I Will Dry Them All Trivia Quiz

Historians generally agree that the first recognizable precursor to today's bath towel made its appearance in the Ottoman (modern Turkish) city of Bursa sometime in the Seventeenth Century. That's the Seventeenth Century AD! It is thought that the importance of what we would now call the Turkish bath in Ottoman society combined with the growing art of carpet making to give the first proto-towels - long, narrow strips of linen or cotton called pestamels - more heft (and probably more absorbancy too) with the use of a loop type of pile. Before this monumental invention, it seems wet people reached for whatever dry cloth item, like a cloak, was nearest to hand and seemed big enough for the job.

By the Nineteenth Century, the industrial production of cotton goods made towels, of recognizable terrycloth, plentiful and affordable. It was at this time that the different towels we know came into being - that is hand towels, bath towels, etc. Soon, bath towels became thicker and fluffier than other towels.

Unlike a dishtowel which may be made of terrycloth, the tea towel is always made of cotton or linen. This handy and attractive item came into use in Eighteenth Century Britain along with the proliferation of silver and china tea services. Though the practical use of the tea towel and its humble cousin the dishtowel declined as paper toweling came into ever more widespread use from the early 1930s onward, they have remained popular as decorative and novelty items.

It's hard to believe, but the clothespin for hanging up wet laundry on a line only appeared in the early Nineteenth century. This simple yet ingenious device is fashioned from a single small piece of wood with a knob-like head and two legs forming a clamp to secure the pinned or pegged item to the clothesline.

The first recorded patent for this epoch-making invention (presumably in Britain) was in 1809 by Jeremie Victor Opdebek. The first American patent on a slightly improved version was granted to Samuel Pryor in 1832. Romani crafted and sold these small but highly useful items in Britain, while Shaker communities did so in the United States.

Although the term 'mangle' signifying a device for pressing fabric is not attested in English until 1598, the laundry drying and pressing device we now know as a mangle or clothes press has been in use in some form or other for centuries. Mainly used in northern Europe, the table version consisted of the rolling pin, a wood cylinder around which the damp cloth was wrapped, and the mangle board, a curved or flat length of wood, used to roll and flatten the cloth. The oldest known example of this device is a Norwegian mangle board, found near Bergen and dated 1444.

The modern mangle, a mechanism consisting of two rollers in a sturdy frame, connected by cogs and in its home version powered by a hand crank or electricity, did not come into widespread use until the Nineteenth Century. When heating elements were introduced in the early Twentieth Century, the mangle became a true drying appliance. Though the mangle or ironer was popular for home use in the 1940s and '50s in the U.S., the gas and later the electric tumble clothes dryer displaced it. Nowadays, mangles are used in commercial laundries and the like to press sheets, tablecloths and other laundry. But they are still used domestically in other parts of the world, as being faster and more energy efficient.

Although David M. Smith of Springfield, Vermont, in the USA invented a wooden clothespin with two prongs connected by a fulcrum plus a spring in 1853, it wasn't until Smith's design was improved by Solon E. Moore in 1887 that the spring-actuated clothespin became practical and cheap to manufacture en masse.

This type of clothespin works by lever action. When the top of the device is pinched, the prongs open at the bottom, allowing the clothespin to be slipped over the laundry item and the clothesline. When the top is released, the spring draws the two prongs shut at the bottom, creating the action necessary for gripping.

Moore added what he called a "coiled fulcrum" made from a single wire. This was the spring that held the wooden pieces together, acted as a spring forcing them to shut, and as a fulcrum on which the two halves could rock, eliminating the need for a separate component, and reducing manufacturing costs. This is the clip type clothespin we know today though, like so many items, it is often made of plastic nowadays.

When sunbathing became fashionable in the 1920s, the trusty towel evolved to meet the new need. At first, people lugged with them to the beach both a blanket to lie on and a bath towel to dry themselves with. But bed or even picnic blankets weren't really suitable, while bath towels weren't either. So, some ingenious soul - We'll never know who - developed a towel that was as large as a picnic blanket. Made with double loops like a household towel, the beach towel has the loops sheered off on one side, leaving a large, decorative towel that can serve both as something to dry off with and as a beach blanket.

In 1879 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, brothers Irvin and Clarence Scott started a company to provide bathroom tissue to hospitals. But in 1907, a fortunate accident happened. Irvin's son Arthur, now in charge of the company, received a shipment of paper that was too thick to be turned into toilet paper. History does not record what if any verbal fireworks ensued. What is known is that eventually Arthur remembered hearing of a local schoolteacher who gave her sick pupils pieces of paper to dry their hands, so they wouldn't contaminate the communal cloth towel in the lavatory. Why not, Arthur thought, use his railcar load of too thick paper to fashion purpose-made paper towels? Scott sold their "Sani-Towels" to restaurants, hotels, railroad stations, and of course schools - anyplace that had public lavatories.

The next big step came in 1931, when Arthur realized the disposable paper towels could be resized for use as kitchen towels. Like most innovations, this one took a while to catch on. But through the '30s and '40s kitchen paper towels became increasingly popular because of their convenience and the improvement they brought in sanitation.

French inventor M. Pochon designed the "ventilator for drying clothes" in 1799. This was a perforated drum, turned by a hand crank and placed over the fire. It dried clothes more quickly than passive air drying on a clothes horse (drying rack) or in an airing cupboard, but they were left smoky and sooty and maybe singed. The American inventor George T. Sampson made a vast improvement in aesthetics and safety by placing his drying drum atop a purpose-built stove. The Sampson design remained popular until the advent of a practical tumble dryer powered by either natural gas or electricity in the late 1930s.

No one inventor can be credited with developing the modern clothes dryer as we know it. Henry W. Altorfer invented and patented an electric clothes dryer in 1937. J. Ross Moore developed designs for automatic clothes dryers and published his design for an electrically operated dryer in 1938. and industrial designer Brooks Stevens developed an electric dryer with a glass window in the early 1940s. Today's tumble dryers have sophisticated controls and touch screens instead of dials and switches, but they still dry laundry by tumbling and heating it.

According to Webster's Dictionary, the word 'clothesline' first came into use in 1830. Historically, such a line was strung between buildings, trees or, ideally, posts made of wood or metal. Yet, even while automatic (indoor) dryers were becoming more practical and affordable, as late as the mid 1940s many housewives still struggled to string their lines between trees in the backyard. In an indication of how uneven and indeed regional the introduction and adoption of technology can be, one Australian historian believes she has found photographic evidence of a device resembling the umbrella or rotary clothesline in Port Melbourne, Victoria, as early as the 1860s.

But there appears to be no dispute over who invented and first marketed the Hills Hoist, what is known in other parts of the world as an umbrella clothesline or rotary washline. Returning World War II serviceman Lance Hill, so the story goes, found his wife Sherry trying to string her clothesline in the backyard. On the spot, he gathered some spare parts and built her something to hang her washing on. Some time later, Lance heard strangers on the tram talking longingly about a new tool for hanging laundry one of the women had seen. Realizing they were talking about the thingamajig he had rigged for Sherry, he hurried home to tell her he was going into business. And thus the Hills Hoist was born. When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s this compact, usually collapsible, and indispensable piece of equipment was ubiquitous.

Alexandre Ferdinand Godefroy constructed the forerunner of today's hood dryer (fixture in beauty salons) in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888 or 1890, sources differ. By the 1950s the bonnet dryer, a lightweight, home version of the large, stationary hood dryer, had become popular. But it was the handheld form of the device, commonly known as a blow dryer, that revolutionized hair care.

Early blow dryers, introduced in the 1920s, were large, heavy, clunky appliances, awkward to handle and prone to overheating. Over the decades, design and safety features improved. In 1954, the first handheld hair dryers appeared that had internal motors rather than external ones. By the 1960s, plastics had been developed that were strong, lightweight and heat resistant, thus making the blow dryer smaller, lighter and easier to handle. So, though home models had been available for some forty years, it wasn't until the mid '60s that the blow dryer came into its own as an essential personal grooming tool.