Atlantic Appliances

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It would seem that the ancestor to this household appliance dates back to 1767, when the first washing machine was created in Regensburg (Germany). It was a wooden piece of equipment with a very basic, manual spin-dryer.

The washing machine considered to be the most similar to our modern appliance in terms of how it worked, was the machine built by Thomas Bradford back in 1860: it had an octagonal drum made from wood that was inserted into another, larger wooden box that was filled with soapy water. A crank was used to turn the inner drum.

According to historians, the title of ‘washing machine inventor’ doesn’t belong to Bradford but to the American William Blackstone, who had a wooden barrel made for his wife in 1874 that contained laundry immersed in soapy water, which was then moved around by a shaft equipped with different pegs, turned by hand: this piece of equipment went on sale and Blackstone became the world’s first washing machine manufacturer.

The next important steps came at the beginning of the twentieth century when the wooden barrels were replaced by metal drums and, above all, when a company from Chicago, the Hurley Machine Company, implemented an electric motor into the washing machine that it produced from 1908 onwards.

After the second world war, washing machines became widespread in Italy, and soon came to be considered an essential household appliance, together with the refrigerator or television.

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