As I have been putting all my things together to travel to my family to spend the holidays with them, I am doing far more washing than I have done in previous weeks. But it has also been happening much faster than I expected as the washes are complete. With every new invention, we lurch into a more convenient day. Washing machines are one of those things that save so much time in my day-to-day life. So where did they come from and when were they invented? 

Gone now are the days were clothes are pounded with rocks in order to keep them or make them clean. The most common way of washing clothes nowadays is to put them into a machine along with some other capsules or liquids or the like and watch as it spins the clothes clean all on its own simply with the push of a button. It seems wild how far that evolution has developed but there is much in the modern world that old ages of humanity would find time to gaze at with wonder and fear. When early ideas of washing machines were first patented around the mid-nineteenth, they were only basic ideas that needed further development, as many preliminary ideas do. At first, they did not much run the way that we are used to them working and were not made of metals or other such materials but rather wood, being powered by hand. The first washer that was made to use electricity was called the Thor, which was not on the market until 1908. Before then all of the washing machines were either hand or steam-powered in their nature. 

Advancement to our current level of efficiency and convenience will always be something to be thankful for, though it does not give us the right to complacency. The convenience we have now was something that someone had to put the effort in to save us are own. 

Sources

• https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-washing-machines-1992666 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine#Automatic_machines