Extinct household appliances of the 20th century

01

Mangle (machine)

Two steel rollers squeezed laundry dry — and de-gloved hands at the wrist without stopping. Hospitals tracked the injuries by decade. The machine outlasted every safety campaign aimed at it.

02

Gas mantle

Before electricity, a mesh sock soaked in radioactive thorium dioxide burned inside every middle-class parlour lamp. The mantles crumbled to radioactive dust when touched. Millions were sold; none came with warnings.

03

Thor washing machine

The 1908 Thor washing machine married bare copper wiring to a full tub of water and called it progress. Its inventor, Alva Fisher, left the ground wire out entirely. It sold briskly.

04

Laundry wringer

Hospital intake forms in the 1930s had a pre-printed checkbox labeled 'wringer injury.' Crushed arms numbered in the thousands annually before spin-dryers replaced the rollers. The checkbox existed because it was needed.

05

Roasting jack

Rising chimney smoke turned a fan-blade that rotated the roasting spit — a fully autonomous heat engine built into Tudor kitchen walls. The cook could leave. The meat turned itself.

06

Wash copper

Every Victorian kitchen held a coal-fired copper cauldron that boiled the week's clothes like soup — lye, blood, and grease rising together. Washday lasted from dawn to dusk, every Monday, without exception.

07

Icebox

Families paid the iceman daily for a 25-pound block of lake-harvested ice just to keep butter solid and milk unturned. When ice didn't arrive, the food rotted by afternoon.

08

Clothes iron

Named from the Old English 'sæd,' meaning solid — not sorrowful — the sad iron was a 6-pound cast-iron slab heated directly on the stove. Women rotated three irons to maintain one usable temperature.

09

Carpet beater

Woven rattan, swung hard against hanging rugs in the yard every spring — the carpet beater was killed by one invention, the vacuum cleaner, within thirty years of its own peak production.

10

Butter churn

A wooden dasher plunged up and down by hand for forty unbroken minutes to produce one pound of butter. The task fell to whoever was smallest — usually the children.