In our daily household chores, I take it upon myself to handle the dish-related responsibilities after a long day at work. I felt it’s only fair, as my better-half, a full-time mum and the lone driver in our small, burgeoning family, has had a long day as well. Ingeniuity is her name, so the least I can do is wash and dry the dishes (understand that by no means is this my only chore, so ‘least I can do’ may not be the most operative word).
When our dishwasher was out of commission late last year, it seemed like I’d never get to sleep: Pots, pans and the like pile up, they can’t go in the heap of junk anymore, and your hands begin to look like those of the witch after she drinks the potion in Sleeping Beauty (Not that I’ve ever seen it. Let’s quickly move on).
So I know for a brief moment how frustrated Josephine Cochrane used to get, among many others who toiled over the kitchen sink.
But while I’m sitting here not perfecting the way to make sure the darn contraptions never break, Cochrane stood up for the dishwashing haters around the world in 1893: Not with a strike that was so common in that recession-plagued America, but with a machine that rendered dish pan hands obsolete.
It’s the reason why, on Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology, Josephine Cochrane is my tech heroine.
Few are inclined to think of soap-spewing metal machines with rusting trays and faulty wheels as a technological advance, but the ingenuity to Cochrane’s work is not so much in wanting to invent something technologically advanced for its time rather, it is for knowing firsthand the importance her contribution to society would be, seeing it through to make the contribution, and providing the modern world with a home staple.
‘Home staple’ would be the operative term long after Cochrane’s original patent saw the light of day, however. Market recognition early on saved the first Dish-washer, as it was then called, as Cochrane knew well enough to see that the sale such a machine would be hard to justify in most homes. Her savvy lied in her ability to look to the people who could shill out the big bucks that the machines originally demanded – hotels and food service operations, to be precise. When that market was found and exploited, the household version could then follow. Without the inventiveness, the ingenuity, and the market recognition of Josephine Cochrane, I wouldn’t have a machine to otherwise moan about in the first place!
Although the dishwasher – originally made with a copper wash-boiler as the main feature and relating to the modern dishwasher with the emphasis of water pressure - would be patented to Cochrane, the notably confident socialite still had to fight the chauvinistic beliefs that saturated an era that still saw women without the right to suffrage or working and educational opportunities. Outside investment in the Garis-Cochran Dish-Washing Machine was non-existant, and according to a 1999 American Heritage article about Cochrane, J.M. Fenster wrote:
Mrs. Cochrane later claimed that she could never interest capital investment in the company except when she was expected to resign…Mrs. Cochrane never did meet the need for outside capital, and that must have seemed a tough break, one dealt largely because she was female.
Making matters worse for Cochrane, Josephine contracted E.B. Tait & Co. to manufacture her new invention after capital funds were not forthcoming. Tait not only took in the profits, but scrapped her ideas and refinements simply out of disdain for Cochrane’s lack of ‘formal mechanical training’. Fenster recalled a Cochrane quote that captured Cochrane’s struggle most accurately:
“Women are inventive, the common opinion to the contrary notwithstanding,” Josephine Cochrane once said. “You see, we are not given a mechanical education, and that is a great handicap. It was to me—not in the way you suppose, however. I couldn’t get men to do the things I wanted in my way until they had tried and failed in their own. And that was costly for me. They knew I knew nothing, academically, about mechanics, and they insisted on having their own way with my invention until they convinced themselves my way was the better, no matter how I had arrived at it.”
As it was, the one who made it happen for the first dishwasher was the one who started it. Behind the scenes at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Cochrane supplied restaurateurs nine Garis-Cochrans to get dishes ready for use again. Rave reviews from the food service executives followed, and Cochrane’s marvel was christened as the best invention at the fair for “best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work.”
Cochrane, still hardened by the trained professionals who had cast her aside a decade earlier, couldn’t resist an ‘I told you so’ dig, as Fenston reported later:
“They used often to bring people to my exhibit in Machinery Hall,” Mrs. Cochrane recalled, “simply because the invention was so mechanical—wonderful for a woman, they thought. They would have thought it still more wonderful had they known the opposition I encountered from trained mechanics in getting my own way.”
Within five years, Cochrane opened her own factory in Chicago, staved off competing imitators, and found a niche for the company by targetting food service industries and hotels for the expensive models throughout Midwestern America and, with its eventual absorption into Hobart and later the Whirlpool Corporation long after Cochrane’s passing in 1913, the world.
‘It’s a good world and getting better every day,’ she said shortly before her death. Indeed, for now that my dishwasher is back and rolling out the china again, a small part of my world isn’t too shabby, either.
