Washing machine, ancient and modern

This washing machine from the early 20th century was powered by the latest "high tech" electricity, but the tub was assembled with the age-old methods of traditional coopers who could make watertight buckets from wooden staves. Manufactured by Miele, it's not all that different inside from the very early washing machines of the 1700s. "Machines" with wooden rods for beating and stirring the clothes were popular in Germany for more than a century, while the original inspiration was probably the English washing dolly. The motor is under the tub.

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Waste not want not?

Can we learn from our ancestors about cutting down on waste? "Leftovers" from food production used to supply straw mattresses, footballs, candles and more. I once thought featherbeds were a good example of not wasting any part of an animal reared for meat. One of my favourite Victorian novelists, George Eliot, implied that the feathers in mattresses, duvets, comforters came from dead geese: "...as for the spare feather-beds.....they were as plentiful as might naturally be expected in a family that had killed its own geese for many generations." But I'm afraid that many living geese had their down "harvested" up to three times a year - painful, and banned today in some countries. Domestic advice expert Maria Rundell was very matter-of-fact about it in 1806: "...old geese may indeed be plucked thrice a year without inconvenience, at an interval of seven weeks."

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