How the Shakers Improved These 4 Everyday Objects

Though the Shakers didn’t invent flat brooms, they did come up with several improvements to the manufacturing process. Traditionally, brooms were made by tying together bunches of twigs, straw or corn. Brooms started out shaped as round bundles of bristles, but the kind associated with the Shakers has a flat edge—like what we picture a broom looking like today—which sweeps a wider path and is therefore more efficient. 

One major innovation came from Brother Theodore Bates (1762-1846) from the Watervliet Shaker community outside Albany, New York. By 1800, he had invented a vise to hold the broomcorn bristles flat so they could be stitched together with twine. The Shakers invented or updated other broom-making apparatuses, some of which were patented, says Jerry Grant, director of library and collections at the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York. 

“[This] equipment gives you the sense that they were into major broom production quite early on, and the dominance the Shaker has had in that market would suggest that that was their particular product,” he explains.

The Shakers were the first to package garden seeds in small paper packets like the ones commonly used today. They also created a tool called a “seed chisel,” which was used to “efficiently cut paper into shapes you would fold up into a packet” in order to produce huge quantities of the item, Grant explains. For example, between 1834 and 1840, nearly 1 million paper seed packets were cut, printed and filled with seed at the Mount Lebanon Shaker Society in New Lebanon, New York alone.

But the Shakers’ innovations go beyond seed production; they also created a novel distribution system. "Most people saved their own seeds, but if people wanted to buy seeds, they went to the agricultural merchant or a general store and probably got them dished out of a bulk bin," Grant says. "The Shakers sent their peddlers out on regular seed routes in the spring with special boxes filled with seeds that people could buy in packets." 

The peddlers would then return in the fall to collect the empty boxes and bring them back home. "The seeds got re-sorted and repackaged or relabeled, and taken out the next spring with new seeds in it," he explains.

Along with flat brooms, Shakers were also known for manufacturing chairs. Shakers didn’t invent what we know today as “Shaker chairs,” but because they produced and sold so many, they became associated with that particular style.

“Shaker chairs are refinements of the eastern ladderback chair, noted by their plainness and lack of turnings, lightness, efficient use of wood and skilled construction,” says Rich Spence, president of Friends of the White Water Shaker Village. 

The Shakers developed two notable improvements on stationary chairs. The first is the revolving chair, which allows the user to swivel around, similar to how modern desk chairs work. The idea was that instead of sliding a standard chair across the floor to work at another part of a desk or table—which scratched the floor or wore out a carpet—someone could easily pivot in their chair to reach a nearby surface.

The second innovation is the chair tilter: small, wooden attachments for the bottoms of the back two legs of a chair that allow the person sitting to recline. Because the standard wooden Shaker chairs weren’t necessarily the most comfortable, people would lean back against a wall while sitting in them. 

“If you have a hardwood chair—something made out of maple or birch—and then you lean back on a soft wood pine floor, it's going to leave dents on the floor,” Grant says. “The Shakers’ idea was [that] if you had something that swivels on the bottom of the chair, the legs with them would stay flat on the floor.” 

This innovation came in the 1820s, he says. By 1852, chair tilters were being used on a regular enough basis that somebody in the Shaker community came up with the idea of making them out of pewter or brass, then patented the design. 

Different versions of washing machines existed before the Shakers, but they had a reputation of wasting soap, ruining clothes and being labor-intensive. 

Nicholas Bennett, a Shaker mechanic at Mount Lebanon, likely developed and began manufacturing an updated machine using mechanical power in the early 1850s. After producing and selling this model for a few years, the Shakers received a patent for an “Improved Washing Machine” on January 26, 1858. Two years later, Scientific American ran a front-page article on the Shakers’ efficient machine. The Shakers made additional improvements to their washing machine, which they patented in 1877.

Washing machines were important to the Shakers because “they were basically running commercial laundries,” washing the clothes of up to 100 people at a time communally, Grant says. And they didn’t keep their technology to themselves. “They built machines to sell to hotels, prisons, almshouses, asylums, schools, colleges and other big institutions,” he explains.