Dishwasher invention observes its 135-year anniversary

 Josephine Garis Cochran invented the first “woman-approved kitchen dishwasher” in 1886.

 Two attempts had been made before that, both by men, but their machines fizzled out because they were poorly designed. 

Born in Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1839, the daughter of John Garis and Irene Fitch Garis, Josephine had the genes it took to become an inventor.

 

Her father was a civil engineer who had invented a hydraulic pump for draining marshes. He also had a great business sense, supervising a number of woolen mills, sawmills and gristmills along the Ohio River. Her great grandfather, John Fitch, is credited with inventing the steamboat.

“Even as a young girl, Josephine was determined to find a technological solution to any problem presented – and if one didn’t exist – to invent it,” her biographers reported. 

Josephine finished high school while living with her older sister, Irene Garis Ransom, in Shelbyville, Ill. Josephine became the 19-year-old bride of William Cochran. He was a successful dry goods merchant and local politician. 

Josephine and William enjoyed entertaining in their large and stylish home in Shelbyville. They possessed an antique collection of fine china. Josephine despised the tedious task of washing those dishes ever so carefully. 

Surely, she said in 1883, there had to be a mechanical solution to make her job easier. Not just for herself, but for all women who dreaded the drudgery of hand-washing and drying dishes. 

When William took ill and died later in 1883, he left “Josephine as a widow short on cash and long on debts.” 

Essayist Ann McCrackin, a modern-day patent lawyer in Minneapolis, Minn., noted: “Suddenly, Josephine Cochran’s project of inventing a viable dishwashing machine was no longer a dream but an urgent financial necessity.” 

“Finding competent help proved difficult,” reported the communications staff at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office staff in Alexandria, Va. Josephine stated: “I couldn’t get men to do the things I wanted in my way until they had tried and failed in their own.” 

“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.” 

She eventually found her guy. He was George Butters, a mechanic with the Illinois Central Railroad. Together, they built Josephine’s dishwashing machine in a backyard woodshed in 1886. 

For visitors attending the world expo in Chicago in 1893, the exhibit that “turned heads” in Machinery Hall “was a strange-looking contraption of gears, belts and pulleys that would vanish a cage full of more than 200 dirty dishes, only to reappear two minutes later as clean as if they had been hand-washed.” 

The exposition’s judges were so impressed with the “Cochrane Dish Washing Machine” that they awarded it the highest prize for “best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work.”

 

(At some point, Josephine changed the spelling of her last name to add an “e” to the end to “assert her independence.”)

Josephine Cochran sold nine of them on the spot to people who were running kitchens at the expo. 

Orders spiked from restaurants and hotels throughout Illinois and neighboring states, and Josephine later found willing customers in hospitals and colleges due to their strict sanitation requirements. 

In 1897, she set up Cochran’s Crescent Washing Machine Company, managed by Butters. Many Shelbyville residents invested as shareholders. Cochran managed her company until she died in 1913 at age 74.

 

The rights to her dishwashing machine company were acquired in 1926 by the Hobart Manufacturing Company, which produced dishwashers under the KitchenAid brand. In 1986, KitchenAid was acquired by the Whirlpool Corporation.