Who Invented the Dishwasher?

Josephine Garis Cochran invented the first modern dishwasher in the 1880s. Unlike previous attempts at dishwashing machines, which used scrubbers on the dishes, Cochran’s machine cleaned dishes with water pressure.

Cochran founded her own company to manufacture and sell her invention, and continuously improved it with new patents. After her death, the KitchenAid brand acquired her company and used her patents to build and sell its dishwashers.

In the press, Cochran showed marketing savvy by portraying herself as a wealthy woman who invented a dishwashing machine because she was tired of her multiple servants chipping her fine china. But census records suggest she didn't have multiple servants. She also encouraged reporting that she was the granddaughter of a steamboat inventor, although her private correspondence shows she knew this wasn’t true. Even the spelling of her last name is not so straightforward, since at some point she began adding an “e” on the end.

So, what do we actually know about Josephine Garis Cochran(e)?

Josephine Garis was born in Ashtabula County, Ohio. An obituary after her death suggested she was born in 1839, while the age on her death certificate places her birth year as 1841. In 1858, she married William Apperson Cochran, and they settled in Shelbyville, Illinois. His death in 1883 left her in considerable debt, and it was around this time that she probably began work on a dishwashing machine.

Josephine Garis Cochran’s father was a civil engineer who worked with pumps and mill machinery, but she didn’t have a formal mechanical education. To build her machine, she enlisted the help of a mechanic named George Butters. In 1886, she received her first patent for her “dish-washing machine” from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

After building her machine, Cochran set out to manufacture and sell it. She tried using a couple of manufacturing firms before deciding to open her own manufacturing plant, with Butters as the foreman. In a 1912 interview with the Chicago Record-Herald, Cochran lamented the problems she had encountered in the process early on.

“I couldn’t get men to do the things I wanted in my way until they had tried and failed in their own,” she said. “And that was costly for me. They knew I knew nothing, academically, about mechanics, and they insisted on having their own way with my invention until they convinced themselves my way was the better, no matter how I had arrived at it.”

Cochran sold her invention through her own Garis-Cochran Dish Washing Machine Company. Although she was able to sell it to some very wealthy households, most homes didn’t have the hot water capacity needed to run the dishwasher. And for many families, the appliance’s price tag (which ran in the hundreds of dollars) was likely too expensive. Because of this, Cochran sold most of her dishwashers to commercial businesses like restaurants and hotels.

In her public interviews, Cochran (or “Cochrane,” as she began spelling her name in the 1890s) was deliberate about how she portrayed herself. Cochran was a savvy saleswoman, and there’s evidence suggesting that not all of the stories she told the press were true, says Irene M. H. Herold, a professor and dean of libraries at Virginia Commonwealth University.

When Herold wrote her Masters history thesis about Cochran, she noted the implausibility of some of Cochran’s claims. In the same 1912 interview with the Chicago Record-Herald, Cochran says she invented her dishwashing machine after growing tired of her multiple servants chipping her fine china. Herold found no servants listed at Cochran’s home in the 1870 census; and in the 1880 census, there was only one person listed as a servant and a boarder, in addition to the relatives who lived with Cochran. The article also misidentified her husband, who had worked as a circuit court clerk, as a former judge.

In addition to promoting stories that elevated her wealth and class status, Cochran didn’t correct claims that her grandfather was steamboat inventor John Fitch. Though she did have a great-grandfather named John Fitch and a grandfather named Joseph Fitch, she and her relatives actually investigated this claim and found that neither of them were the same Fitch who invented the steamboat, Herold says. Still, she let the press think it was true, as the connection seemed like good advertising for her business.

What’s frustrating for Herold is that the myths Cochran promoted often overshadow her real contributions.

“She was a remarkable woman with her real story,” Herold says. “She was not just the inventor, but she was also the manufacturer, the salesperson, she oversaw installations and she continuously improved her invention through multiple patents.” She supported many relatives both financially and as a caregiver, and used her business to further support them after her husband’s death.

Cochran moved to Chicago in 1890, and three years later, she exhibited her invention at the World’s Columbian Exposition along with other female inventors. She won a prize for her dishwasher, and went on to exhibit at fairs in Massachusetts, New York and Missouri. When she died in Chicago in 1913, she had six U.S. and two British patents to her name.

After Cochran’s death, her company changed names and changed hands. Dishwashers remained a mostly commercial product until the 1950s and ‘60s, when they transitioned from an expensive extravagance to a common household appliance.

The water pressure method that Cochran pioneered persevered over earlier scrubber designs, and the Whirlpool Corporation (which acquired KitchenAid in the 1980s) still acknowledges her contribution today.