11 - Legacies and meanings

Summary

Patent number 4,428,085 was lodged with the US Patent Office by an artist and inventor called Frances Grace Arnholz Bateson in 1980 and finally registered in January 1984. The patent was for an enterprise called ‘Self-Cleaning Building Construction’, and it consisted of 68 separate designs that together would enable houses and their contents to be cleaned automatically. Although this radical plan came many years after the zenith of the household science movement, it was inspired by the same principles: that cleanliness is essential, but it should be achieved as efficiently as possible. All the incumbent of the self- cleaning house had to do was press a button, wear waterproof clothes and hold an umbrella. In every room sprinklers housed in the ceiling and at the junction of wall and floor sprayed a mist of soap and water followed by drafts of warm air: the water could contain, as appropriate, germicides to counter communicable diseases, and bug repellents to deal with infestations of termites, carpenter ants, bedbugs, cockroaches, fleas and suchlike. The floors were coated in waterproof resin and were slanted so that gutters at the edges drained the water directly outdoors to the doghouse, giving the dog a good wash as well. Waterproof fabrics protected furniture, pictures and books. The whole process took under an hour. Particularly inventive was the method for laundering clothes. These were washed, dried and stored while hanging in a closet that was also a washing machine; they emerged from the wash on their hangers ready for wearing. The entire design was really quite like today's automatic car wash.

Frances Bateson, known as Frances Gabe, who created this marvel, was the daughter of an architect and the wife of an electrical engineer. She was born in 1915, found school very boring, and spent 27 years inventing her self- cleaning house. Her eureka moment came when she confronted globules of fig jam her two young children had thrown at the wall. Gabe took the garden hose to the fig jam and the idea for her mechanised house was born. She converted her own house, which was up a dirt track in rural Oregon, and charged people to come and look at the results.