The good china keeps coming back chipped

Those plates made it through two hundred years in the family. Then we hired help. — Hostess, 1886

Josephine Cochrane had servants to wash her china, and they kept chipping it. So she sent them off and washed it herself. She hated it. She went out to the shed instead, measured every plate, cup and saucer, built a wire slot for each one, set them on a wheel in a copper boiler and sprayed them with soapy water. Her husband died while she was building it and left her in debt, so the machine had to save more than the china. It did.

Noted: her company is now KitchenAid.

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Inventing ran in the family. Her great-grandfather was John Fitch, who got one of the first American patents for a steamboat.

The housewives wouldn't buy it, so she sold it to hotels and restaurants. The first one went to the Palmer House hotel in Chicago in 1887, through a rich friend. At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago it won an award for how it was built and how long it lasted, and the fair's restaurants used it to wash tens of thousands of dishes a day. It was the only machine in its hall invented by a woman.

Selling it was a job of its own. Years later she said, "You cannot imagine what it was like in those days ... for a woman to cross a hotel lobby alone." She crossed it anyway.