Meanwhile back at the ranch....
On the other side of the pond routine boiling of laundry at least in domestic laundry went out with semi then fully automatic washing machines.
Though long held in distain by Europeans American housewives and many laundries employed chlorine bleach (eau de Javel) for whitening, stain removal and sanitizing. Hot water of course was needed especially when soap and most early detergents were used more so for whites.
It is important to remember why all this boiling was going on in the first place.
Leaving aside the sanitation and bleach activation properties laundry was boiled as a way to lessen the work of hand washing.
Prior to going into any boiling vessel laundry had already been pre-washed/soaked (all except coloured things likely to dye bleed). Boiling completed the washing process by allowing textile fibers to expand and thus release soils easily. What remained could be often tackled with less scrubbing or brute force than otherwise employed.
One *NEVER* boils dirty laundry.
Absent boiling laundry would be subjected to beating, whipping, battering, slapping and all sorts of mechanical action in efforts to shift dirt. As you might imagine a few trips through such laundering processes left textiles looking worse for wear. This fed into all that darning, mending and patching once a common part of housekeeping. It wasn't that persons were wearing out their clothing/linen, but the laundering process helped things along.
When American women/laundries got machines that did the washing it supplied the mechanical force. What remained were the other three parts of good laundry process: time, chemicals and water temperature. Since chlorine bleach will whiten and sanitize in warm or just hot water the need for boiling diminished in America.
It is interesting to see all over Europe various early washing machines with fireboxes/boilers attached. Whereas in the USA at least domestically households relied upon heating water elsewhere (a range, water heater, etc...) then sending or bringing it to the washer.
"1924: In the 1920s, wooden-tub washers from Miele were to be found in many private homes. This new technology soon caught the attention of laundries, hotels, hospitals, convalescent homes and large estates although they needed considerably bigger machines. The solution was to come from Miele's Gütersloh plant in the form of a coal-and gas-fired drum washer. The previously common wooden-tub washers with a paddle-type agitator were replaced by an electrically driven horizontal-axis metal drum. For the first time, it was no longer necessary to pour hot water into the tub as water was now heated in a side container which formed an integral part of the machine. The drum consisted of sheet copper, with perforations created from the inside working outwards in order to ensure the gentle treatment of laundry. The first model from the '00' series had a load capacity of almost 8 kg of laundry. Slowly but surely, Miele added more models to the range, some of which had a 30 kg capacity and were heated with steam."
www.miele.de
