An appliance is a device or machine that is powered by electricity and that is used in people's houses to perform a particular job such as cleaning or cooking.The broad usage, afforded to the definition allows for nearly any device intended for domestic use to be a home appliance, including consumer electronics as well as stoves, refrigerators, washers, dryers, dishwashers to air conditioners.
Appliances were designed to make life easier when cooking and preparing food. Since the mid-1800s, people have been thinking of new and innovative ways to store food, cook food and clean up after eating food.
If electrification brought light and power into the home, it created the 20th century's laborsaving household devices. This devices owe a huge debt to electrification. In the second half of the century advances in electronics yielded appliances that could be set on timers and even programmed, further reducing the domestic workload by allowing washing and cooking to go on without the presence of the human launderer or cook.
Inventors are still trying to make things easier by coming up with new products that do more things as well as stoves, refrigerators, toasters, air conditioners to light bulbs and well pumps.
Whether you prefer gas or electric, stoves are the main source of cooking food in American homes today. The stove is something that most people could not do without.
The Copeman Electric Stove Company, based in Flint, Michigan, received the first patent for an electric stove in 1912 and continued to perfect their technology in following years. Today, people can choose between gas and electric. Since they are both safe and serve the same purpose, the stove that people use is generally a matter of personal preference.
Cooking appliances have come a long way since impaling something on a stick over a campfire. Older wood burning stoves were great for not only cooking pancakes but heating your entire house as well.
With the invention of the pellet and charcoal stoves, temperatures could be better regulated through the use of a consistent fuel source. The stove would also require less attention by using a hopper system to slowly fee fuel from a storage container (hopper) into a burn-pot area; they create a constant flame that requires little to no physical adjustments and are still in use today.
Preserving food has not always been easy at all. There were a number of ways to keep food cool in earlier times, and humans made use of a diverse number of natural surroundings Centuries ago, people gathered ice from streams and ponds and did their best to store it year-round in icehouses and cellars, so they had a ready supply to keep their food cold.
People also cut ice in the wintertime, and stored it in deep cellars or icehouses. Such ice could keep for a significant period of time, especially if it was covered in salt.
However, and snow and ice served as the primary means of refrigeration until the beginning of the 20th century.Iceboxes.
One of the next steps between storing ice underground and modern refrigeration was the icebox.It bears some resemblance to the refrigerator . These were developed just before the 19th century. Often installed in a home, they were simply wooden boxes and sometimes lined with metal or other materials. People would place ice in the box, and then store foods with it that needed to be kept cool.
Mechanical refrigeration, has had even more far-reaching effects, through refrigeration . These cooling technologies have altered some of our most fundamental patterns of living. Our daily chores are different. What we eat and how we prepare food have both changed as a result of 20th-century expertise at keeping things cool.
Before the use of refrigeration, a world that was still very much present well into the first decades of the 20th century. Only fresh foods that could be grown locally were available, and they had to be purchased and used on a daily basis. Meat was bought during the daily trip to the butcher s; the milkman made his rounds every morning. If you could afford weekly deliveries of ice blocksh arvested in the winter from frozen northern lakes you could keep some perishable foods around for 2 or 3 days in an icebox.
All that had changed by the end of the century. Fresh foods of all kinds were available just about anywhere in the country all year round and what wasn't available fresh could be had in convenient frozen form, ready to pop into the microwave. The milkman was all but gone and forgotten, and the butcher now did his work behind a counter at the supermarket. Indeed, many families concentrated the entire week's food shopping into one trip to the market, stocking the refrigerator with perishables that would last a week or more
The invention of the scrub board in 1797 was only a slight improvement from scrubbing clothes by hand against stones. In the 1800s, hand-turned drums were the beginning of the washing machine, as we know it today. Still it wasn't until William Blackstone designed the first hand-driven washing machine for home use in 1874 that technology began the fast leap forward that would combine with the invention of the dryer to revolutionize the way laundry is done. Today, nearly every home has a washer and dryer. Even though the basic design of the dryer has not changed much in hundreds of years, changes are in the making.
Prior to the invention of the washer , doing laundry took enormous amounts of time and energy as water often had to be pumped or drawn from a well, carried in, heated, clothes scrubbed, rinsed, and wrung out by hand. Even though the earliest designs were hand-cranked drums, it was a step in the right direction. As wringers were added to the machines in 1861 and the electric wringer style washer became available in 1911, the washing machine allowed laundry to be done more efficiently than ever. Today s washing machines are designed with convenience and energy efficiency in mind.
Spin cycles have replaced wringers and automatic timing run by microchips mean there is no need to provide direct hands on labor. The choice between top loading and front loading washers or even a combination washer/dryer that does away with the need to transfer clothes from one machine to another has continued to lighten the washday load.
The solar power was the first source of energy used to dry clothes as people washed, rinsed and wrung out clothes by hand and hung them over rocks, tree branches or later clotheslines to dry in the sun. The first dryer invented was a simple wooden rack to hang clothes near a fire to dry. The first mention of a modern type dryer appeared in the 1800s when a Frenchman by the name of Pochon invented a vented-barrel-shaped drum called a ventilator to dry clothes. Clothes were placed inside the drum and the drum was turned by hand over an open fire. It was not a very reliable method or machine, but opened the doors for future designs.
By 1915, the electric clothes dryer was introduced but it was not until the Hamilton Manufacturing Company produced the first automatic dryer in 1938 that the use of the dryer started to become known. From 1938 through the 1960s, the cost of owning a dryer remained out of reach for most people with a dryer in the 1950s costing the equivalent of $1600 in today s money. New technologies, production methods, and lower costs put the dryer in more homes by the late 1990s.