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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

That's all well and good, but the revolution of motorized washing machines and dishwashers was to free western women of having to spend large parts of their days washing things. Making it hand powered may shorten the time vs a wash tub, but is still going to miss the positive social outcomes.

[EDIT] I don't mean to be dismissive of this pretty cool improvement on manual washing. It seems like it will be really helpful for a lot of people until their economic situation improves.

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But wasn't the counter-intuitive result that women spent more time washing since it was so "easy" now, they could wash things much more frequently.

I can't find the reference but I did read it recently.

If the time spent stays the same but more stuff gets washed that's still a win for living standards. If you reduce the cost of something then that labor gets spent elsewhere, maybe on more of the same but then you have more to show for it. Labor hours are fairly fungible at scale like that.

Your cuts are less likely to get infected when your clothes don't have the manure you put on the field last week on them.

No [1], that's not the case. Even while we own more clothing and wash it more often, it still takes less time. You can also do other tasks while a washing machine is running.

[1]https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mfr/4919087.0011.104/--deconstr...

I do not think that your source supports your claim, although I might have missed something. To the contrary, it states:

> Although the physical labor of laundry was lessened somewhat by the machines, the actual time housewives allocated to their family laundry increased.

(This is claimed to be the result of housewives being responsible for the entirety of laundry, instead of employing help, however.)

That's the Jevons Paradox, generally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It could be, but not in the way the parent thinks. Washing machines and dish washers are what allowed women to enter the work force, but they didn't cause them to spend more time washing. It probably increased demand for freshly washed clothes and clothing in general.

The Jevons Paradox is an economy-wide effect, not (just / only) an individual one.

Cheaper washing machines mean more clothes, more laundry, more people washing more often.

Individuals may spend less time doing laundry. But more laundry is being done, above and beyond simply meeting previous latent demand.

Right, I was clarifying that it didn't in this case mean more time spent washing at an individual level, the resource here is probably labor.

I don't think that's the case for washing machines, but it is the case for some inventions. Like the typewriter, which allows you to write four-five times faster than when using a pen, and communications networks that are however many million times faster than carrier pigeons and pony expresses and what have you... So we should be spending less time writing and sending letters, and more time frolicking in the sun, right?

Indeed. And having women in the workforce is literally worth trillions of dollars, far exceeding the costs of “obese Americans”.

IIUC the angle here, it’s not that they don’t go to work. It’s that rather than going to the gym, they’ll work out as they do their laundry at home.

I'm not a fan of the gym, as I prefer to stay active other ways, but I often wonder if the effort and energy expended there could be put to better use? This is perhaps an example of that.

How many men do you need before you have one horsepower?

One horsepower is .7 kW. A horse working for an hour nonstop would be .7kW hrs.

Now, how many men do you need working constantly before you have comparable strength to a 20kW generator sipping a little bit of gasoline?

Here is an olympic cyclist barely managing to toast bread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ

Electricity is nice.

The idea that a singular man can output a horsepower (~700W) for enough time to toast bread is still very impressive to me!

Clearly an Olympic-level athlete. That being said, I can't help but imagine that with some optimization, it could make the electricity generation a bit easier (maybe more RPM but less torque needed?). Clearly, the video shows him straining and pushing.

Power == RPM * Torque, converting to less torque but more RPM with gears probably would be easier.

> A horse working for an hour nonstop would be .7kW hrs.

More like 8.4kWh.

> data from the horse pulling contest at the 1925 Iowa State Fair showing that peak mechanical power output of a horse is 12-14.9 HP.

https://doi.org/10.1038/364195a0

That's peak. Average is much lower. 1 HP is supposed to be a horse on a treadmill for a full day of work. A horse in acceleration is outputting far more than that for a few seconds.

On the other hand, manual laundry was one of only a few common means of self-support for 18th century working-class women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK9OyW4Jx_g

Crappy jobs shouldn't have to exist just for the sake of desperate people being able to have one. A justice issue demands a justice solution, not the scraps that fall from the table.

See also: the current argument raging around minimum wage in the US, and whether the the millions of grocery-bagging and burger-flipping gigs are supposed to be something you can actually survive on, or are they just meant to be short term jobs for middle class teenagers who have no dependents or living expenses to cover? Or maybe we don't love this reality but there's nothing anyone can do about it because The Market has declared that these jobs are worth less than a living wage so whatever (obligatory FDR meme: https://imgur.com/gallery/SvuwZrm).

Yes, washing clothes was a crappy job, just like coal mining was/is in certain parts of Appalchia. That said, it was an important and necessary job in its day, and it generated valuable income for workers with no other useful skills. Removing crappy jobs and the income they generate is rarely good for the laid-off workers, especially in the absence of any social safety net. I wonder how many laundresses became washing machine mechanics, or laundromat owner-proprietors. I'm guessing the answer is "not many."

I'd certainly agree that both coal miners and laundresses deserved better wages and working conditions.

Absolutely, but of course "better wages and working conditions" has a time and place element to it as well. Coal mining conditions were obviously terrible in hindsight, but my impression is that they were considered "good jobs" at the time, with union protection and so on (depictions in media like October Sky notwithstanding).

In any case, it appears that the purpose of this human-powered laundry machine is not to put anyone doing laundry for pay out of work, but rather to allow some combination of doing laundry at home cheaper, faster, or with less physical strain (a crank may be more ergonomic than being bent over a tub, and your hands don't have to be in wet soapy water the whole time).

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