1947 Bendix Pair Photo

[danemodsandy]

Hello:

Just thought I'd show this detail from the February, 1948 issue of House Beautiful; it shows the laundry area of a show house they sponsored.

The machines are Bendii, and of course, what's unusual is that both the washer and dryer are present. Hope you enjoy.

 

[appnut]

Wow, didn't know they offered a dryer that far back!! I guesss that's the exhaust on the front, top right corner.

 

[danemodsandy]

Front Exhaust

Can anyone explain how that front exhaust worked? Did it have some sort of filter, or was this the "Fold 'n Flock" model? ;-)

 

[tomturbomatic]

Some friends had that dryer in their basement. I am not sure, but I thought that the exhaust hood on the front had a short nylon stocking to catch the lint. I just remember one of us kind of bumping it as we went past it and it clanked, so maybe it opened for access to a lint screen and they put a final filter on the front to catch the finest flying fuzzies. Since the gas dryers had to be vented to the outside, I would imagine that this one might have had some internal baffle in the exhaust like the very different Hamilton, Frigidaire and GE dryers of the time so that the exhaust could be routed from the front discharge to go out the back. Venting out the front was a short lived design. When dryers originally came out, people worried that exhausting so much inside air to the outside would cause structural damage to the house due to a supposed great difference in air pressure between the inside and the outside. They pictured windows breaking and all kinds of structural mayhem, fireplaces and furnace flues reversing their draft to pump smoke into the house, etc.. Given the not very well sealed construction of older houses, it should have sounded comical even then.

 

[gansky1]

Imagine the sighs of wonder when women saw these laundry rooms with automatic washers and dryers. The price points of these machines were pretty far out of reach for most households, a great number of which were newly started after the war.

This dryer is a very interesting design - it had a routing system inside the machine to re-use some of the heated exhaust air and only a portion was directed out the vent on the front. Most of these did have a screen or metal mesh 'cup' on the front to catch the lint. Early models offered and outdoor venting option that consisted of a vent pipe that attached to the front of the dryer and routed the air around to the back on the right side. As attractive as it sounds, I'm sure that didn't measure up to House Beautiful's standards.

When the washer needed service, did you have to remove the cabinets on the left side to un-bolt it from the floor?

Here is a (lifted) ad for the '48 dryer that shows the lint catcher. They curiously use the word "speedy" - can you imagine how long it would take to dry a load out of that slow-spinning washer? There should have been a system to catch the water from the dryer and re-use it in the washer!

 

[48bencix]

That is almost the pair

We had that washer, and a slightly later model dryer. Our dryer was from 1950, and had a glass door, but the surrounding part of the door was round, not that rectangular deal.

Gansky is correct, the vent had to come from the front and was routed to the back. Although they went through three other washers, that dryer was the only one they had from 1950 until around 1993. At some point towards the end it stopped working, but they never replaced. They would always try to dry the clothes outside. Or inside on a rack when the weather was cold and rainy.

The three other washers were: (1) A bolt down Kenmore from a friend who moved out of town, from a family that also had 4 kids so I guess it had the same usage. Installed after the Bendix finally died after a couple of bearing replacements. (2) A Maytag AMP from our cousins that had 1 kid, so less usage. Installed after the Kenmore died. (3) After all of those died, my dad finally bought a 1980's Kenmore 24" DD.

Martin

 

[jetcone]

Beautiful Photo

thanks for sharing!

Jet