Dishwasher

Inventor of the first commercially successful automatic dishwasher was Josephine Cochrane. Her dishwasher was the first to use water pressure instead of scrubbers to clean the dishes.

Before her in 1850, Joel Houghton patented a wooden machine with a hand-turned wheel that splashed water on dishes.It was hardly a workable machine. Later in the 1860s, L. A. Alexander improved the device with a geared mechanism that allowed the user to spin racked dishes through a tub of water. But it was not effective.

Her machine was a hand-operated mechanical dishwasher. She founded a company to manufacture these dishwashers, which eventually became KitchenAid.