Women in History: Josephine Cochrane Invented the Dishwasher

Chipped heirloom china forced Josephine Cochrane to devise a better way of doing the dishes.

Josephine Cochrane hated washing her own dishes. Normally, she left that task to the servants until she noticed chips in the family china which reportedly dated back to the 1600s. At that point, Cochrane proclaimed the dishes off-limits to the servants and began washing them herself.

Being somewhat spoiled, Cochrane detested the menial labor required to clean her coveted china. Soon she was pondering a better way to wash dishes without the hands-on work.

Inventions ran in Josephine Cochrane's family. Jon Fitch, Cochrane's great grandfather was a civil engineer who ran a steamboat service with a steamboat of his own design. Cochrane's father, John Garis supervised several mills along the Ohio River and later was state swamp engineer in Indiana, working with hydraulic engineering. It would stand to reason then that Cochrane inherited the knack for invention.

Josephine attended private high school while her father engineered swamps in Indiana. When her school burned down, she went to live with her sister in Illinois. It was then she met and married William Cochran and they moved to Shelbyville, Illinois.

Once settled in Shelbyville, Josephine immediately began establishing her life as a socialite while William began successful work in the dry goods business and procuring other investments as opportunities presented themselves.

Josephine added an "e" to the end of the Cochran name to go along with her social status while William used his given surname.

Cochrane loved giving dinner parties and it was the clean up after these parties which compelled her to contemplate replacing the manual labor involved with washing the dishes with a machine which would do the work for her.

At the time that Cochrane began seriously working on a machine to wash dishes, her husband became ill. The couple were to go on a retreat together in the hope it would make William better but Josephine was so immersed in her idea that she insisted William go to the retreat alone. He returned a short time later scarcely better than when he left. Within a matter of weeks after his return, William Cochran died.

Though hundreds of people attended his funeral as William Cochran was well-liked, he left his widow with only $1500 and almost twice that in debt. Yet Cochrane never once considered taking on employment as a means of survival. So confident was she in her idea that Josephine Cochrane forged ahead with the making of her dishwashing system.

She first tested the soundness of her idea by standing at the sink and throwing soapy water over the dishes. Once she was satisfied with this basic method, she proceeded to the task of actually building the mechanical device capable of mimicking this tossing of soapy water onto dishware.

She first enlisted the help of mechanic George Butters. Together they constructed a copper boiler into which was placed a wheel holding wire racks which held dishes in place in individual compartments. The wheel was turned by a motor and hot soapy water was squirted onto the dishes by jets.

Within two months, Cochrane was the first person on her block to own a dishwasher.

Joel Houghton had patented a hand-cranked dishwashing machine in 1850, but it was Cochrane's ideal that the machine she invented be completely self-sufficient. Cochrane received a patent on her design in 1886. She called her creation the Garis-Cochran Dish-Washing Machine after her father and her husband.

Cochrane at first wanted to market her machine to households. She quickly learned that this would not be a feasible marketing technique.

"When it comes to buying something for the kitchen that costs $75 or $100, a woman begins at once to figure out all the other things she could do with the money. She hates dishwashing-what woman does not?-but she has not learned to think of her time and comfort as worth money. Besides, she isn't the deciding factor when it comes to spending comparatively large sums of money for the house. Her husband sees that adversely, generally, in the case of costly kitchen conveniences-though he will put comptometers and all that into his office every day of the week without even mentioning the fact to her." [1]

It was time to try a different approach. Cochrane traveled to Chicago and contacted everyone she knew there about her invention. As fortune would have it, a rich friend introduced her to the manager of the Palmer House, one of the most famous hotels in the country. With this successful meeting,

Cochrane ventured forth on her own to the Sherman House, another well-known hotel in Chicago.

"You asked me what was the hardest part of getting into business," Mrs. Cochrane recalled for the reporter for the Record-Herald. "That was almost the hardest thing I ever did, I think, crossing the great lobby of the Sherman House alone. You cannot imagine what it was like in those days, twenty-five years ago, for a woman to cross a hotel lobby alone. I had never been anywhere without my husband or father -the lobby seemed a mile wide. I thought I should faint at every step, but I didn't-and I got an $800 order as my reward." [1]

With those two orders, it would have seemed as though the Garis-Cochran Dish-Washing Machine would be in big demand. But selling the device was much more difficult than creating or patenting it. Cochrane attempted to get financial capital to help the company grow, but capital was hard to come by, particularly for a company owned and run by a woman in the late 1800s.

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago proved to be the break Cochrane was looking for. As Cochrane knew, people attending a fair eat and they eat a lot. And anytime anyone eats, they leave dirty dishes behind.

A total of nine Garis-Cochran Dish-Washing Machines were used to clean all those dirty dishes from the Exposition. Each machine could clean 240 dishes in two minutes when at peak capacity. But they also cut dishwashing staff, sanitized dishes and minimized breakage. This did not go unnoticed as the judges awarded the machine the highest prize for best mechanical construction and durability.

The publicity from the Exposition helped sales enough to make Cochrane's invention a viable product. Five years after the Exposition, Cochrane opened her own factory near Chicago. Mechanic George Butters oversaw the manufacturing process.

Even while traveling around the country to sell her dishwashing machines to hotels and restaurants, Cochrane was still determined to create a machine affordable, dependable and small enough for her original market: the home. The hotels, restaurants and even hospitals and colleges appreciated the fact that the dishwashing machine helped prevent the spread of germs by using scalding hot water to rinse the dishes. Cochrane attempted to use this as a selling point to homemakers to no avail. She did find that a hidden benefit of the dishwasher was what really appealed to homemakers. Dirty dishes could be stored in the dishwasher, hidden from sight.

At the age of 73, Cochrane traveled to New York to sell machines to the Biltmore Hotel as well as Lord & Taylor who purchased four of the machines for restaurants. The company was finally beginning to thrive. But less than a year later, Josephine Cochrane died in August of 1913 after a fall.

In 1926, Cochrane's company was absorbed into the Hobart Company, also a manufacturer of appliances. Under the name of KitchenAid, a home dishwasher as manufactured in the 1940s. KitchenAid is now part of the Whirlpool Corporation.

Although Cochrane did not get rich from her invention, it did provide her and her employees with a nice living.

As Cochrane stated shortly before her death, "It is a good world and getting better every day." [2]

[1] Cochrane interview with Chicago Record-Herald on November 24, 1912

[2] American Heritage