Laundry – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Laundry is the washing of clothing and linens.[1] Laundry processes are often done in a business, room or area in a home or apartment building, reserved for that purpose; this is referred to as a laundry room. The material that is being washed, or has been laundered is also generally referred to as laundry.

Laundry was first done in watercourses, letting the water carry away the materials which could cause stains and smells. Laundry is still done this way in some less industrialized areas and rural regions. Agitation helps remove the dirt, so the laundry is often rubbed, twisted, or slapped against flat rocks. Wooden bats or clubs could be used to help with beating the dirt out. These were often called washing beetles or bats and could be used by the waterside on a rock (a beetling-stone), on a block (battling-block), or on a board. They were once common across Europe and were also used by settlers in North America. Similar techniques have also been identified in Japan.

When no watercourses were available, laundry was done in water-tight vats or vessels. Sometimes large metal cauldrons were filled with fresh water and heated over a fire; boiling water was even more effective than cold in removing dirt. Wooden or stone scrubbing surfaces set up near a water supply or portable washboards, including factory-made corrugated metal ones, gradually replaced rocks as a surface for loosening soil.

A posser could be used to agitate clothes in a tub.[2]

Once clean, the clothes were wrung out twisted to remove most of the water. Then they were hung up on poles or clotheslines to air dry, or sometimes just spread out on clean grass.

Before the advent of the washing machine, apart from watercourses, laundry was also done in communal or public washhouses (also called wash-houses or wash houses), especially in rural areas in Europe or the Mediterranean Basin. Water was channelled from a river or spring and fed into a building or outbuilding built specifically for laundry purposes and often containing two basins - one for washing and the other for rinsing - through which the water was constantly flowing, as well as a stone lip inclined towards the water against which the washers could beat the clothes. Such facilities were much more comfortable than washing in a watercourse because the launderers could work standing up instead of on their knees, and were protected from inclement weather by walls (often) and a roof (with some exceptions). Also, they didn't have to go far, as the facilities were usually at hand in the village or at the edge of a town. These facilities were public and available to all families, and usually used by the entire village. The laundry job was reserved for women, who washed all their family's laundry (or the laundry of others as a paid job). As such, washhouses were an obligatory stop in many women's weekly lives and became a sort of institution or meeting place for women in towns or villages, where they could discuss issues or simply chat, equated by many with gossip, and equatable to the concept of the village pump in English. Indeed, this tradition is reflected in the Catalan idiom "fer safareig" (literally, "to do the laundry"), which means to gossip, for instance.

Many of these washhouses are still standing and even filled with water in villages throughout Europe. In cities (in Europe as of the 19th century), public washhouses were also built so that the poorer population, who would otherwise not have access to laundry facilities, could wash their clothes. The aim was to foster hygiene and thus reduce outbreaks of epidemics.

The Industrial Revolution completely transformed laundry technology.

The mangle (wringer US) was developed in the 19th century two long rollers in a frame and a crank to revolve them. A laundry-worker took sopping wet clothing and cranked it through the mangle, compressing the cloth and expelling the excess water. The mangle was much quicker than hand twisting. It was a variation on the box mangle used primarily for pressing and smoothing cloth.

Meanwhile 19th century inventors further mechanized the laundry process with various hand-operated washing machines. Most involved turning a handle to move paddles inside a tub. Then some early 20th century machines used an electrically powered agitator to replace tedious hand rubbing against a washboard. Many of these were simply a tub on legs, with a hand-operated mangle on top. Later the mangle too was electrically powered, then replaced by a perforated double tub, which spun out the excess water in a spin cycle.

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Laundry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia