![]() Roman emperor Vespasian is still famous for having imposed, in 70 A.D., a tax on the distribution of urine from public urinals in Rome’s Cloaca Maxima (great sewer) system. In ancient Rome washing facilities were famous: there were public laundries, in which fermented human urine, with its high concentration of ammonia was used to bleach linen. Paul Gauguin – 1888 – Washerwomen at Arles ![]() They gradually disappeared as running water was introduced into homes. These were covered area laid out to facilitate their work, and also played an important social role, because they became “talking houses” where women used to exchange local news and often sang as a means of lightening their daily tasks and passing the time. Washing linen by hand has always been a very laborious chore: washerwomen used to wash linen by boiling them in a pot, or going near springs, rivers, fountains or to wash-houses. They generally involved pouring hot water into a tank, turning a lever to wash the clothes, wringing them between two rollers and draining the tank using a tap. However, the first washing machines made laundry a less laborious undertaking but they still required manual operation via a crank handle. Since a massive fire in December 1836 obliterated many of the Patent Office records, no description of this device survives. Thirty years later, in 1797, an American, Nathaniel Briggs obtained the first patent titled “Clothes Washing“. In short, he was a sort of Jack-of-all-trades. That machine was described as” having two pendulums suspended from the uprights, at the extremity of each of which is a block – one is loaded for washing, the other is grooved, which pendulums are worked and set in motion by a handle which is affixed to two arms, which are attached to the pendulums”.Īn early washing machine had already been invented in 1767 by Jacob Christian Schäffer, a German theologian who was also a professor, botanist, mycologist, entomologist, ornithologist, as well as inventor. ![]() In 1824, the Legislature of Lower Canada enacted the first patent law in British North America and on 8 June 1824 in Quebec City, an inventor named Noah Cushing was the first Canadian to be awarded a patent for a “washing and fulling machine” to clean and strengthen cloth.
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