The History of the Washing Machine

Doing laundry was never just a single action. You had to haul water, light a fire to heat it, soak the clothes in lye or soapy water, scrub or beat them, boil them, beat them again, rinse them multiple times, wring out the water by hand or with a wringer, hang them out, bring them in, and iron them. In this chain of tasks, hauling water, heating it, and wringing required raw muscle, while everything else consumed endless time.

In Korea, there was an entire extra step. Lye steeped from straw ash served as the primary detergent, and the first wash of water had a different purpose from the next. Clothes were soaked in diluted lye for a pre-wash, beaten clean, boiled, beaten once more, and laid out in the sun to bleach. Once dry, they were dampened with water, placed on a fulling stone (dadeumitdol), and beaten with wooden clubs to smooth wrinkles and add a crisp sheen. On top of that, most garments were completely unstitched before washing and resewn after the laundry was done. Doing the wash was a chore that literally encompassed needlework.

There is a study that measured just how much of this grueling chain machines managed to take away. Under a US rural electrification project running from 1945 to the following year, twelve farm homemakers wore pedometers to track their movements, and the detailed log of one woman was preserved. Even before electricity reached her home, she had already been using a gas-powered washer, yet doing a single load still took four hours, and ironing took four and a half hours. After she was equipped with an electric washer, dryer, iron, and a hot water system, washing took 41 minutes, and ironing took one hour and 45 minutes. The distance she walked while doing that exact same laundry shrank from 3,181 feet to 332 feet.

With a sample size of twelve and detailed numbers from just one person, we shouldn't read this like a national average. Still, what was reduced is unmistakable. The fact that her walking distance fell nearly ten times means that what was spared was not just time, but physical motion itself.

It is hard to name a single "first" when it comes to the washing machine. That is because the answer branches in five different directions, depending on what kind of "first" you are looking for.

The first axis is the earliest recorded patent. The first washing-related patent in U.S. records appeared in 1797. But its specification has not survived. Early records were destroyed when a fire swept through the Patent Office in the middle of the nineteenth century. So we have no way of knowing today what that machine actually was. The second axis is turning the tub using power other than human muscle. We can gather this from the fact that when the U.S. Census Bureau first counted this industry separately in 1909, it named them "steam laundries." The third is powering it with electricity, the fourth is having the machine do the wringing as well, and the fifth is not requiring a person to keep watch over it.

The third axis is where the trouble begins. The one most widely cited is a U.S. patent granted in 1910, but the title of that patent was not a washing machine—it was "a drive mechanism for washing machines." Out of twenty-eight claims, only one mentions a motor, and nowhere does it claim to have invented the electric washing machine. In the British patent granted to the same person around the same time, a motor does not appear anywhere in its seven claims. On top of that, several other washing machine patents illustrating electric motors had been filed earlier, and advertisements and magazine articles from companies selling electric washing machines survive from several years before that patent was issued.

A collector who read through these patents one by one reached this conclusion: the inventor of the electric washing machine cannot be determined. The reason he gave is fascinating. A patent is not a document proving an invention, but one claiming ownership; yet people have repeatedly crowned inventors based on nothing more than a single drawing.

Only the fifth axis has a clear point in time. A patent for a washing machine that ran water intake, detergent dispensing, washing, draining, rinsing, and high-speed spin extraction in clockwork sequence inside a single tub was filed in 1937 and granted in 1940. It was a machine where a person no longer had to transfer the clothes by hand.

If every household heats water and wrings out clothes separately, the same chore gets repeated a hundred times over. But gather a neighborhood's laundry into a single building equipped with steam boilers, large vats, and centrifugal extractors, and you can share the water, heat, and power. In the United States, this calculation turned into an industry.

Records from the Census Bureau's first tally in 1909 still survive. There were 3,845 power laundries with annual receipts of $5,000 or more, employing 105,216 wage earners and taking in $100,900,182 for work done. Hand laundries that operated strictly by hand were not included in these statistics. By 1914, there were 4,639 establishments and 126,665 workers. Laundry revenue per urban resident rose from $2.77 in 1909 to $3.60 in 1914, and to $5.02 in 1919. However, the report itself noted that this increase was heavily mixed with the inflation of that period.

These statistics reveal one more thing: who was doing the work. In 1919, 70.7% of wage earners in power laundries were women. Working hours were also documented: the proportion of people working 48 hours or less per week rose from 8.4% in 1909 to 46.4% in 1919, while those working 60 hours or more dropped from 34.4% to 4.3%.

A more detailed picture can be found in a survey by the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor. It was a report based on visits to 290 large laundries across 23 cities in 17 states from September 1927 to May of the following year. In those laundries, 81.2% of the workforce were women, and 26.7% of the female workers were Black. The regional differences were immense. In the South, more than four out of five female workers were Black, whereas on the Pacific Coast, it was 16 out of 5,583. The report also published separate median weekly earnings for White women and Black women.

When laundry was done at home, records of who did it and how much they worked rarely survived. Once it stepped outside and was given a price tag, it began to be counted year after year.

It is easy to get the sequence backward here: assuming commercial laundries went bust as soon as home electric washing machines arrived. But contemporary records tell a different story.

Up until around 1915, the power laundry business in the United States primarily dealt with men's shirts and collars. When home electric washing machines emerged, laundry operators created a new category to compete. It was a service that charged by weight, washing clothes and returning them damp. From there, options expanded to returning them semi-dried or fully ironed. A Department of Labor report noted that even in the first half of 1928, this 'family wash' business had grown by 10.9% over the same period of the previous year, with over 70% of reporting laundries seeing this work expand.

The numbers bear this out. In 1927, there were 5,962 power laundries, 203,215 wage earners, and $453,877,518 in revenue. Compared to 1909, revenue had grown by 349.8%, wage earners by 93.1%, and the number of establishments by 55.1%. Revenue grew much faster than headcount. That meant the same number of people were processing far more laundry. And the work itself expanded from a few shirts to an entire household's laundry bundle.

So what happened during this period was not 'the machine killed the industry.' It is more accurate to say that the machine and the industry began competing for the same work. On one side was a tub sitting at home; on the other was a fee based on weight. And throughout the 1920s, the commercial side grew alongside it.

The tables only turned afterward. Before getting to that story, we first need to look at an unresolved debate that continues to this day over 'what the washing machine actually changed.' The data behind that very debate spans this period of transition.

The widely circulated story goes like this: In the early part of the last century, American households spent 58 hours a week on housework, but by 1975 that figure was down to 18 hours, and home appliances made the difference. An economics paper published in 2005 popularized this line of reasoning, and an overview article in 2024 still cites the very same numbers.

There is a famous counterargument to this. In the 1970s, a researcher reanalyzed twelve time-diary surveys of housewives from the 1920s and 1930s affiliated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and discovered that the domestic labor hours of housewives in the mid-1960s were not all that different from those in the 1920s. A historian of technology offered an explanation: what the machines replaced was not the housewife’s labor, but the labor of multiple people. As a result, a housewife in 1950 ended up doing alone what would have required three or four people in 1850.

Yet this counterargument must also be measured again. The counterargument’s sample consisted of full-time housewives. It did not include employed women, men, children, or the elderly. In the late 2000s, an economist went back to the raw data from those earlier surveys, adjusted the sample for age, number of children, education, and race, and estimated figures for people outside the group of full-time housewives as well. Here were the results: domestic labor hours for prime-age women fell by about six hours from 1900 to 1965, and by about twelve hours from 1965 to 2005. They did decrease. But over the same period, men’s hours rose by about thirteen hours, so for the household as a whole, the total barely changed.

The same study verified one more thing. When tracing the origins of the widely repeated “from 58 hours to 18 hours” claim, one part turned out to have been mistakenly pulled from a different table in a doctoral dissertation, while another was merely a hypothetical scenario posed by an activist who had conducted no survey. It was not the starting point that was wrong—the 1900 baseline reconstructed by this researcher from raw data was also 58 hours a week. Where the accounts parted ways was how far the hours dropped after that.

The points where the answers diverge are largely consistent: who was in the sample, whether participants kept diaries or relied on recall, and what counted as housework. If you exclude time spent caring for non-household members, the historical figure drops by 0.67 hours per week and the recent figure drops by 1.8 hours. If you include time spent playing with children, the recent figure rises by 2.2 hours. When all three differ, the two numbers cannot be placed side by side.

A single table from the same study holds the core insight of this chapter. It places the time breakdowns of 1920s American rural and town housewives side by side with those of housewives in 1965. In all three groups, family size was similar at around four members.

The time spent on "clothing care"—which combined laundry, ironing, and sewing—dropped from 11.3 hours for rural housewives and 11.5 hours for town housewives to 6.9 hours in 1965. That was nearly in half. Yet total housework hours remained almost unchanged at 51.7 hours, 52.4 hours, and 51.8 hours. Other categories filled the void. Time spent shopping, traveling, and managing the household grew from 3.3 hours to 10.4 hours, and time spent caring for family members increased as well.

What is even more striking is a report suggesting that home laundering alone actually edged up slightly around the middle of the last century. While overall clothing care fell, laundry itself increased. A sharp drop in sewing and mending drove down overall clothing care, but laundry did not follow that downward trend. Still, because this specific point is one paper citing a particular page of another, it is best taken with a lower degree of certainty.

Why did laundry alone increase? There are two explanations. First, standards rose. In the first half of the last century, as bacteriology and sanitation knowledge spread, the conviction took root that a clean home was vital to family health; the hypothesis suggests that right as home appliances spread, the volume of domestic labor demanded went up. And when washing becomes easier, people wash the same clothes more often.

The second explanation forms the backbone of this chapter: what machines replaced might not have been household members' labor, but rather services bought with money. There is an estimate that weekly domestic servant hours per household in the United States fell from 8 hours in 1900 to 1 hour in 1950. Scholars also note that washing machines and dryers likely replaced market services such as commercial laundries just as often as they replaced homemakers' own labor. While both arguments remain within the realm of plausible theories, they point in the same direction.

Cost was not the only factor. Contemporary home economics writers warned readers to be suspicious of commercial laundries. The arguments were that your clothes would be mixed with other people's soiled garments, and that you couldn't know the personal hygiene of laundry workers. While these claims seem flimsy today, hygiene was establishing itself as a new standard of household life at the time.

There was also the problem of verification. Just by looking at the returned parcel, it was difficult to tell whether the laundry had been done properly or how it had been handled. An economic historian offered a reason for this: among household chores, some are easy to outsource while others are difficult, and the harder it is to verify quality, the less likely a chore is to be outsourced. That was especially true when people believed their family's health was at stake.

The calculation itself shifted as well. A service charged by weight costs money every single time you use it, but a machine purchased once only consumes a bit more electricity and water. As machines that didn't need constant human supervision appeared—such as the automatic washing machine filed in 1937—the burden of doing laundry at home dropped once again.

So what happened to that industry? It's tempting to string the numbers together here, but doing so would be wrong. US laundry industry statistics change their scope from year to year. Hand laundries were excluded from the very beginning, some years had minimum annual revenue thresholds while others did not, and linen supply and industrial launderers later split off into separate classifications. In the 1992 Census of Service Industries, establishments categorized under "family and commercial power laundries" numbered 1,853, with 27,641 paid employees. This category included neither industrial laundries nor linen supply or diaper services. So you cannot simply subtract that from the 203,215 workers in 1927.

While you cannot subtract one number from the other, you can place them side by side. On one side lies an era when large factories operated in every city; on the other, an era when a machine sits in every home.

A washing machine cannot really be used with electricity alone. It needs running water piped directly into the home. That is why, while the early adoption of washing machines was rapid, it took time for them to truly settle in. In many homes, electricity had arrived, but running water had not.

Why does this matter? Because it is difficult to separate in the data whether "the machine reduced the work" or "running water reduced the work". The two arrived almost at the same time. There is a study that tried to disentangle the two. By linking the 1940 and 1950 US censuses at the county level, the researcher examined which counties saw female labor force participation rise more over that decade depending on what kind of infrastructure had expanded.

The findings were telling. Outside the South, there was no clear relationship between the spread of refrigerators and the rise in women's labor force participation. On the other hand, indoor bathing facilities—a proxy for indoor plumbing—were much more strongly linked to the increase in women entering the workforce. The author concluded that more weight should be placed on changes in the structure of the home rather than on home appliances.

Yet this study observed correlation, not established causation. The author discusses this issue at length. After all, both the arrival of indoor plumbing and women going out to work could be the shared results of a common cause, such as urbanization.

Moreover, this entire question remains unsettled. One side argues that rapidly falling appliance prices drove women's entry into the labor market. Another side points out that re-examining time-use diaries shows the data does not align with that narrative, while yet another side reaches different estimates for the impact of appliance diffusion. What this chapter can do is not decide who is right, but simply lay out what each argument relies on.

We saw earlier what traditional laundry in Korea looked like. Soaking in lye, beating, boiling, sun-bleaching, and pounding with fulling sticks—not to mention ripping garments apart at the seams and sewing them back together. This labor began to change after the 1890s as Western soap was introduced, and synthetic detergents became widely used starting in the 1960s. Yet it took much longer for electric washing machines to make their way into individual homes.

The country's first domestically produced washing machine appeared in 1969. It was Goldstar's WP-181, a manual twin-tub model with separate washing and spin-dry tubs and a washing capacity of 1.8kg. By modern standards, it was a tiny machine. In 2013, it was designated as a National Registered Cultural Heritage.

Widespread adoption came much later. According to a study compiling data from Statistics Korea, the washing machine ownership rate among Korean households was 11% in 1979 and 14% in 1980. It rose to 39% in 1985, 56% in 1988, 76% in 1990, 86% in 1991, and reached 93% in 1994. That means it surged by more than tenfold in just over a decade.

Yet another curve rose alongside it during the very same period: the piped water supply rate. According to a summary by a specialized water industry publication, it was 17.1% in 1961, 54.6% in 1980, and 78.4% in 1990. Because the article did not cite its source, these figures should be taken with a grain of salt, but the trajectory itself is unmistakable. In Korea, the machine and running water arrived almost at the same time.

In the United States, the two spread at different speeds across different regions, leaving some room to tease apart their effects at the county level. In Korea, that room is far narrower. While the washing machine adoption rate climbed from 14% to 86%, piped water coverage also leapt from just over half to nearly 80%. Here, asking who deserves the credit is even harder.

Earlier, we noted that work without a price tag does not get counted. Today, however, statistics exist that try to put a price on it.

In calculations based on 2024 released in April 2026 by the National Data Agency, the monetary value of unpaid domestic work in Korea reached 582 trillion 394 billion won (582,394,000,000,000 won). That came to 11,254,000 won per person. Broken down by gender, it was 16,458,000 won for women and 6,050,000 won for men. Women's share was 2.7 times that of men, compared to 3.2 times five years earlier. This shows that the gap is narrowing, but at the same time, it remains wide.

We see the same direction when looking at time. In the 2024 Time Use Survey, among dual-income households with children under 18, husbands' daily housework increased by 13 minutes while wives' decreased by 17 minutes compared to five years earlier. When reading this number, you must keep the caveats attached: this is not about all households, but specifically dual-income households with children under 18, and it reflects the change compared to five years ago, not the absolute total.

Meanwhile, there is also a path where that work heads back out of the home. There are drop-off and pickup laundry services, as well as unattended laundromats equipped only with machines. Yet an unattended laundromat is different from the laundry factories we met earlier. While the machines sit outside, the person running those machines is still the user themselves. The work stepped outside, but no monetary value was ever attached to that labor.

And there are still places where the opening scene of this story continues to play out. The Joint Monitoring Programme of the World Health Organization and UNICEF reports that in households without water on premises, fetching water falls primarily on women and girls. This programme divides service levels based on whether water can be collected within a 30-minute round trip. It means there are still homes where fetching and heating water remains the very first link in the chain.

Instead of predictions, let's mark four spots to watch.

First, which laundry chore gets handed over to machines next. In this chain, there are still steps left in human hands: hanging, bringing in, folding, and putting clothes away. Washing, rinsing, spinning, and drying have already crossed over, but this final step has not. Seeing whether this step gets handed over—and if it does, where that saved time goes—will reveal the next chapter of this story.

Second, how a price is attached to the share that heads back outside the home. Laundry drop-off services put a price on the labor itself, while laundromats charge only for machine use. Depending on which side grows, the answer to "who does the work" changes. Thinking back to which side commercial laundries fell into in the United States a hundred years ago gives us a good comparison.

Third, the value of unpaid domestic labor and the gender multiple. It went from 3.2 times 5 years ago to 2.7 times. It is worth watching how fast this multiple shifts, and whether that change comes from one side increasing or the other side decreasing. In the 2024 Time Use Survey, the time spent by husbands in dual-income couples increased while their wives' time decreased—an example where both directions moved at once.

Fourth, what arrives first in places that still lack indoor running water. Depending on whether washing machines come first, plumbing comes first, or an entirely different approach emerges, this story could be rewritten. One US study pointed to indoor plumbing as the heavier factor, while data from Korea shows the two arrived almost at the same time. There is still room for a third answer to emerge.

There is one question this series deliberately leaves unsettled: what the washing machine truly liberated. What we did confirm instead is this: the chore called laundry never disappeared; it simply kept moving around. And depending on where it moved, it was either assigned a price tag or not.