Josephine Cochran: Hero to Women and Inventor of The Dishwasher

Last night as I was loading the dishwasher, I wondered to myself who had come up with the inspirational idea of using a machine to wash dishes. Well, I should not have been surprised to discover it was a woman! Actually, a man named Joel Houghton patented a wooden machine in 1850. His invention had a hand-turned wheel that splashed water on dishes but didn’t do a very good job at cleaning them. In 1896 Josephine Cochran of Ohio, apparently proclaimed in disgust “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself”. Ms. Cochran’s motivation was not her dislike of doing dishes by hand. In fact, she never washed her own dishes in spite of the fact that she held many fancy dinner parties. She was very wealthy and had servants to take care of things like dish washing. Her motivation was that she wanted a dish washer which could wash dishes faster and cleaner without chipping them. She developed her invention and presented it at the 1893 World Fair in Chicago. She had thought that women everywhere would immediately fall in love with it, but only hotels and large restaurants bought her mechanical hand-operated machine. The dishwasher would not become a household item until the 1950’s – long after Josephine had died. She never enjoyed the true success of her invention, but her company lives on today. KitchenAid now sells all kinds of appliances and has come a long way from its humble beginnings as Josephine Cochran’s hand-turned dishwasher. Appreciating having a dishwasher – especially one does not have to turned by hand . . . . it’s a good thing!