Andrew, There was a company by the name of Jackson that made a round dishwasher. It, too, had semicircular doors arranged so that the machine opened on one side for the rack of dirty dishes to be pushed in. After the wash-rinse cycle was completed, only the door on the clean side of the counter would open. There was a safe guard so that once the clean dishes were removed, that side had to be closed in order to move another rack of soiled dishes in and the machine had to go through a cycle before the dishes could be unloaded on the clean end. At one time the circular racks were yellow vinyl. The round shape wasted a lot of space compared with square racks. They were not so great at washing and were the devil when it came to installing the electronic detergent and rinse-agent dispensers, because everything was in one tank. This was my father's opinion and he had to train people to do those things on every brand of commercial dishwasher. When I had the opportunity to tag along with him, the various big commercial machines were pretty neat. I liked to eat in restaurants that had a counter as well as booths (like Waffle House, Toddle House, and back when they still existed Dobb's House, and then get a seat where I could watch the Hobart Turtleback be put through its paces. When dime stores and drug stores had luncheonettes, I liked to watch the front loading Hobart witn one rack and a 4.5 minute cycle. The Dunkin' Doughnut Shop that was on Piedmont between Montgomery Ferry and Cheshire Bridge had one for coffee mugs and the way they stacked those mugs, you would have thought the Flying Wallendas had trained them. I will have to drag out some of his information on dishwashers.
Kitchens were pretty neat, but for machinery, bottling plants won hands down. The bottles were washed in a machine that was about as long as half a city block. Their width was measured in how many bottles one link of the machine's conveyor link would hold and they could be up to several dozen bottles wide. The tanks of the caustic solution where the bottles soaked were kept hot 24/7 and some times, I could look under them and see the big gas burners firing along. A lot of the operation was, as Robert terms it, a "Forbidden Cycle", but some of the machines had glass windows along the top of the side where you could look in and see each row of bottles move into position over the spray jets, get sprayed and then move on with the water running out. If I had been given a good, strong flashlight or work light and a ladder, I could have stayed there all day. The machine that my father thought did the best job was the only one that had a row of brushes that went up inside the bottles to further scour them. Tom
