a design.
Husband William was soon home, feeling even worse.
Two weeks later, he died, and Josephine was left
with a scant fifteen hundred dollars and much more
than that in debts. She'd also lost the influence
he would've provided in pushing her invention.
At that moment, everything changed. Josephine
Cochrane became the driven developer and champion
of a wholly new commercial venture. She started out
in a shed behind her house. Four years later, she
was advertising the Garis-Cochran Dish-Washing
Machine Company in periodicals. She later said that
the hardest part of the task was not turning from a
socialite into a mechanic, but turning from a
socialite into the promoter of a new product.
Cochrane's big break came when the 1893 Columbian
Exposition used her new machines in its vast
kitchens. The company kept growing, propelled by
her dogged energy, until she died of nervous
exhaustion at the age of 74. Late in life, she'd
said, "If I knew all I know today [I] never would
have had the courage to start." After she died, the
company changed hands and names until in 1940 it
became the Kitchen Aid part of the Whirlpool
Corporation.
Cochrane's success makes a nice counterpoint to her
great-grandfather. John Fitch churned the waters of
an earlier America with his steamboat. He failed on
the business side, where she at last succeeded. But
both were inspired amateurs. Both set the stage for
the kind of lives you and I live here in America
today.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
