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launderess

launderess

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Commercial Laundry In Chicago - Circa 1917

OSAH would have fits if things like this were still going on.

What damp, hot, and back breaking work this must have been. Saving grace is during the freezing Chicago winters the warmth must have been somewhat welcomed,

http://www.criticalpast.com/video/6...washing-machine_delivering-wash_large-mangles

http://www.criticalpast.com/video/6...ollars_delivering-laundry_humidifying-machine

http://www.criticalpast.com/video/6...-machines_mending-torn-shirts_sewing-machines

Circa 1946 Newark, NJ Westing House showroom/store display.

http://www.criticalpast.com/video/6...ts-in-modern-kitchen_refrigerator_stoves[this post was last edited: 10/16/2016-08:42]
 
Having run and worked in a dry cleaning plant/laundry, I can attest to how hot and tiring the work was and still is. Pressing shirts on the shirt line or pressing jeans and laundry pants was a hot dreary job along with slaving over a hot dry cleaning press too. Most cleaning and laundry plants are impossible to air condition and have only exhaust fans and water cooling blowers to keep them cool amongst all that hot equipment.
 
You're welcome!

Worker operating the hydro-extractor broke several safety rules including the two biggest; operating that thing with lid open and reaching into the basket while it was still turning. Again OSAH or local inspectors would shut that place down! *LOL*

Those pocket washers were a solution to customers wanting their laundry not mixed with others, but allowed a laundry to still have one large machine doing the same rated pounds of wash; it was just separated into different compartments/pockets. Today of course there would be a series of smaller twenty or whatever pound washers so each customer's wash could be done individually. However many commercial plants still insist on mixing laundry, hence the marks and now bar codes that are on laundry when it comes back from the plant.

You notice there is really nothing automatic about those washers, other than they reverse IIRC. Stopping, starting, adding and draining water, introducing steam, etc.. all were done manually.

The first thing that laundryman adds from a bucket is soap. It would have been made up daily or weekly in a "cooker" from either soap flakes or bar soap shaved into bits. Some laundries "built" their own soap solution by adding soda, borax and or phosphates, others would add what was necessary to the wash cycle. The last thing he ladles out was bluing it seems.

In other video that mending department probably was quite busy. In addition to customer wear the overall laundering process does not look very gentle (hint; it wasn't) so am going with most shirts, sheets, tablecloths, etc... sent out routinely sooner or later needed some attention.

It was very labor intensive to run a laundry back then; happily Chicago like New York City was full of immigrants mostly if not all Europeans. Laundry work wasn't great but it beat domestic service. The mustache on the guy who jumps into the picture reminds me of old school German or maybe Eastern European. A neighbor of mine (sadly now departed) who came to the USA from Hungary as a child had that same type.
 
Thank you, Laundress

A guy in my boy scout troop was the son of the owner of a large laundry in Atlanta. One night we all boarded a bus and went over to the plant for a tour. It was after hours, of course, and it was in the summer. He turned on the fans to show us the breeze they created through the plant and told us that during the cold wave the previous January, when the temperature got down to minus 3F, which broke records, they still had one fan operating that day. He told us about the importance of the boiler and how at laundry conventions laundry owners talked first about boiler capacity. He turned it on and within a minute or so the pipes started snapping as the steam hit the metal.

 

The laundry in the hospital where I worked one summer was the same with the big fans. The hospital laundry was a room with a very high ceiling so the heat could rise. There was an exhaust hood over the huge mangle, but when it was in the high 80s and low 90s outside, the laundry was a hot and humid place to work. We walked past it to sign in and out  and were always grateful that we worked in the air conditioned areas.

 

Laundries that do large amounts of bedding use pocket washers to keep the sheets from tangling and balling up. I still have the green mesh laundry bag with the big pin used for my mom's laundry when she was in "The Home."

 

I remember the big Milnors with the program box on top. At various points the washer stopped, a buzzer sounded and a red light came on. Written on the program tape was what to add at that point. The operator would scoop up something, add it through the chute on the top of the tank and flip a toggle switch which restarted the tumbling, turned off the buzzer and changed the light from red to green.  They did fill and drain automatically.
 
Detachable collars both stiff and soft faded out of daily men's fashions by the 1930's or 1940's. Some men still wore them (and still do) but this is largely either a die core group of fashion sort. Then again "stiff collars" are still part of many men's formal evening wear or say for special events like a wedding. In places like the UK they are part of the traditional "uniform" for barristers, judges, etc... Indeed one of the few if not only places left that still has the equipment to launder, starch, and iron stiff collars is in London: http://www.barkergroup.info/barker_collars.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...oom-demand-producing-80-000-collars-year.html

Elsewhere such collar ironing and other specialized machines were long ago scrapped.

However you can still find side loading H-axis washing machines including pocket units that are fifty or more years old chugging away. While newer offerings can extract, there are still those in operation that do just one thing; wash/rinse. Soaking wet laundry must be moved to an extractor: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Commercial-...879182?hash=item282257ebce:g:noQAAOSw8gVX~Eoo

Because the washers shown in OP didn't extract, starching was done in another machine department. Smaller laundries could get away with returning the wash to same machine or another after extracting to starch, but large plants like this had to keep things moving. Rather than tie up the "washing" machines there was another that did starching and it varied by what was being processed. There were actually machines that starched just stiff collars, shirt bosoms, etc... This was to replace the slower work of hand starching.

Stiff collars and bosomed shirts are an art. You have to get the starch into the fabric but not just on the surface. In the case of shirt bosoms only that part and maybe the cuffs and neck band were starched. Thus obviously you couldn't put the entire shirt into a starch bath. Again this was often done by hand in the domestic setting or small laundry. A place like the "Palace Laundry" shown above that did hundreds if not thousands of stiff collars per week required faster through put .

Final bit of trivia: the detachable shirt collar was invented by a woman. Tired of laundering her husband's shirts when only the collar was dirty it came to her why not have the two separate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_collar

Troy, New York became known as the "collar capital" of the USA. Not only did the place produce much of the inventory, but many laundries that specialized in cleaning and starching said garment were located there as well. You simply packed up your dirty collars and mailed them (in a small box), and clean ones came back via same.

Due to hygiene habits being what they often were then, and the expense of having collars laundered many men wore the same one more than once, sometimes for a week or longer. As you can imagine by the time the things went to the wash it suffered a major case of "ring around the collar". Hence all the scrubbing, hot water and so forth you see in above clips. It would have involved a heavy dosage of bleaching and bluing to counteract the yellowing that came from built up collar soils. Because the industrial laundering process was so harsh many did tend to wear things longer between cleaning to help preserve. [this post was last edited: 10/16/2016-16:07]
 
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Very cool videos and information.   I would imagine that even today the laundry business is one that could not be air conditioned and would be less than pleasant in which to work.   There is a laundry here in Atlanta (Tom, Sig Samuels, you may remember  Monroe near 10th).  They still operate with very vintage equipment and business practices.   They are also a dry cleaner.  For years Sig Samuels was "the" place to send shirts and table linens.    These shared videos look somewhat similar to the equipment still in use at this Atlanta institution.
 
The worker reaching into the spinning extractor gave me the willies!!!!He could have lost his arm!!!That equipment shown sure wouldn't meet todays safety standards-and the extractor running with the lid open-today the lid would have an interlock-the machine won't start unless the lid is closed.That was the case with a spinner I used at a laundramat.Most safety is really common sense--would YOU reach into a piece of equipment that is turning??NOT ME!!I want to keep my hands and arms a while longer!
 
Awesome Footage

Thanks for posting Launderess.

That bloke really isn't scared of that spinner lol. As a professional cleaner myself, the client's laundering I do doesn't look half as back breaking as that looked.

It was great getting a look into the industries history.
Cheers.
 
Back in the 70's, 80's and 90's when I was working in and running a dry cleaners/laundry there were several machines that were somewhat dangerous to use. OSHA stepped in at some point and forced changes that really needed to be made. Some of the changes were good, some not so good. A dry cleaning or laundry "presser" had to be a pretty skilled individual with the machines used to do it with anyway. If machines were made so safe that there was NO way to possible press a limb, it restricted the ability to press the garment and was useless. There was almost always a possibility of an accident, even with a hand iron. The laundry presses were fairly fool proof, since you had to use both hands to press a button on each side to lower the press head. With dry cleaning presses you could actually press your hand, if you were totally careless. Some of the automatic machines used for pressing shirts could be dangerous if you did not know what you were doing too. So most of the problem came from not taking care in using them. We had a few accidents in the 30 years I was involved. It is just difficult to make a completely fool proof pressing machine. Seems like if you really are totally careless, you can hurt yourself. The dry cleaning machines and laundry washers were fairly safe, but still you had to take care in using them. I know the first old split pocket dry cleaning machine we had was kind of dangerous to load and unload. Back in the day, there were only supposed to be trained professional people who used them and were familiar with how they worked. As time went on, we got many new people who had no idea how to even do any of this and had to be trained. We did have some front load washers that did not extract the shirts in the beginning. We had an extractor much like the one in the video, however our extractor was designed so that you could not make it run without having the lid completely closed and it had a brake when you opened the lid. I personally replaced those machines with a line of old Frigidaire laundromat rapidry 1000 washers and used those for a couple of years until we moved the plant to a different location and got some newer machines. We did finally get a 50# front load washer/extractor, but still had several top load Frigidaire 1-18 machines too. I used to mix my starch in an old hamilton beach malt and shake mixing machine like an ice cream parlor would have. Worked quite well too. That was when I had a couple of white westinghouse front loaders for dark colored clothes that needed starch. They came out without streaks of starch that way.
 

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