Invention of the Dishwasher

Published Aug 29, 2022, 1:00 PM

There is one woman in particular who normally gets the credit for inventing the dish washer. But there were other inventors trying to come up with ways to automatically take care of kitchen clean up both before and after Josephine Cochran.

Research:

  • Bellis, Mary. "Josephine Cochran and the Invention of the Dishwasher." ThoughtCo, Aug. 28, 2020, thoughtco.com/josephine-cochran-dishwasher-4071171.
  • Houghton, Joel. “IMPROVEMENT IN MACHINES FOR WASHING TABLE FURNITURE.” United States Patent Office. May 14, 1850. https://todayinsci.com/Events/Patent/DishwashingMachine7365.htm
  • Cochran, J.G. “Dish Washing Machine.” U.S. Patent Office. Dec. 28, 1886. https://patents.google.com/patent/US355139
  • Fenster, Julie M. “The Woman Who Invented the Dish Washer.” Invention & Technology. Fall 1999. Volume 15, Issue 2. https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/woman-who-invented-dishwasher-1
  • “Restoring History: Family Purchases Home of Dishwasher Inventor Josephine Cochrane and Pledges to Return it to its Former Glory.” Whirlpool. July 30, 2020. https://www.whirlpoolcorp.com/restoring-history-dishwasher-inventor-josephine-cochrane/
  • Eschner, Kat. “This Time-Saving Patent Paved the Way for the Modern Dishwasher.” Smithsonian. Dec. 28, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/time-saving-patent-paved-way-modern-dishwasher-180967656/
  • Ram, Jocelyn, et al. “I’ll Do It Myself.” United States Patent and Trademark Office. https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innovation/historical-stories/ill-do-it-myself
  • “Josephine Garis Cochran.” National Inventors Hall of Fame. 2006. https://www.invent.org/inductees/josephine-garis-cochran
  • Smyser, Sue. “Woman’s Quest to Save Good China Leads to Invention of Dishwasher.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon, Illinois). March 13, 2002. https://www.newspapers.com/image/84706698/?terms=Garis-Cochran&match=1
  • “Mrs. Cochran, Who Has Won Success as an Inventor.” The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois). Nov. 16, 1895. https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=55415779&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjMzODYyNTg5OCwiaWF0IjoxNjU5OTY3OTUzLCJleHAiOjE2NjAwNTQzNTN9.a3m-ZQ4f6PFlFUG8ibS-p2qBxNpg0C9Z2gEwg1t5lOU

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Listen. I don't know why I'm on a kick about the origins of everyday items lately, but it's still what my brain is drawn to. Also, let me be frank, I'm kind of a slob by nature. I fight it, I'm working on it all the time, but that makes me deeply grateful for every invention that helps me kind of keep up with my housework. I need them all in Spain. By the way, not an ad for anyone. I won't mention a specific one, but if you haven't got a steam mop, I highly recommend it. Uh. They're like magic. That's not what we're talking about today. We are talking about dishwashers, and there is one woman in particular who normally gets the credit for inventing the dishwasher, but there were other inventors trying to come up with ways to automatically take care of kitchen clean up, both before and after. Josephine Cochrane, the woman we're talking about today. We are going to talk primarily about Josephine. But we will also book nder story with other efforts to get dishes clean. So first we're going to start out with some design patents that didn't result in much actual machinery being built. So first up is Joel Hutton of Ogden, New York, who was granted the first dishwasher patent in the US on May. It's really kind of a glorified hose and bucket affair. Water would pass onto buckets that were mounted on a shaft that was turned with a crank, so it would sort of spatter the water onto dirty dishes that were in a wooden or a metal cylinder. The water had to be boiled separately and then poured onto this mechanism. This was not really functional in any kind of thorough or practical sense. The description of this dishwasher in the patent application of pretty charming, though quote the nature of my invention consists in placing the crockery or other articles of table furniture in a machine fitted to receive them and then to wash them by turning a shaft with arms and buckets so arranged as to throw the water upon the crockery with force, and thus acting upon and cleansing each and every article. In the eighteen sixties, another person, l A. Alexander, got a patent for a dishwasher with a rack that would turn the dishes on a circular spinner that would move through a tub of water. This was for like a gentle dish bather. It was not particularly effective. No. Uh So. The woman who is, as we've said, generally credited with inventing the dishwasher is Josephine Garris Cochrane. She was born Josephine Garris on March eight, eight thirty nine, in Ashtabula County, Ohio. Her father, John Garris, was a civil engineer. He worked largely when she was born with mills along the Ohio River. Her mother, Irene Fitch Garris, was the daughter of John Fitch, who was an inventor. He invented the first patented steamboat, and for a while he ran a service that connected Philadelphia to other ports with that steamboat. She never actually knew her grandfather, but her family's engineering background is often mentioned in Josephine's biography to kind of suggest that becoming an inventor was inevitable for her. But Josephine didn't really grow up showing any real inclination to follow in her grandfather or father's footsteps, John moved Josephine to Valparaiso, Indiana for his work. Her mother, Irene, had died before the move. Josephine had an older sister who had started her own life and was living in Illinois. Josephine attended a private high school in Indiana, although that particular school burned down and that ended her formal education. After that, Josephine first moved in with her sister in Shelbyville, Illinois, and then she did what a lot of young women at the time did, which was she got married. She was nineteen at the time. Her new husband was William A. Cochrane, who was twenty seven. As a young man, William had been quite entranced by the idea of striking it rich in the California gold Rush, and he had traveled to the West Coast in eighteen fifty three to seek his fortune. I did not really go as planned, and he had moved back home, and by the time he met Josephine, he had been back for roughly a year and he had started to build a successful dry goods business. He was working in the business with his uncle, so she was marrying into a pretty comfortable and stable situation. They were married on October eighteen fifty three. Josephine and William had two children. Their son, Hallie, died as a toddler, and they also had a daughter, Catherine, who lived to adulthood. One interesting detail of Josephine's married life is that she and her husband spelled their last name differently. William you c O c h r A N his name by birth, but Josephine preferred to add an E on the end of Cochrane. Some biographers say she thought this looked more fancy or refined. Her daughter Catherine used the version without the e, the idea that she just made her last name a little bit more fancy. I love it, go for it. It's like plu to flourish um. Some biographies kind of differ on whether she was actively doing this when William was still alive, but particularly after he had passed, she was definitely full time using it with the E version. Twelve years into their marriage, when William Cochrane had grown his business to a point not just of comfort but really of true wealth, he purchased a luxury home for the family in Shelbyville, Illinois. Both he and Josephine recognized that they had moved up the socioeconomic ladder, and they both worked really hard to fit into a higher class than they had grown up in, and they both wanted to move even higher. In short, Josephine aris Cochrane was at this point considered a socialite, and she really loved that. One of her greatest joys was having fancy dinner parties, and as part of this hosting hobby, she used only the finest china. The set she really prized was an heirloom originally made in the sixteen hundreds, and if you've ever washed antique china, you may know it's often delicate and easy to chip. That is exactly what happened when Josephine's house staff washed up after these parties, and Josephine was really upset by this, so much so that she would not let any of the staff wash her good china anymore. She took on that shore herself. There are debates about how long this actually went on, but it turned out she just didn't love doing an entire party's worth of dishes on her own. Who would not me? Not me either, and she thought at first that someone must have already come up with a machine designed to handle such tasks. And after she looked around for such a solution and finding that a truly functional washer had not yet been created, she has often quoted as saying, if nobody else is going to invent a dish washing machine, I'll do it myself. She is said to have sat in her home's library to think on this matter, and to have come up with a basic design after only about thirty minutes of sketching out ideas. Previous attempts at making an automatic dishwasher had not been very successful. The dishes just didn't get as clean as a person could get them themselves. There was also inconsistent cleaning in any given loads, so some items would come out okay and other ones would still be dirty. Josephine saw that one of the biggest failures of those machines was a lack of water pressure, and she intended to fix that in her version. And at this point in her life, Josephine was very well connected to a lot of wealthy people, many of whom her husband had business relationships with. William was not only a businessman, he was so very politically active. He was a prominent member of the Democratic Party in Illinois in a community that was not supportive of Lincoln. During the Civil War, William was sometimes called Judge or the Judge. He held no such position, but people called him that as a nickname because they trusted his opinion, and they often went to him for business and political advice. And the plan was that William could call on his vast network of friends and use his influence and his attachments to various business associates to assist in forming a company that could build and sell Josephine's dishwasher. Just as Josephine conceived of her design, William left for a visit to a hot spring to take the waters. She stayed behind to work on her idea, but he came right back home because his health precipitously got a lot worse. Over the course of their marriage. William had started to drink heavily, and he died of an illness that was exacerbated by alcohol miss used just two weeks after she had started on this dishwasher project. Grieving aside that was going to make it a lot harder for Josephine to get financial backing. People had trusted her husband in business, but she did not have any practical experience to expect the same confidence, and to make matters worse, after William's death, it became apparent that the lavish lifestyle that the Cochranes had been living was kind of built on a house of cards. They did make a lot of money, but apparently William also spent a lot of money, and Josephine was left with only fifteen hundred dollars and a debt that was far greater than that. She no longer had the business world favor or financial backing that she thought she was going to start this enterprise with, but that just made her really more adamant that she had to follow through on her plan because she needed an income. She did not seem interested in downsizing her life. She was forty five at this point. We will talk about how she approached making her idea into a reality after we pause for a word for one of our sponsors. Josephine's resolved to see her invention through the reality was, as we said before the break, stronger than ever. After her husband William had passed, she found herself without income. Her first step in testing Her design was done in her kitchen, although it involved no actual machine at all. She just wanted to make sure that she was correct in thinking that water pressure was sort of the key to this whole thing. So she assembled dishes in her sink and then proceeded to throw that was the word. She used hot soapy water onto them, and as she suspected through his trial and error, it was possible to apply enough force to the water that the dirt was rinsed from the dishes without damaging them. So then her next step was to try to build an actual working model of her machine idea. This is where George Butters enters the picture. Butters was a railroad mechanic. He worked for Illinois Central Railroad, and Josephine hired him to help build her machine since she needed somebody familiar with actual machinery. He became indispensable, not just in creating her first prototype, but just throughout the entirety of Cochrane's work. Although there isn't a lot written about their relationship, it seems like they must have gotten along great and really trusted each other. Yeah, she often talks about how many men discounted her, but she and Butters worked together for a long time. He ended up, you know, in a high position in her company, so clearly that was not a problem for him. The first version of the dishwasher that Cochran and Butters assembled took about two months to put together. There was some trial and error, and it sounds not the different from dishwashers today. They measured out dishes and then carefully built wire racks that would hold standard dish sizes, and then they had built it so that when an operator turned the crank on it, there was a pump that pushed streams of hot, soapy water onto the dishes, and then you did the same thing again without soap to rinse them clean. Josephine put the first finished prototype to work in her own kitchen, and soon the entire neighborhood wanted to stop by for a visit and see it in action. And words spread really quickly about Mrs Cochrane's contraption, inviting people to visit and see what she had been working on. Achieved the thing that Josephine Cochrane had thought she lost when her husband William died. It got her the support of the business community. She started collecting written testimonials from people who had come and witnessed the Garris Cochrane dishwashing machine, as she called it in action. Initially, Josephine was able to take orders from some of her friends and build them dishwashers of their own, but soon she realized this was not a very sustainable business model, not as a startup, and not at a time when the unit was just well out of the price range of most homes. Many years later, she told her reporter or quote, when it comes to buying something for the kitchen that costs seventy five dollars or a hundred dollars, 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 kartometers and all that into his office every day of the week without even mentioning the fact to her. If you don't know what a charmtometer is it was like an early form of a calculator, and it was all the rage in businesses at the time. Also, obviously this is all very gendered. Uh, and a lot of this discussion is, uh, just know this is you know, kind of part and parcel of what's going on throughout one of those things that we should expect, but we also see it is so gendered in every quote. I just want to warn you going forward, there will be more of the same. Josephine filed her patent application for this machine on New Year's Eve of eighteen eighty five, writing in it quote, my invention relates to an improvement in machines for washing dishes, in which a continuous stream of either soap, SuDS or clear hot water is supplied to a crate holding the racks or cages containing the dishes, while the crate is rotated so as to bring the greater portion thereof under the action of the water. It took almost an entire year, but she got her patent on December six, and she was ready to launch a company with it. Since she had realized that the home market was going to be tricky to get into, she pivoted and started targeting businesses. This was something some of her community business leaders had suggested to her. For restaurants in hotels, she knew that she could make the case that it dishwasher could cut down on expenses and man hours while improving service. Josephine, from her years on the social scene, knew that the best way to make connections with decision makers in business was through introductions and referrals. She started writing everyone she knew in Chicago who might know people in the hospitality industry. Through just such a connection, she got her first commercial order from the Palmer House hotel, which had opened in eighteen seventy three and had quickly become synonymous with luxury. After that, she followed up with sales to other hotels, and sometimes she had introductions, but sometimes she didn't. She later described making a sales call to the Sherman House Hotel with no contact or introduction, saying, quote, 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 wine. I thought I should faint at every step, but I didn't, and I got an eight hundred dollar order as my reward. Those first orders have been placed in seven by the next year. The Garris Cochrane dish washing machine Company offered two different models. The smaller of the two was still hand cranked, and it pumped soapy water onto the dishes through the motion of the operator. To rinse the dishes that you had to pour clean hot water over them. Yeah, that was the lower end. The second model was larger and it had the option to be motorized. It was much easier for anyone of any size to operate, whereas the basic model required some strength to provide enough power to wash hundreds of dishes at once. Both of these machines were touted as washing as many as two hundred forty dishes in only two minutes. I have a dishwasher. It takes much longer than that. Part of me is like, what have we lost. Both of these models offered by Cochran's company could be built to custom specifications to fit in any kitchen building. To spec was not something that Cochrane and Butters were doing on their own and Josephine's shed obviously that they had support from businessmen within the community that was largely moral support, not financial, so they didn't have the capital to open their own manufacturing facilities and had to work with a contractor. This was deeply frustrating for Josephine, who found that even though she invented the machine and held the patent, none of the men involved wanted to listen to her. Additionally, there was a firm in between her and the manufacturer, and that seemed to be making most of the money. She later said of this period, quote, women are inventive, the common opinion to the contrary. Notwithstanding, you see, we are not given a mechanical education, and that is a great handicap. It was to me, not in the way you suppose. However, I couldn't get men to do the things I wanted in my way until they had tried and failed on their own, and that was costly for me. They knew I knew nothing academically about mechanics, and they insisted on having their own way with my invention until they convinced themselves my way was better. No matter how I had arrived at it. One of her friends, who was a businessman, thought that she just needed to make more pitches to investors to gain capital so she could be a little more independent, and he actually put together a pitch package for her and went out to other members of the business community to try to drum up money himself, but it never really gained much traction. There were a few potential investors who showed interest, but to echo what she said in that quote Tracy just read, there were a lot of them that said they would only invest if Cochrane stepped aside as head of the company and let a man run the business. That was not going to happen. Similarly, campaign started by women to try to support a woman inventor didn't garner the hoped for in lucks of money. There were some ads placed in women's magazines that were like, we should be supporting this other woman, but it never really got any kind of cash flow. Josephine was tenacious, though, and she kept going as she had and making her visits to hotels and restaurants and taking orders. Cochrane had a breakthrough in EE. At the same time, many other business people found themselves in an economic crisis during the Panic of eighteen. We'll talk about the World's Columbian Exposition after we take a little sponsor break. In the World's Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago. It ran from May to October that year, and in Machinery Hall, Josephine's dishwashing machine was on display. There were demonstrations of its effectiveness as two hundred dishes at a time were loaded into it and then washed in that two in its cycle. The garris Cochrane machine drew crowds. People marveled that this invention, invented by a woman, could so easily handle a job that every household needed. But the restaurant capabilities of the machine were also on display, not just on the show floor, but throughout the expo. There was a total of ten garris Cochrane machines at the expo because in addition to the one on the show floor, Josephine had arranged for the fair's nine large restaurants to use them as well, which is so smart. The garris Cochrane dish washing machine won the judge's highest award at the fair, with the prize for Best Mechanical Construction Durability and adaptation to its line of work. That recognition was soon parlayed into advertising copy. One advertising flyer for the dishwasher that came out shortly after this touted quote the great domestic problem solved the only machine used at World's Fair, and it goes on to say, quote, attention, hotel in Steward's restaurants and boarding housekeepers, increase your profits and safe space by using a Garris Cochrane dishwashing machine. The last block of text in the flyer, which has a large detailed illustration of the machine, is at central focal point Warren's quote, Every enterprising and progressive hotel man should investigate this machine. In November of the newspaper The Dispatch of Muline, Illinois ran an article about Josephine and it's woman's World section. Though she's lauded for her inventiveness, it seems the paper got almost everything else about her wrong, right down to her name. It opens with quote, few people living in park manor one of Chicago's pretty suburbs, are aware that the quiet little woman living in an unostentatious manner at Anthony Avenue is Mrs Elizabeth garris Cochrane, a name familiar to inventors the world over. Never mind the weirdness of an address being given out some public, which is like way more common in newspapers of this era than it would be for now. For sure, the fact that she's called Elizabeth like what this article goes on to say that she came up with this idea after she was widowed, and it gets additional facts wrong. So even though her invention had been really well received, it seems that to some degree to some people, she was still just seen as a novelty more than as an inventor and a businesswoman. I'm gonna talk more about that article in our Friday. Behind the scenes sounds like a mess. It's a mess, and I have some theories. Um though she was not taken serious as seriously as she would have liked. Frankly, Josephine Cochrane had other issues at this point. The one that was really taking up her time was the onslaught of copycat machines that sprang up after she became so well known from the Expo success. Josephine defended her patent ardently. She was very quick to go after anyone infringing on it. But that was taking up a lot of time. By the end of the eighteen eighties, Josephine's business had grown to the point that she was getting busier than ever at an age when most people at the time might be retiring. In her fifties, she was traveling all over the country to visit order sites to ensure that the Garris Cochrane dishwashers were properly installed for her customers. Over the course of just seven years since her idea and since being widowed, she had built not just her dishwasher but her entire career. The hotels who bought her machines spoke really highly of them. The ones that had been on display at the expo had performed really well, and that continued to be the case. This wasn't like a situation of that test model worked, but everything else has been a mess. Hotels reported that they didn't need as many people on dishwashing duties, so they either didn't need as much staff or they could allocate staff to other more important activities. Many also reported that they had less loss through breakage than they had with just hand washing. There was also the hygiene benefit of the dish is not just being cleaned, but sanitized due to the high tempts of the water that was used. That particular benefit actually helped expand the business because more institutions like hospitals adopted the Garris Cochrane dishwasher. Throughout all of this, Cochrane had an eye on becoming more independent in her work as well. She had been putting money aside, and by she had saved enough to open her own factory and finally be out from under the manufacturing contracts that she disliked so much. George Butters headed up the operation as chief machinist and foreman. They set the factory up in a former schoolhouse. The employees answered only to Josephine and George, and she no longer had to wade through scores of other people to get things done or to make changes. Yeah, there's not a lot that I could find written about it, but it sounds like her factory was definitely um very big on mutual respect, Like I trust these people who work for me, and in return, they trust me when I say we need to change something, which sounds sort of idyllic. I don't know how truthful those accounts are, but it sounds great. She also shifted the name of the company to Cochrane's Crescent Washing Machine Company. When she opened that factory, she tried once again to get into the home consumer market. She had tried to manage production in ways that would reduce costs, but that still stayed well beyond what most families could afford, and the ones that neared affordability tended to lose a lot of the features that made them effective. Additionally, most homes at this point just did not have plumbing capable of supporting a built in washing machine. The marketing efforts tried to make use of things like touting the sanitation benefits, as well as the fact that you can simply use it to store dirty dishes out of sight until you were ready to run aload, but the home market remained elusive, and the company's primary customers continued to be hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. In nineteen well, Cochrane wanted to expand her business even more. She made a trip to New York to make sales calls at several big hotels and also sold several machines to the Lord and Taylor Department Store for its in house restaurants. She also promoted the company through interviews. She was in her seventies at this point and still working full time. She told a reporter that year quote, if I knew all I knew today, when I began to put the dishwasher on the market, I never would have had the courage to start. But then I would have missed a very wonderful experience. But though she may have found her work a wonderful experience and very fulfilling, it was also taking a toll. Like we said, she was in her seventies, and like doing all this travel, she was traveling also outside the country in some cases, to these to these visit sites to make sales calls. And in is a consequence of all of this, Josephine likely experienced a stroke. She had something happened after which she was paralyzed. Her doctor recorded her condition as being the result of nervous exhaustion. She never recovered and died on August third, nineteen thirteen. Josephine's last patent, which she had applied for to reflect updates to her design, was awarded posthumously in nineteen seventeen. Josephine's company continued after her death, and it still does as part of a larger company. In nine, Crescent was acquired by Hobart Manufacturing company. Dishwashers made after the acquisition carried the brand name Kitchen Aide, and then Kitchen Aide became part of Whirlpool in nineteen six, still going strong uh and they still mentioned Josephine and in their founding So we mentioned that during her work with her company, Josephine defended her patent with Gusto. But there were other inventors and companies also just working on their own models and slightly different approaches at the same time that cochrane was building her company. In nineteen for example, the Walker Company offered a small hand crank dishwasher for home use for the low price of twenty dollars. But that was pretty tiny though. It was kind of the size of a large stewing pot on four legs, and because it was strictly handpowered, it didn't offer the level of pressure spraying and it didn't have any real automation. Josephine did not hold a patent overseas, and new dishwasher started popping up in Europe in the early twentieth century. In four a new dishwasher with a rotating sprayer was developed by William Howard. Levin's had racks that were a lot like what listeners are probably accustomed to seeing, and a rotating sprayer. Levin's filed for European patents, but his dishwasher doesn't appear to have ever gone into production, and German manufacturer Mela brought their first electric dishwasher to the European market in Mila, named for one of its founders, Carl. Mila made a lot of different mechanical home goods, including butter churns, washing machines, and even motor cars. Melas still exists and continues to manufacture a wide range of home appliances, including dishwashers. In the nineteen fifties, as well plumbed homes came to be commonplace, so did home dishwashers. They were still considered a luxury item, though it took another twenty years before home dishwashers became fairly standard in home kitchens, but even now not every home has one. One of my best friends does not have a dishwasher. In the teens, it was estimated that about seventy five percent of homes in the United States had automatic dishwashers. Josephine Garris Cochrane was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in two thousand and six. Today, the site of the shed where she built her first dishwasher with George Butters has a historical marker which was placed there in n It reads, in part quote in a wood shed located at the rear of this site. In eighteen eighty six, Mrs Josephine Garris Cochrane eighteen thirty nine to thirteen invented one of the first mechanical dishwashers ever built. Over the years, the home itself changed hands and it was for a while a rental property that had been split into two units. Was purchased by a family who intends to restore it, and kitchen Ade gave them a new dishwasher to help with that renovation. That was I read that in a press release from the Whirlpool website, so I thought it was kind of cute dishwashers. Thank you Josephine and all other engineers and inventors who have worked on perfecting the dishwasher, because I sure like it. I have listener mail that is about another one of our invention episodes. This listener mail tickled me because its title is how Many Zippers is too Many? Which sounds a little bit like a nineteen fifties documentary educational film how Many Zippers? But it is not. It is from our listeners, Zia, and it is very charming. She writes. I have only recently caught up on stuff you missed in history class episodes, so I heard the Zippers episode on the day it am out. I wonder about the early efforts of home sewers to sew in a zipper for the first time. My first attempts required multiple tries and probably some frustrated tears and cursing. I now teach sewing to elementary and middle school students, and sewing in a zipper is one of the skills we practice. They do pretty well, no cursing. To have a supply of zippers, I try to source them cheap or free. Recently, I replied to an ad for free zippers from a business that was closing, and it said quote must take all. It turned out to be about five thousand zippers. Am I exaggerating? I'm not really sure. So when your Zipper episode came out, it was perfect for listening while I worked on my project assorting all of these zippers by type, color, length, and also brand. I was surprised to learn that Talent is the brand that evolved from the original, and not y k K, which is so ubiquitous. I don't know what I will do with this massive quantity of zippers, but I think I have enough for my classes. I love the show and the wide variety of topics, Zia. I love this because I too love a freebee. And if you are like me and you sew a lot, really, if you do anything a lot and people know it, they tend to always dump a lot of stuff on you. Like I can't tell you how many times someone has contacted me and said, hey, my aunt or grandmother passed away and they have a sewing room full of things. Do you want it? And whether I do or not, I'll just go sure because I can sort through it and I know what's worthwhile and what's and it saves the family one more thing to work through. Um. I also will say I got one of my favorite sewing implements in a very fun way, which is that um it is also sad. I used to work for a long time in a hair salon. We had regular clients and when one of them passed, she specifically left me her sewing mannequin, and I just thought that was the greatest thing of all time. I still have it. I'll have it forever. Um anyway sewing supplies sometimes freebees come in bulk um zeeah. I also want to make sure I thank you for being an educator and for teaching kids to sew. I was that kid that did not want anyone to teach me, so I would have been absolutely a nightmare. But I love that that people are still learning that skill because it's one that not as many people do as they used to, and I feel like it's very useful. You don't have to be creating entire wardrobes to get the benefit of knowing how to sew. Um, So more sewers, please, I'm all for it. If you would like to write to us about your thousands of zippers or thousands of something else or anything else you'd like, you could do that at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, And if you haven't subscribed yet and you would like to, that is so simple. You can do it on the I Heart radio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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