Chief among which is the washing machine, an innovation that’s surprisingly new. Electric washing machines began to be manufactured in the 1920s, but the modern “automatic washing machine” made by the Bendix Corporation, wasn’t introduced until 1937. And we had to wait a year for those clothes to dry before Hamilton Manufacturing began to sell electric and gas dryers in 1938. And early washers and dryers cost like sin. Or, I should say, they cost like washing (and drying) away the stains of sin. When my parents got married in 1946, my grandfather gave them a washer and dryer as a very unromantic wedding present. Unromantic, but not unwelcome. The pair of appliances cost about $500... or $6,725 in 2017 dollars. Hand-washing clothes is like hand-washing a car – if you had to pick the car up and put it in a giant bucket and rub it up and down on an immense washboard until its fenders, doors, roof, grille, and trunk lid were fresh and clean. And if you had a whole used-car lot of dirty cars to wash every Monday. Drying clothes on a clothesline is as bad... and, in the winter, worse. You can’t towel- off... a towel. And a laundry basket full of wet sheets weighs as much as my poultry waterer. If I had to drag soaked and dripping bed linen from the laundry sink to the backyard clothesline, I’d be running my tractor up and down the basement stairs. The first self-contained electric refrigerator was produced by Frigidaire in 1923. Before that, if you wanted a burger you had to cook the
whole cow. And, with no place to store the leftovers, you had to eat the whole cow, too. And yet it’s people now, not people back in the 1920s, who have an obesity problem. This may have had something to do with the old-timers’ hard labor washing and drying their clothes. Not to mention ironing them. I tried it – once – when I was a bachelor. The ironing wasn’t so hard, but it was a lot of work putting out the shirt fire. Alert readers will notice that many of my examples of under-appreciated innovations concern what was traditionally considered women’s work in less-enlightened times. And by “less-enlightened times” I mean right now, when women are still doing almost all of that work. (Power tools, by comparison, are over- appreciated innovations. Try cooking, cleaning, washing, drying, and ironing with my table saw.) Women are, as women know, under- appreciated. The greatest innovation ever, for all time, took place 1.2 billion years ago among unicellular eukaryotic organisms in the Proterozoic Eon. Never heard of any of that stuff? Me either. I had to look it up because I’m a typical under- appreciative man. The best innovations get no respect. The Proterozoic Eon was when sexual reproduction first occurred. Unicellular eukaryotic organisms invented women.
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