Most of these inventors' names have not stayed in the public's consciousness, though. For every Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, there are countless inventors whom no one has heard of, such as me.
I invented the Dishwasher but it wasn't to make doing the dishes easier, its main purpose was to reduce the number of breakages caused by my clumsy servants.
As the daughter of a civil engineer and the great- granddaughter of John Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat, my main problem in life was worrying about the maids chipping my precious china which had been in the family since the seventeenth century.
This enraged me so much that one night after i spotted yet more chips in the plates one evening I dismissed all the servants and did the damned dishes myself.
In my defence, this did come with the realisation of just what an awful job washing up was so I looked around for a machine which could do it for me, didn't find one so decided to invent one myself.
When my husband William died and left me heavily in debt, I got serious and with the help of an engineer friend, designed the machine in our woodshed and despite being crude and cumbersome it was effective and we were able to able to wash and dry 200 dishes in two minutes.
I showed it off at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and won first prize for the best mechanical construction for durability and adaptation' and sold them at $250 each to hotels and restaurants.
So the first practical dishwasher was actually invented to wash dishes more often than a women who couldn't be arsed to.
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