- And this was the dawn of the appliance.
Household items can save us time and money. The vacuum was invented because of a sneeze, the washing machine had over 1000 patents before it was motorized, and the sewing machine caused riots.
The 1950s was the American dream with a kitchen that ran itself, wall to wall blender, mixer, defroster and disposal. This technology was hard earned and tells it’s own story.
The second revolution for the Us was the industrial revolution. It was a time of manufacturing, mass production, automation and invention, forever changing our lives.
Servants fled the household for higher paying factory work, so housewives found themselves home alone and without help. Innovators created new maids to lighten the labor of the household.
And this was the dawn of the appliance.
Stoves
For thousands of years, the world revolved around the fire, including food. Food went from being cooked over the fire and into the history of the cooking stove, which is hard to trace in 1940s Benjamin Franklin invented a heating stove to warm a room. From there, lots of manufacturers worked on the idea. Demand for the stove coincided the with the iron industry at the time and pig iron with coke or coal could be remelted into stove plates and that created the cooking stove. The stove became the most important domestic symbol of the 19th century.
Early cooking stoves for the household were also heaters. There were lots of different varieties on first oven. It was indispensable, even if you were traveling by wagon. Your stove could boil potatoes, cook meat and bake a pie at the same time.
Some didn’t like the stove over the fireplace but they became popular nonetheless. Coal became the stoves new fuel.
With cooler and faster cooking in the gas and electricity, came cooler and faster work for women and elimination of heavy work for men.
Microwave
The original of the 1950s were big expensive and not sufficient. They looked like they came out of a science lab and not like they were meant for a household.
At the end of WWII, 1945 Percy Spencer was working around the magnetron when he discovered a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He had felt no heat.
They next day he experimented with popcorn kernels and they popped. High frequency radio waves housed in a metal box cause food to cook quickly.
The waves penetrate the food and certain molecules vibrate, cooking the food. The first was called a radar range. People didn’t know what to do with microwaves at first. But then, with the release of microwave products from food industry, the radar range became the king of recooking.
The 19th century housewife was still using a washboard for clothes and a regular old broom for cleaning her household. But not for long.
It all started with illumination of one bulb of electricity. That bulb turned on lights and a new spirit of invention. It was a new age for man. General electric called electricity the lamp that lights the way to lighter housework.
Electric homes are still vision of the future. Even if families were lucky enough to own electric appliances, most of them had nothing to plug them into.
Let electricity be your new maid. It was a field day for inventors and there were always new products coming out.
Sewing Machine
The sewing machine freed women from slavery to the needle as sewing by hand was a part of daily life, even for wealthy women. There is no sole inventor of the sewing machine.
This was one device that seemed to have shown up at the same time to tailors and inventors all over the world. But France claims Barthlemu Thimonnier as the first. He was a poor tailor who patented a machine in 1830 which made a chain stitch, like an embroiderer may use.
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