Josephine Cochrane

Based on Wikipedia: Josephine Cochrane

The Woman Who Was Tired of Broken China

In 1870, Josephine Cochrane threw a dinner party in her Chicago mansion. The food was excellent. The conversation sparkled. And when the servants washed up afterward, they chipped her heirloom china.

It was the last straw.

Cochrane could have done what wealthy women of her era typically did: complain, replace the dishes, and move on. Instead, she decided to invent a machine that would wash dishes without breaking them. She had no engineering training. She had never built anything mechanical. She was a society hostess in an age when women couldn't even vote.

Thirteen years later, she held patent number 355,139 for the world's first commercially successful dishwasher. Her company would eventually become part of KitchenAid, which is now owned by Whirlpool. Every modern dishwasher traces its lineage back to a shed in Shelbyville, Illinois, where a grieving widow with almost no money refused to accept that dishes had to be washed by hand.

An Inventor's Granddaughter

Josephine Garis was born in 1839 in Ashtabula County, Ohio, a rural area in the northeastern corner of the state near Lake Erie. Her father was a civil engineer, and her grandfather had been an inventor—though history has not preserved exactly what he invented. What matters is that she grew up in a household where building things and solving problems were normal activities, not mysteries reserved for men in workshops.

She moved to Indiana as a child and was raised in Valparaiso. At nineteen, she married William Cochran, a man who had recently returned from the California Gold Rush with nothing to show for it. Gold rushes worked that way for most people—the merchants who sold pickaxes and provisions to miners generally made more money than the miners themselves. William pivoted to dry goods and politics, becoming a prosperous merchant and Democratic Party politician in Shelbyville, Illinois.

Josephine took her husband's name but added an "e" to the end. The small act of spelling her name differently hints at a personality that would not simply accept things as they were handed to her.

The Problem Nobody Had Solved

Dishwashing in the nineteenth century was exactly as miserable as you might imagine. There were no rubber gloves. Hot water had to be heated on a stove and carried to a basin. Soap was harsh. The work was repetitive, wet, and endless—every meal created a new pile of dirty dishes that someone had to clean.

For wealthy families like the Cochranes, servants did the washing. But servants were human, and humans make mistakes. Fine china, passed down through generations, could be destroyed in an instant by a careless scrub or a dish slipping from wet fingers. Cochrane's frustration was personal—she cared about her heirloom dishes. But she also thought about the housewives who did their own washing, the tired women scrubbing plates every evening while their families relaxed.

Others had tried to mechanize the process. In 1850, a man named Joel Houghton patented something he called a dish soaker. It was essentially a wooden tub with a hand crank that splashed water around. It didn't work very well. In the 1860s, another inventor named L.A. Alexander added gears that let users spin racked dishes through water. This was marginally better but still not effective enough for anyone to actually use.

The fundamental problem was that these machines tried to replicate the motions of handwashing—moving dishes through water, hoping friction would do the work. Cochrane would take a completely different approach.

Widowhood and Invention

William Cochrane died in 1883. He left his wife with $1,535.59 in assets and a significant pile of debt. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly $47,000 today—enough to survive on for a while, but not enough to maintain the lifestyle of a Chicago society hostess. Josephine Cochrane was forty-four years old, a widow with two grown children, facing a future of declining fortunes.

She could have retreated into genteel poverty, living quietly on what remained of her husband's estate. Instead, she filed a patent application on the last day of 1885 for a dish-cleaning machine.

Her workshop was the shed behind her house. Her first employee was a young mechanic named George Butters, whom she hired to help with construction. The partnership between a society widow and a working-class mechanic must have seemed odd to their neighbors, but Cochrane knew what she wanted to build, and Butters knew how to work with his hands.

The Insight That Changed Everything

Cochrane's dishwasher worked on a principle that seems obvious now but was revolutionary in 1886: instead of moving dishes through water, she kept the dishes still and moved water through them.

She began by measuring her own dishes—plates, cups, saucers, each with different dimensions. Then she designed wire compartments sized to hold each type of dish securely. The compartments were arranged on a wheel that lay flat inside a copper boiler. A motor turned the wheel while hot, soapy water was pumped from the bottom of the boiler and sprayed up onto the dishes.

The key innovation was water pressure. Previous dishwashing machines had tried to use scrubbing or agitation. Cochrane realized that pressurized jets of hot water could blast food particles off dishes more effectively than any brush or sponge. Her dishes didn't chip because they never moved—they sat in their custom-fitted compartments while water did all the work.

Patent 355,139 was issued on December 28, 1886. Josephine Cochrane, a fifty-seven-year-old widow with no formal engineering education, had invented the technology that would eventually sit in hundreds of millions of kitchens worldwide.

The Challenge of Selling to Housewives

Inventing something and selling it are two entirely different skills. Cochrane had solved the technical problem, but she now faced a commercial one: who would buy her machine?

The obvious answer seemed to be housewives—the very people who spent hours each day washing dishes by hand. But this market proved nearly impossible to crack.

First, there was price. Cochrane's dishwashers cost between $75 and $100. In 1890s dollars, that was a fortune for a household appliance. A working-class family might earn $500 in an entire year. Even middle-class women who could theoretically afford the machine often couldn't justify spending that much on something that would only save them the effort of a chore they'd been doing their whole lives.

Second, there was infrastructure. Cochrane's dishwasher required large quantities of hot water. Most homes in the 1890s didn't have water heaters capable of supplying that demand. You couldn't just buy the machine and plug it in—you'd need to upgrade your entire plumbing system first.

Third, and perhaps most subtly, there was culture. Many women of that era had been raised to believe that domestic work was their purpose and duty. A machine that did your dishes for you could be seen as laziness, an abdication of womanly responsibility. Some women may have actively resisted the technology, not because it didn't work, but because accepting it felt like admitting they couldn't handle their own kitchens.

Hotels, Restaurants, and the World's Fair

Cochrane pivoted. If individual housewives weren't buying, she would sell to businesses that washed dishes at industrial scale.

Hotels and restaurants went through hundreds or thousands of dishes every day. They had the infrastructure—commercial kitchens were already equipped with large boilers and hot water systems. They had the economic incentive—paying staff to wash dishes was expensive, and broken dishes cut into profits. And they had no cultural resistance to labor-saving devices. A hotel manager didn't feel moral qualms about mechanizing dishwashing; he felt grateful for anything that reduced costs and improved efficiency.

The turning point came in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This massive world's fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas and attracted over 27 million visitors. It was one of the most significant events in American history—the fair introduced Americans to everything from the Ferris wheel to alternating current electricity to Cream of Wheat cereal.

Cochrane displayed her dishwasher at the fair. Nine of her machines were installed in the exposition's restaurants and pavilions, cleaning dishes for the millions of fairgoers. She won the prize for "best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work."

The timing was extraordinary. That same year, the Panic of 1893 triggered a devastating economic depression. Banks failed. Businesses collapsed. Companies that had been relying on investor funding found themselves suddenly bankrupt. But Cochrane's business was built on actual sales to actual customers. The hotels and restaurants that had seen her machines at the fair placed orders. They needed to wash dishes regardless of the economy.

Building an Empire from a Shed

Cochrane founded the Garis-Cochrane Manufacturing Company to produce her machines. In 1897, as the business grew, she renamed it Cochran's Crescent Washing Machine Company. In 1898, she opened her own factory, with George Butters—the same mechanic she'd hired years earlier in her backyard shed—serving as manager.

Her sales territory eventually stretched from Mexico to Alaska. Not bad for a widow who'd started with less than $1,600 and a pile of debt.

But she never cracked the household market in her lifetime. The technology was there. The desire for labor-saving devices was there. What was missing was the infrastructure. It wasn't until the 1950s—four decades after Cochrane's death—that home plumbing systems and water heaters had improved enough for dishwashers to become practical for ordinary families.

Legacy and Recognition

Josephine Cochrane died on August 3, 1913, in Chicago. She was seventy-four years old. Some accounts say she died of a stroke; others say exhaustion. Either cause would fit the story of a woman who spent three decades building a company while fighting against the assumptions of her era about what women could accomplish.

She was buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Shelbyville, Illinois, the same town where she'd first built her dishwasher in a shed.

Her company continued without her. In 1926, it was acquired by KitchenAid, which was itself a division of Hobart Manufacturing Company. Hobart made commercial food equipment—the kind of industrial machinery you'd find in restaurant kitchens. Cochrane's dishwashers fit perfectly into that product line.

KitchenAid is now part of Whirlpool Corporation, one of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world. Every dishwasher they sell—and they sell millions—descends from the machine Josephine Cochrane patented in 1886.

In 2006, ninety-three years after her death, Cochrane was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The citation recognized patent 355,139 for her invention of the dishwasher.

The Accidental Urbanist

There's an interesting connection between Cochrane's invention and the history of housing that's worth considering.

The twentieth century saw what urban planners call the "Great Downzoning"—a period when cities across the Western world banned the construction of dense housing like apartments and townhouses, instead requiring single-family homes on large lots. This created sprawling suburbs where every family needed its own kitchen, its own appliances, its own everything.

In denser housing—the kind that existed before downzoning and is slowly returning in some cities—shared amenities make more sense. An apartment building might have a common laundry room. A neighborhood might have a commercial kitchen or bakery nearby.

But in sprawling suburbs, each household is an island. Every home needs its own dishwasher, its own washing machine, its own everything. This multiplication of appliances would have delighted Cochrane from a business perspective. Her machines found their market not just because technology improved, but because the very structure of American housing changed in ways that made household appliances essential rather than optional.

What Innovation Actually Looks Like

Josephine Cochrane's story defies almost every assumption we have about inventors and innovation.

She wasn't trained as an engineer. She didn't work in a laboratory or a university. She wasn't trying to get rich or change the world—she was trying to stop her dishes from getting chipped.

She wasn't young. She filed her patent at forty-six, started her company in her fifties, and opened her factory at fifty-nine. In an age that worships young founders and fresh perspectives, her story is a reminder that experience, patience, and persistence matter at least as much as youth and brilliance.

She didn't succeed by convincing people they needed something new. She succeeded by finding customers who already knew they had a problem—hotel managers tired of paying staff to wash dishes, restaurant owners frustrated by broken plates—and offering them a solution.

And she didn't do it alone. George Butters, the mechanic she hired to help build her prototype, stayed with her for decades, eventually managing her factory. Innovation is often portrayed as the work of lone geniuses, but Cochrane's dishwasher was a collaboration between a woman with a vision and a mechanic with the skills to make it real.

Today, dishwashers are so common that we barely think about them. They sit in our kitchens, quietly doing work that used to take hours of human labor every day. When we load the dishes after dinner, we're participating in a routine that began with a frustrated society hostess in 1870, staring at her chipped heirloom china and thinking: there has to be a better way.

There was. She built it.