May 21, 2014 • 41 mins
Clothes dryers have evolved from precarious, fire-bellied devices to the increasingly green machines we know today. We cover the history of dryer tech, plus the newest innovations and NASA-funded research. And, of course, explain how they work.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff Works dot com. Say then, everyone, and welcome to
tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Foke OBAM
and Laurena. Here's someone on Facebook. Wanted to know about
some tech related thing, right, yeah, Thomas on Facebook road
(00:24):
in and to to us two guys and one gal
here at tex Stuff. Hey, nol you were represented. Nol
Is is smiling from behind his barrier, very gentitely, raising
the roof. I believe, yes, I think so um, but yes, yes,
so so Thomas wanted to know now that we have
done an episode about washing machine, how dryers were Okay,
(00:46):
all right, excellent. Yeah, and guys, remember we asked at
the end of every episode if you have ideas, send
them in and we mean it. Yeah, do that. So,
first of all, we're talking about dryers. So what was
the first clothes dryer, Lauren? The Sun? Yeah, that thing
is just pulling so much double duty, I mean triple duty,
like like quintuple duty. What's what's above quickly, Yeah, like
(01:10):
infinite duty. Yeah, there's a lot of duty going on
with the sun, including drying our clothes. So clearly, if
you've ever had to dry close without having the use
of a dryer. I've done this. I think a lot
of people have done this at some point or other.
Maybe fewer today than back when I was a kid.
But it depends on where you live. If you're in
the middle of a city, perhaps yeah, maybe not so much.
(01:32):
You might have gone to a laundromat or something. But
most of if you look at history, most people use
the sun in some form or another by laying wet
clothes that have just been washed out on on on
a rock or hanging it on a line or over
the branch of a tree yep, and just letting the
sun do its thing evaporate all that water. Usually take
you know, a couple hours um depending upon where you
(01:54):
were at, how hot it was, how humid it was.
Humidity could slow things down, obviously, not only dried up
the clothing, it would also cause colors to fade over time,
sometimes pretty quickly, depending upon the dye being used. Now,
sometimes you plan for that, that was what you wanted.
In fact, the Romans used to use various types of
minerals and rub them in on the cloth. They would
(02:15):
make during the drying process. An arctic to um specifically
fade or or even bleach it. Yeah, so that way
you get that nice white toga look, um, and then
you can go to all the parties because in Roman
times they were all toga parties. Okay, I was gonna
see if I can get an eye roll, but instead
of Lauren just gave me the staring right into my
soul look, which is terrifying. So we're gonna move on. Okay.
(02:37):
So so wash your technology evolved, Um it really intricately,
as as you may have heard in our previous episode.
But since the sun is relatively effective and drying clothes
this way is not really difficult, backbreaking, time consuming work,
dryer technology didn't really develop along the same lines. Yeah,
it just it wasn't as big a deal because yet,
(02:59):
to wash something you had to put in a lot
of effort, right, you had to, especially before the washing machine,
you had to scrub things manually or stomp on them
or beat them against rocks or throw them away and
get new stuff. I mean, it just was not easy
to do, and so there was a need to develop
automation there. It just it felt like there's this is
so much work. It's it's the woman's dread as we
(03:23):
said in the last podcast, according to one quote, so
that made sense. But for drying, like you said, it
was it was free to dry it by the sun,
so you didn't have to you know, put in any
kind of expense there except maybe for a clothesline and
maybe some maybe some closed pins, but that's about it.
And uh yeah, you just had to lay it out
and collect it. That's all the labor that was involved.
(03:44):
So it wasn't as imprintant to develop a dryer, but
it didn't make things convenient, right, You couldn't have dry
clothes very quickly using that rate. So if it happened
or something like that, Yeah, So there certainly were people
who were thinking there's to be a way to dry
close even if the weather is bad, or to do
it more quickly than just putting them all on the
(04:05):
sun for a few hours. And I'm sure that a
lot of people were doing this. But the history of
this kind of thing is a wee bit contentious, as
we find out every time we look into the history
of something. Yeah, as it turns out, when you want
to look at the history of something that's been around
for at least a couple uh, like like a century,
or more, and especially something that was done by the
lower classes who were not writing about it or or
(04:27):
certainly not contributing to scientific journals very frequently, or perhaps
didn't bother to patent something, then it's hard to find
reliable records. So here's a big caveat for all the
historical stuff you're about to listen to, dear listeners. The
caveat is that we did a lot of background research
(04:49):
to try and verify as many claims as we could,
and a lot of them are unverifiable, meaning that there
are no primary sources that are definitive. There are a
lot of sources that quote each other, but it becomes
kind of a circular thing. Yeah, which does happen on
the internet. Uh, not entirely and frequently right, Um, But
so so, most of what we're going to tell you
(05:10):
comes directly from the U. S. Patent Office. That's what
I relied upon most heavily. Although our first example is
not among them because it wasn't a United States invention,
it was actually a French one. This is one you're
going to see if you ever do a search for
the history of dryers, this is going to pop up
all the time. Usually the year is specifically seventeen, but
the best I'm going to say is around the year
(05:31):
eighteen hundred. A French inventor known only as Poshan p
O c h O N sometimes listen as M. Posh On,
but I believe the M is for Monsieur Poshan, not
necessarily a name that begins within, created what he called
a ventilator, which to me sounds like a weapon you
would pick up in Duke Newcombe. But in this case,
(05:54):
a ventilator was a metal drum that had some small
holes in it. So that might start to sound familiar
already to anyone who's used a dryer. And you put
your wet clothing into the drum and turn it using
a hand crank, right, and you think, well, okay, so
now you're just turning a drum full of wet clothes
with holes in it. What else you have to put
it near a fire, yeah, as your source of heat.
(06:15):
And now here's the thing. Um. Sometimes this meant that
clothes would get a little uh you know, burnt, Yeah,
a little little extra crispy um or or full of
smoke in any case, Yeah, so you would end up
damaging clothes this way, And according to most reports this
is the first tumble dryer, but didn't catch on, mostly
(06:35):
because of the downsides, Right, the idea that you would
end up damaging clothes, Well, if you're gonna damage them,
then that's not helpful at all. So the interesting thing
to me is that this basic approach that he took
ends up being the the kind of the central design
of dryers in the future. It would just take a
long time to perfect the heating elements, like a couple years. Yeah,
(06:58):
so sorry, but yeah, but it's interesting that again, we
couldn't really find any primary sources on this, so this
story could be apocryphal. However, I'm going to go ahead
and say that it sounds like it's possible, so we'll
give it a pass. Sure. Then in this is the
(07:19):
next really official dryer technology that we have to report on,
and it's one that we actually mentioned in our episode
about washing machines. That's when um Ellen Edgley invented a
ringer to sit on top of washing machines and help
dry out the laundry before you hang it on a line.
So so that's that's squeezing mechanism to the two rollers
and it rolls the clothing between and squeezes them with
(07:41):
incredible pressure that could crush your fingers if you get
them too close. Don't do it right right. The design
would later be integrated into washing machine models until these
tumble dryers later caught on. Yeah, so two, we have
another African American inventor, this one by the name George T.
Samps And, who filed a patent for a clothes dryer.
(08:03):
In this case, he spelled dryer d R I E R,
which some of the patents are in that spelling. Some
of them are d R y E R I. Can
do what they want. His invention wasn't a tumble dryer, however,
although I saw a lot of notes that said it
was an improvement or, in the case of some of them,
a betterment of Poshan's approach. Uh, it wasn't wasn't like, No,
(08:27):
it wasn't a tumble dryer. The I think the betterment
or improvement would be that he used a stove as
the heat source as opposed to an open flame, so
it reduced the kind of damage that could happen. But yes, he,
as he pointed out, it was not a tumble dryer.
It was not like a drum that you put clothes in.
It was more of a frame, and you would put
the clothes within the frame, secure it in the frame,
(08:50):
and then put the suspend the frame near the stove
and the heat would would end up evaporating the water
out of the clothing. So, uh, it's in that pattern,
is in the records, so you can actually go and
look at it. And if you look at it, you'll
see it is not a tumble dryer. It's not the
same style as posh on. So that tells me something else.
It tells me that some of the websites that I
(09:11):
pulled up while I was doing this just didn't go
and look at the patents. They just reported it as
being like this was an improvement on that tumble dryer,
And uh, always go that extra step. I'm saying that
to all of our listeners because I expect that they
will occasionally have to write things like if you're a student,
you may have to write a paper. This is why
(09:32):
taking that extra step, Like if you just find a
web page that says it's about that stuff, see if
you can find a primary source, because it's always going
to give you a better idea of what the real
story n Then we have a patent by Seward H.
Davis for his clothes drying machine. And it's interesting. So
now he's decided to incorporate an oven directly into the
(09:56):
device to generate heat. So we're still creating an oven.
It's pre heating air because obviously an oven's not going
to generate heat at the speed where you could just
blow air across it and it's going to be hot, right,
so you would. But he also incorporate a motor in
his It was a motor that was connected by pulleys
to a rotating drum, so going back to that post
on approach, right, and it would rotate in one direction
(10:17):
for a few turns and then go back the other way. Yeah,
because according to Davis, you didn't want to continuously rotated
in one direction or else the clothes would become hopelessly
entangled with one another, and uh, it would just end
up being a big mess. So his design had it
where it would rotate one way then the other, and
that would prevent the clothes from getting, yeah, from clumping
and getting all like super friendly inside the dryer. You
(10:40):
want your clothes to be a little bit antagonistic, Yeah,
you don't. You don't want any fraternization inside the tumblers.
What I'm saying, um, so yeah, pretty interesting. And then
he also he also specifically pointed out in the pattern
that the whole idea was to allow the clothes to fall,
to tumble, like you didn't want to just spin and
try and force the water out, but to tumble, because
that tumbling motion would have it go through that hot
(11:02):
air and thus evaporate the water much more quickly, pushing
the air through it. And therefore sure, yeah, yeah, kind
of cool. Nine Henry Sieben he attempts a different approach.
His patent has a closed dryer that is more like
a heated cabinet with wire shelving inside it. So imagine
that you have like a little like cabinet or closet
and it's got wire shelves, and you put the clothes
(11:24):
on the shelves, and then you have an electric fan
that draws air through the machine, which allowed for faster drying. Now,
he didn't specifically include an element that with heat air,
but you would presumably have this near some sort of
other device that would heat the air, like a stove.
So this cabinet would just pull the air through, which
would circulate through the clothes, so kind of similar to
(11:45):
Seward H. Davis's approach of tumbling, but they're stationary, so
it's just pulling the air. So again this another idea
that becomes important in uh in modern day dryers. So
the important thing to remember here is the fan that
holes the air through. These are all various elements, the
tumbler pulling the air through. These are all things that
(12:06):
are going to come into play with the modern day dryers.
Now you still had to preheat the air though with
something like a stove. Then we get to nineteen thirty seven.
Now here's the guy that most people credit as Yeah,
although again the citations different from what I was able
to find. Okay, see, because he filed for a patent
in ninety seven, this is James are more James right?
(12:28):
Thank you? Um, it wasn't granted until, which we suspect
World War two probably had something to do, had other
stuff on their minds, right, the patent office was probably drafted.
Uh So yeah, seven is the filing and is the
awarding makes perfect sense. But it was for a closed
drying machine. And this is the basis for closed dryers
(12:49):
as we now know them. And so he what he
did was he added applying heated air that didn't need
to be preheated in an oven. He wanted to have
a heating element either a gas hour or electric and
in fact would eventually create both types. Right. He He
also created a ventilation system so that air can can
move through the dryer and then exhaust out of it,
(13:09):
carrying that water vapor out. So you see, this is
the combination of that rotating drum and that idea of
the cabin exactly. So by combining the two, he has
the best approach. And in fact, you could tell us
the best approach because it's the one that lasted the
test of time. So yeah, he uh as often cited
in a lot of the websites we saw as having
(13:32):
patented this this approach as early as nineteen thirty. But
I went to the patent office, I mean online to
the patent office. He didn't like, you didn't go there.
I didn't actually take a trip to the patent office.
I think they probably would have thrown the out of
the patent off. They were like, how did you find
your way in here? And I was like, I'd like
to see your archives from nineteen thirty. Yeah, that probably
(13:55):
would not have gone over. Well, they said, you've heard
of the internet, right, Well, you can actually do searches
online on the patent office. Google has a great patent
search function, but you can also go to the U
S Patent Office and use their search function. I use
both because I could not find it in one, so
I wanted to try both versions. You need to find
a keywords pretty pretty acutely. Yeah, but it but it's
(14:18):
it's a little more forgiving. But with the US one
you can find everything listed in chronological order, whereas with
Google you get it by order of relevance to your query.
So in other words, you might see the first one
pop up and say nineteen forty five, and the next
one says nineteen twenty seven, and the next one says
nineteen eighty three, and you're like, oh man, it's gonna
take forever to find the oldest one. U S Patent
(14:38):
does it chronologically, with the oldest being the last on
the list. I went through both. The earliest I can
find was nineteen thirty seven as a filing date, let
alone a patent granted date, So I have no idea
where they pulled this date of nineteen thirty They also
said that he sold the patent in nineteen thirty six,
but he didn't even file for a pat until nineteen
thirty seven. I don't know where you get your informa
(15:00):
Asian Internet, so you should check it more carefully. Yeah,
So anyway, he did file in nineteen thirty seven, and
he did end up working with another company in nineteen
thirty eight. That company would be the Hamilton's Manufacturing Company
located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, Pride and Joy of Wisconsin
of Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Anyway, they actually have a museum
(15:20):
dedicated to this former manufacturing company, and they used James R.
Moore's design. They actually paid him for this, and they
released in ninety eight the June Day Clothes Dryer based
off this design. The early models used gas for heat
to heat the heating element, so you'd have to like
light the pilot light every time you wanted to dry
(15:41):
a load of laundry, and then once you were done
drying that load of laundry, should probably remember to blow
it out. Yeah, you had to extinguish it or else
you would just be wasting lots of gas or possibly
creating a fire hazard, which, by the way, dryers big
fire hazards. In general, do not run your dryer and
then leave the house just in case. I mean, I
don't want to scare anybody, but it is, but lint
(16:03):
fires can happen. Yeah, so just a little word of
caution in the middle of the episode. But yeah, later
models were electric and they still created the gas ones too,
but manufacturing was interrupted shortly after they started. They produced
about six thousand of them and then stopped suddenly, all
because of the event we have already referenced in this podcast,
(16:23):
afore mentioned World War too. Yep, so World War two
causes a manufacturer to stop. This was the case across
multiple industries because yeah, the war effort needed all that
material and and labor and a lot of the factory space. Yes,
so all of that meant that dryers were not seen
as being important to the war effort. It was put
on hold. World War two was was over and the
(16:47):
Hamilton's Manufacturing Company got back into this, but they were
no longer the only game in town. By this time.
Another big company, much bigger than Hamilton's Manufacturing actually got
into the closed dryer game, and that would be General Electric.
And so then it was off to the races, but
but not not fast races and not not cheap races, no,
(17:08):
incredibly expensive races, very very slow, expensive races. Around the
same time, the first electric dryer to include a glass
window in the front was introduced. And this is a
design element, you know, it's it's it's just kind of
nice to look at. But I wanted to mention it
because it was designed by Brooks Stevens, who's another wisconsinite.
He was a Wisconsin designer who also worked in in architecture, furniture,
(17:32):
and auto design, including that greatest car of all, the
Oscar Meyer Weenomobile. Man truly a visionary. We could do
a full episode just on that. Actually I should mention
all the inventors we've talked about have done some pretty
phenomenal things besides inventing dryers. So but this, I mean,
(17:52):
no one approached creating the Auscar Meer Wiener mobile aso.
You know, we won't go back and fill those out
nineteen fifty s. Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
a dryer in the mid nineteen fifties cost about two
thirty dollars, which if you adjust for inflation, would be
closer to two thousand dollars for a dryer. Yes, so
(18:13):
not a whole lot of people could afford it. On um.
I shall also point out that this same paper cited
some of the erroneous sources that I mentioned earlier. Um,
the ones that could not be supported by, say, the
Patent Office. I guess the Bureau of Labor Statistics in
the patent offices don't don't talk to each other frequently. Yeah,
(18:33):
this inner departmental stress type thing. This was I had
to include it. I mean, there are some crazy patents
out there, y'all. If you if you ever have a
really slow day and you just want to amuse yourself,
just start typing random words into a Google patent search
and then enjoy. But one of the crazy ones I
(18:54):
found was filed by William C. Sholin and the title
of the patent is hair drying attachment for clothes dryer.
This this cannot be what I think it is. I mean, well,
if you think it's you're putting your hair in a
clothes dryer, it's not. But if you think it's a
tube connected to your clothes dryer that's used as a
hair dryer, it totally is. It's a tube using the
(19:16):
heat from the the dryer. I guess, I guess. You know,
it's good to conserve energy, and so if you're already
creating that heat, you might as well, yeah, dryer your hair,
even though even though you're mostly using steam at that point. Yeah,
so the hair dryer. It's one of those where it's
got like the whole thing that comes of the fad,
(19:37):
the helmet. Yeah, I have no idea what those are called.
My hair days are long over, but anyway, it would
fit over the person's head and uh, and presumably dry
it using the heat from the hair dryer. Um. I
don't know how popular this invention was if it were
ever actually uh, you know, built because just because something's
patented doesn't mean that you're going to have real examples
(19:59):
of it. But if you want to look this up,
I got a treat for you. Here's the patent number.
You can put into a search, three million, sixty four thousand,
three hundred sixty and you can look at the illustrations.
Depending upon the patent search you put in, you may
or may not need to use the commas in that number.
You just could put in the digits three zero six
four zero. It's entertaining, but obviously I can't really show
(20:23):
it on an audio podcast at any rate. In Um,
a vacuum chamber related dryer was proposed. Yeah, William Lambert
Chanley filed a patent for a drayer that would use
a vacuum chamber. And this makes sense when you think
about it, in the sense that in a vacuum, it
takes less heat to evaporate water. Yeah, so if you're
(20:45):
able to create a partial vacuum. We're not talking like
a complete vacuum, but if you were able to create
a partial vacuum within a dryer, then you could pressure
and yeah, you don't have to heat up the air
as much, so you don't have to pourse my energy
in it. As we'll talk about a little bit later,
it takes a lot of energy to power a dryer.
In fact, it's one of the most energy hungry appliances
(21:08):
that typical house has, so this will be a way
of reducing that. Also, Channeling maintained that the high quote
unquote roasting temperatures of clothes dryers and the fast rotation
of the drum meant that clothing was being damaged and
turned into lent, and that his invention would appeal to
people who wanted to get a more gentle drying of
their clothing. It wouldn't require as much rigor. Now this
(21:30):
particular approach has been experimented with a few times, but
it's tough to make a chamber that is a partial vacuum,
particularly if you need to have an exhaust to the
outside to get rid of steam. Then you can't really
make a vacuum without crazy valves and then having a
venting time as well as a vacuum time, and and
(21:51):
and and more energy being put in even than a
regular dryer. Yeah, you can't. You obviously can't keep introducing
hot air into such a thing because then you wouldn't
have a vacuum. So it's it's one of those that
was an interesting idea, but no one i think, has
really found a way of implementing it where it really
made sense. Plus it it makes it you know, it's
hard to make a partial vacuum. It means they would
make it more expensive. Yeah, they are working. NASA is
(22:13):
funding someone to work on something related to that. But
I'll talk about that way at the end of the podcast. Excellent,
there's a little teaser for you. So in the nineteen seventies,
again going back to our friends at the Bureau of
Labor Statistics while they're not talking to the patent office.
The price of a dryer was closer to a hundred
ninety dollars, which in today's money is closer to a
grand so half the expense of what it was in
the nineteen yeah and about forty of all households had one.
(22:38):
So when we get up to nineteen seven, the unit
price is about three hundred forty dollars. So remember it
was a hundred ninety dollars in nineteen seventies, three forty
ninety seven, and you think, oh, what the heck the
price went up. It didn't go down well, except that
when you adjust for inflation from nine seven, it's still
pretty close to three and forty dollars. So the value
(22:58):
has of that money has increased, the buying power has
increased um for that amount for three dollars, so you
don't so it's actually cheaper in the long run. Um
and of households owned a dryer by this time. That
same year, over in Europe, a manufacturer called Electrolux would
develop an energy efficient type of machine, the heat pump
(23:19):
or hydraulic dryer. Over the next couple of years, UM
that they had gained market share kind of slowly but
surely over in Europe and also in Australia, although they
have not caught on yet in the United States. UM.
More on how those work later on. But but they're
pretty cool. They use some like forty ft of the
amount of energy the traditional dryers do, so that's that's
pretty awesome. Yeah, and now we're getting up to just
(23:42):
about today, right yeah. Okay, So so every year Energy Star,
which is a program within the e p A, the
the US Environmental Protection Agency, UM, they announced an area
of technology that's deserving of what they call an Emerging
Technology Award, and in it was advance clothes dryers UM,
which makes sense. According to Consumer Reports, dryer's account for
(24:05):
some six percent of US home energy use, which accounts
for for three or more per year, which is think
about this. You aren't running your dryer constantly. Your run
your dryer occasionally when you have to do laundry, and
you don't necessarily have to do laundry every single day.
So if you're talking about an appliance that you only
use occasionally and it makes up six percent of your energy,
(24:28):
that's that's incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it means that you know,
really small innovations could make for pretty huge savings and
in terms of both money and you know, overall carbon footprints. Um. So.
So the e P A specifically or energy star I
guess I should say specifically called out a Samsung model
uh named Cleverly DV for rolls off the tongue does
(24:51):
um uh that it estimates could save enough energy to
run an efficient clothing washer for eleven months um and
also has an integrated smart system for monitoring your clothes
remotely via app Yo dog, your shirt is dry? Uh, well,
I mean, I mean you're you're you're joking, But there
are sensors in these new kinds of dryers that will
(25:12):
test moisture in your clothing. They can shut off automatically
when your clothes are dry. That that was one of
the one of the specific considerations for this award. It
had to the dryers they were looking at had to
contain at least two types of sensors for determining when
your clothes are dry. And just that way, you cut
off the cycle. Yeah, you don't have it continuing for
some predetermined amount of time when the clothes are already dry.
(25:35):
There's no need to keep it going. I mean, you're
just wasting energy and shrinking clothes unless you're strapped for entertainment,
and that's just you know, you're just sitting there watching
the clothes tumble, in which case, Hi, dr horrible. Uh.
You know, we got a lot more to say. Specifically,
we're going to cover how these things are actually working.
But before we get into that, let's take a quick
break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So now we're back
(25:57):
with ratists specifically dig into how Ryer's work, and we've
kind of mentioned a lot of the elements already. You've
got a typical clothes dryer, so we're talking about just
your basic model that, yeah, most of mostly in the
United States, is the type you're going to run into.
UM has a rotating tumbler. So that's your drum that
rotates around and around and the clothes tumble within it.
(26:19):
You've got some kind of heating element to heat air,
which is then somehow drawn through that tumbler, right, So
you probably have holes in the tumbler to allow air
to pass through, and then you've got an exhaust pipe
of some sort so you can vent out that the
warm humid air. Yeah, because no, you don't want to
keep the steam in there. It's just gonna make the
clothes take even longer to dry. So by venting it
(26:42):
out and constantly replacing it with dry, warm air, you're
gonna end up, you know, drying a much faster. You
just vent out all the steam. So let's start talking
about all these various elements and how they work together.
Let's start with the fans. Yeah, yeah, let's start. Let's
start at the end. Yeah, the because the end is
the beginning. The beginning is the end. It is the
(27:02):
alpha and the omega of d it's a flat circle. Yeah, yeah,
it is. We didn't mean to get all philosophical, but
it is pretty late on a Thursday afternoon, guys, and
things get weird. So the fan is located at the
exhaust end of the dryer. It's not at the very
front of the dryer's at the very end of it.
But it ends up when it turns pulling air in
(27:23):
from the dryer and exhausting it out the exhaust vent.
That's the direction of air flow, so it's not blowing
air in, it's essentially pulling air out of it. So
that means you kind of have some place for air
to come into the dryer or else it is trying
to create a vacuum, right, which is less effective. That's
less effective. Yeah, if you just have a heating element
and you create a vacuum, then you've got a hot
(27:44):
spot in your in your dryer and no air inside
the tumbler, and that's not going to help. So these
dryers have vents or holes that are in them that
allow air to pass into the actual dryer and and
be pulled in. Yeah, pulled in and then passed over
a heating element, which, as we mentioned before, is either
powered by gas or electric power. So this heating element, um,
(28:08):
we'll talk about that in just a second, but that's
what's creating the increase in temperature in the air, which
will then, once it is warm, continue into the tumbler
where the clothes are. Yeah, I mean, if you've loaded
your dryer correctly where the clothes should be exactly. If
the clothes are not in there, you've done something very wrong,
you know, and we've made some assumptions and we apologize,
(28:29):
but no, you put the clothes in the tumbler, that's
where the warm air goes into. Next, it passes into
the door area. That's where the lent screen. The air,
not the clothes. Yes, the air. Yes, if you close
are passing through the door area, you have not replaced
the lent screen, and you should do that. So the
LN screen is there obviously to capture lent from clothing
so it doesn't end up clogging up the rest of
the system. But that's where the airflow goes to next.
(28:52):
So it's coming in through these venting areas into the
tumbler out through the door venting area. Pulled passes through
the fan because that the next stop is where the
fan is, and then the fan blows it out the
exhaust area, which usually you have some sort of weird
that that tubing stuff, you know, the tubing stuff that
you can cut in half and then you can have
robot arms. My cosplay is different from your cosplay. That
(29:16):
is accurate. I have a video that proves that. So
that's your basic airflow, and that is the secret to
drying the clothes is that introducing this dry warm air,
possibly dry hot air. It all depends upon the mode
you've set it on. We'll talk about that in the
second certainly. Okay, so let's talk about how it gets
warm or hot. What is this heating element? Like, Okay,
have you ever seen a toaster and you know when
(29:40):
you when you we're not talking about cylons, right, No, No,
I mean no, because I've seen those two. We don't
want to talk about the cylons because they might show up. No,
we're talking about toaster toaster, So we're talking about you know,
you put a put a piece of bread in a
toaster and you set it down. Then you see those
little wires turn red hot. That's essentially what we're talking about.
SAME's of a a heating element, it's without of nichrome wire.
(30:03):
So what you're doing is you're passing a current through
this wire. The wire has a resistance to current. Resistance
means that quite a lot of resistance. Actually yeah. Um,
it's sort of the opposite of what you want to
do in any kind of electronic wire technology, where you're
trying to insulate it so much that that it has
as low of a resistance as possible. Right. Yeah, when
with low resistance you make it really really efficient, right,
(30:24):
you're not losing energy to heat. But in this case,
what you want to do is generate heat, is lose
as much energy to heat as possible because that's the
kind of energy. One is the heat energy. You're not
interested in passing electricity on to some other points. So
in this case, this electricity gets converted into heat due
to that electrical resistance. And this is the element of
the dryer that consumes the most power that the rotating
(30:45):
drum not even close, the fan not even close. It's
this heating element. So a typical dryer is pulling in
like four thousand to six thousand watts. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah,
Now we've got the tumbler. Uh, it's it's a really
simple pulley system. Actually, you know, you got a motor,
the motor, electric motor or gas powered motor. A belt
attaches from the motor to the tumbler, and the motor turns.
(31:10):
That ends up turning the belt, which ends up turning
the tumbler. It's pretty it's one of the simplest machines ever. Actually.
The policy system, so yeah, usually you have to have
maybe you know, two pulleys that are involved. One is
creating tension on the other so that it stays in place,
because obviously, like if it slips a belt, that's when
you're starting to get this weird noise. And your dryer
is not gonna be turning properly, and then you need
(31:30):
to shut things down before your motor burns out. But
assuming everything's working fine, it's just gonna turn the tumbler. Next.
We have the controls. So we have two different types
of controls. Right. The modern dryers you would buy in
an appliance store today, most of them have digital controls,
which involves having a micro controller. But if you're going
with an old dryer, let's say like the kind of
(31:52):
dryer I grew up with where it had like a
dial and buttons. Yeah, you punch the button saying okay,
I'm going to do permanent press, and you push the
permanent press button and it and it clicks in and
then you would turn the dial to the right setting
and then uh, it would be possessed and start rumbling.
And that's because there would be a series of of
gears and cams. So and it worked a little bit
(32:16):
like a like an egg timer. Yeah, yeah, kind of. Yeah,
you have like a you have you can you have
a physical capacity that that when it ran out, it
would it would cause a shot off valve, a shot
off circuit disconnect. Yeah, because with the cam you can
think of it as like, think of it like a
metal key, and when the metal key makes contact with
a contact point, it completes a circuit. Right, So when
(32:37):
the circuits complete, electricity can flow. And then as long
as that that key is making contact with the contact point,
it'll stay in place. The electricity will continue to flow.
But at the time or when the timer comes out,
a mechanical piece will push the key out of the way,
breaking the circuit and thus the dryer. Yeah, so we're
talking about programming something through actual phizz iCal moving pieces,
(33:02):
mechanical pieces, but it's it's doing the same source of
stuff that digital controller is doing digitally, it's just doing
it all mechanically and with electronic pieces. So yeah, it's
kind of exciting stuff. Like if you ever were to
take one of these apart, first of all, I hope
you don't need it afterward, because if you do anything,
you know, if you're anything like us, you're not going
(33:22):
to get that back together. No. No, we might be
able to put something back together, but it ain't gonna work.
Let's just put it that way. It'll look really interesting though. Yeah,
so you could actually see that there are all these
little moving parts that need to come into play so
that they touch these contact points and create these circuits.
They also usually have In fact, as far as I know,
(33:43):
dryers are required to have temperature shut off switches. And
these aren't to measure the temperature of your clothing, but
the the temperature of the overall unit, so that if
it gets too warm, um, and is in danger of
melting down the motor or any of the other operative
parts or causing a fire. Causing a fire, it can
shut down. Yeah, It'll just break that contact and you
will lose the circuit, and thus the dryer will shut down. UM.
(34:06):
So you know, it's kind of a fail safe there.
And uh, some of them, like we said, have the
humidity sensors, so they can actually measure how much humidity
is within the dryer and if it reaches below a
certain threshold, then the dryer will shut off because your
clothes are dry, so that doesn't have to continue to
operate and thus consume more energy. Now, there are other
(34:26):
types of clothes dryers out there. That's the basic type,
that's the one that's the most common United States. But
like you were saying, Lauren, it's not the only kind
out there. One of them is called a condensing clothes dryer.
So these don't have a vent to exhaust steam. They
don't have that fan pulling the air through inventing it out. Instead,
these dryers allow water to condense and then collect, either
(34:49):
draining into a collection pan or tank, or more likely
draining into the house water waste system. So if you
have a washer dryer combo, something that can act is
both washer and a dryer, it's usually this type of dryer.
It's a condenser dryer more often than not. Uh, And
so putting an exhaust on a washer that would be
really not good. Yeah, I mean you've got like the
(35:11):
wastewater exhaust. But if you had just a pipe that
was supposed to allow air to go through, water would
go through that too. Yeah yeah so yeah, which would
make it an inefficient washer. So yeah, then you have
the heat pump dryers, like you were saying, yeah, yeah,
these these have a these have just just a normal
old heat pump. I mean, I mean the kind of
thing that we were talking about in in in our
(35:31):
refrigerator episode. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's a heat exchanger. You've
got a hot side and a cold side, so the
cold side is really important because you've got that hot,
steamy air and when you have hot steamy air meat
a cold service, that's when you have water condensing, and
then that condensed water can then flow into a pan
or a drain, just like in the condenser style. The
warm side of the heat pomp can reheat the air
(35:51):
inside the dryer. So as the dryer air is losing
energy because it's encountering that wet water and causing it
to evaporate, that means that the air temperatures to go down.
But this heat pomp continues that cycle, so the cold
side is removing the water, the hot side is increasing
the temperature, so you can have a more efficient means
of drying out the clothes inside. So again, no need
(36:13):
to exhaust unless which is great because if you don't
have to exhaust this thing, like by exhaust, I mean
you don't have to have a pipe where the exhaust
air flows through. There's no need for that in this model,
and that's great because when you have an exhaust pipe
that's open to the environment, that means that you're losing
some of the heat that you want to put inside
the clothes just going out the exhaust pipe. Oh sure, sure,
(36:35):
and you're you're losing through that exhaust pipe that heat
out into your house, which, for example, during the summer months,
can make you run your acemore more intensely. Yeah. So, uh,
it's kind of a domino effect, right, So then we
can talk a little bit about these future dryers. One
of the which one of the ones that you mentioned.
So first of all, there was an idea back in
the nineteen sixties to try and use microwaves as a
(36:57):
as a means of drying clothes, So you would make
a special old dryer would be a microwave dryer. Supposedly
there are some of these in Japan, but I've never
seen like an actual source source about it. But the
real problem with this is arcing. So arcing is when
you get these little plasma forms. If you've ever accidentally
put something metal in a microwave, and here's where I
(37:17):
tell you do not put metal in a mica that's
very bad. But if you've ever accidentally done it, then
you might have seen arking where you see these little
plasmas lightning bolts. Yeah, or if you've ever had one
of those plasma balls where you put your fingers on it.
It's kind of like that too. In fact, it is like,
that's what's happening. Um, it's not good for your microwave
(37:39):
in general. I used to have a microwave that had
a special stand that came with the microwave. Okay, that
was meant for popcorn, Like you put a bag of
microwave popcorn on it, and it would elevate the popcorn
so that it would have more uniform heating. Despite the
fact that this came with the microwave, which I would
assume means it's say, to put in the microwave, it
(38:02):
would occasionally mark. Not all the time, but sometimes you
would get a mark, and I would think, I do
not want microup microwave popcorn that badly. Yeah, that's vaguely terrifying. Yeah.
So anyway, if you were to put stuff that's like
if you had metal stuff in your clothes, either like
change or zippers or yeah, or buttons or other clasps
things that are metal, then that could possibly cause this
(38:22):
arcing problem which could damage clothing. And in fact, that's
the main reason we haven't really seen it implemented. There
have been other people who have tested it, and there's
still people who are thinking that there might be a
way of doing this in a in a in a
manner that's not going to make your clothes burn up
or right right, which is really the purpose of me
drying my clothes. I don't know about everybody else. Well,
there are occasionally shirts where I'm like, no, never mind,
(38:45):
we'll see step one for me, as I want to
get my clothes dry, but step two is I do
not want to burn holes in them. Yes, but okay,
So as unlikely as it sounds that this could be
a really viable plan. This, this is the kind of
system that that NASA has granted some some money too.
They granted one company specifically called Umqua all in capital
letters because why not, ye it's spelled exactly the way
(39:08):
it sounds. They granted them some funding through their Small
Business Innovative Research Program back in Tleven and um that
the system that UMA is working on the last time
I checked, involves ceiling clothes in in a vacuum bag
and um cleaning them by jetting water and soap through
the bag and then drying them via microwave radiation and
(39:31):
then furthermore making them all soft and cuddly with jets
of air. Interesting, so You've got a whole bunch of
things in there that are are similar to approaches that
were considered failures. Yeah, so maybe this could be a
terrific failure in space. Space. In space, nobody can clean
your underwear. It's a problem. I mean yeah, I mean,
(39:54):
I mean you either you either have to bring infinite
changes of underpants with you, right, which, try and get
that through customs, right right, I mean, and it's really
expensive to bring stuff into space. You don't want to
do that, I mean you you want to be able
to wash him. Everyone wants to clean underwear. Yeah, no,
that is very and if you don't, you should. Okay,
(40:15):
we're not judging. We're just I'm judging. Okay, we're judging
a little all right. So anyway, that wraps up this
discussion about clothes dryers. I hope that Thomas enjoyed this episode. Uh,
we've already received a request for what will eventually become
the third part of our series of cleaning clothing. Who knew?
H Yeah, dry cleaning. Yeah, dry cleaning will be the
(40:36):
next one we tackle. Obviously, it will not be the
next episode. Now we'll figure out. Gonna give it a
break for a little minute. You know, we gave it
a couple of months for for washing clothes and dryers,
so the same sort of thing is going to apply
at least so but we will get around to it.
If you have a request, whether it's clothing related or
something completely unrelated the clothing but still related to technology
(40:56):
and you want to learn more about it, let us know.
Will take that burden of responsibility off your shoulders and
we'll carry it proudly into the future. Just send us
an email or at least into a microphone or at
least into a microphone. Yeah, send us an email the
addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us
a line on Facebook, Tumbler, or Twitter or handle at
all three is tech stuff h s W and we
(41:19):
will talk to you again. Releasing for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it has stuff works
dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff Works dot com. Say then, everyone, and welcome to
tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Foke OBAM
and Laurena. Here's someone on Facebook. Wanted to know about
some tech related thing, right, yeah, Thomas on Facebook road
(00:24):
in and to to us two guys and one gal
here at tex Stuff. Hey, nol you were represented. Nol
Is is smiling from behind his barrier, very gentitely, raising
the roof. I believe, yes, I think so um, but yes, yes,
so so Thomas wanted to know now that we have
done an episode about washing machine, how dryers were Okay,
(00:46):
all right, excellent. Yeah, and guys, remember we asked at
the end of every episode if you have ideas, send
them in and we mean it. Yeah, do that. So,
first of all, we're talking about dryers. So what was
the first clothes dryer, Lauren? The Sun? Yeah, that thing
is just pulling so much double duty, I mean triple duty,
like like quintuple duty. What's what's above quickly, Yeah, like
(01:10):
infinite duty. Yeah, there's a lot of duty going on
with the sun, including drying our clothes. So clearly, if
you've ever had to dry close without having the use
of a dryer. I've done this. I think a lot
of people have done this at some point or other.
Maybe fewer today than back when I was a kid.
But it depends on where you live. If you're in
the middle of a city, perhaps yeah, maybe not so much.
(01:32):
You might have gone to a laundromat or something. But
most of if you look at history, most people use
the sun in some form or another by laying wet
clothes that have just been washed out on on on
a rock or hanging it on a line or over
the branch of a tree yep, and just letting the
sun do its thing evaporate all that water. Usually take
you know, a couple hours um depending upon where you
(01:54):
were at, how hot it was, how humid it was.
Humidity could slow things down, obviously, not only dried up
the clothing, it would also cause colors to fade over time,
sometimes pretty quickly, depending upon the dye being used. Now,
sometimes you plan for that, that was what you wanted.
In fact, the Romans used to use various types of
minerals and rub them in on the cloth. They would
(02:15):
make during the drying process. An arctic to um specifically
fade or or even bleach it. Yeah, so that way
you get that nice white toga look, um, and then
you can go to all the parties because in Roman
times they were all toga parties. Okay, I was gonna
see if I can get an eye roll, but instead
of Lauren just gave me the staring right into my
soul look, which is terrifying. So we're gonna move on. Okay.
(02:37):
So so wash your technology evolved, Um it really intricately,
as as you may have heard in our previous episode.
But since the sun is relatively effective and drying clothes
this way is not really difficult, backbreaking, time consuming work,
dryer technology didn't really develop along the same lines. Yeah,
it just it wasn't as big a deal because yet,
(02:59):
to wash something you had to put in a lot
of effort, right, you had to, especially before the washing machine,
you had to scrub things manually or stomp on them
or beat them against rocks or throw them away and
get new stuff. I mean, it just was not easy
to do, and so there was a need to develop
automation there. It just it felt like there's this is
so much work. It's it's the woman's dread as we
(03:23):
said in the last podcast, according to one quote, so
that made sense. But for drying, like you said, it
was it was free to dry it by the sun,
so you didn't have to you know, put in any
kind of expense there except maybe for a clothesline and
maybe some maybe some closed pins, but that's about it.
And uh yeah, you just had to lay it out
and collect it. That's all the labor that was involved.
(03:44):
So it wasn't as imprintant to develop a dryer, but
it didn't make things convenient, right, You couldn't have dry
clothes very quickly using that rate. So if it happened
or something like that, Yeah, So there certainly were people
who were thinking there's to be a way to dry
close even if the weather is bad, or to do
it more quickly than just putting them all on the
(04:05):
sun for a few hours. And I'm sure that a
lot of people were doing this. But the history of
this kind of thing is a wee bit contentious, as
we find out every time we look into the history
of something. Yeah, as it turns out, when you want
to look at the history of something that's been around
for at least a couple uh, like like a century,
or more, and especially something that was done by the
lower classes who were not writing about it or or
(04:27):
certainly not contributing to scientific journals very frequently, or perhaps
didn't bother to patent something, then it's hard to find
reliable records. So here's a big caveat for all the
historical stuff you're about to listen to, dear listeners. The
caveat is that we did a lot of background research
(04:49):
to try and verify as many claims as we could,
and a lot of them are unverifiable, meaning that there
are no primary sources that are definitive. There are a
lot of sources that quote each other, but it becomes
kind of a circular thing. Yeah, which does happen on
the internet. Uh, not entirely and frequently right, Um, But
so so, most of what we're going to tell you
(05:10):
comes directly from the U. S. Patent Office. That's what
I relied upon most heavily. Although our first example is
not among them because it wasn't a United States invention,
it was actually a French one. This is one you're
going to see if you ever do a search for
the history of dryers, this is going to pop up
all the time. Usually the year is specifically seventeen, but
the best I'm going to say is around the year
(05:31):
eighteen hundred. A French inventor known only as Poshan p
O c h O N sometimes listen as M. Posh On,
but I believe the M is for Monsieur Poshan, not
necessarily a name that begins within, created what he called
a ventilator, which to me sounds like a weapon you
would pick up in Duke Newcombe. But in this case,
(05:54):
a ventilator was a metal drum that had some small
holes in it. So that might start to sound familiar
already to anyone who's used a dryer. And you put
your wet clothing into the drum and turn it using
a hand crank, right, and you think, well, okay, so
now you're just turning a drum full of wet clothes
with holes in it. What else you have to put
it near a fire, yeah, as your source of heat.
(06:15):
And now here's the thing. Um. Sometimes this meant that
clothes would get a little uh you know, burnt, Yeah,
a little little extra crispy um or or full of
smoke in any case, Yeah, so you would end up
damaging clothes this way, And according to most reports this
is the first tumble dryer, but didn't catch on, mostly
(06:35):
because of the downsides, Right, the idea that you would
end up damaging clothes, Well, if you're gonna damage them,
then that's not helpful at all. So the interesting thing
to me is that this basic approach that he took
ends up being the the kind of the central design
of dryers in the future. It would just take a
long time to perfect the heating elements, like a couple years. Yeah,
(06:58):
so sorry, but yeah, but it's interesting that again, we
couldn't really find any primary sources on this, so this
story could be apocryphal. However, I'm going to go ahead
and say that it sounds like it's possible, so we'll
give it a pass. Sure. Then in this is the
(07:19):
next really official dryer technology that we have to report on,
and it's one that we actually mentioned in our episode
about washing machines. That's when um Ellen Edgley invented a
ringer to sit on top of washing machines and help
dry out the laundry before you hang it on a line.
So so that's that's squeezing mechanism to the two rollers
and it rolls the clothing between and squeezes them with
(07:41):
incredible pressure that could crush your fingers if you get
them too close. Don't do it right right. The design
would later be integrated into washing machine models until these
tumble dryers later caught on. Yeah, so two, we have
another African American inventor, this one by the name George T.
Samps And, who filed a patent for a clothes dryer.
(08:03):
In this case, he spelled dryer d R I E R,
which some of the patents are in that spelling. Some
of them are d R y E R I. Can
do what they want. His invention wasn't a tumble dryer, however,
although I saw a lot of notes that said it
was an improvement or, in the case of some of them,
a betterment of Poshan's approach. Uh, it wasn't wasn't like, No,
(08:27):
it wasn't a tumble dryer. The I think the betterment
or improvement would be that he used a stove as
the heat source as opposed to an open flame, so
it reduced the kind of damage that could happen. But yes, he,
as he pointed out, it was not a tumble dryer.
It was not like a drum that you put clothes in.
It was more of a frame, and you would put
the clothes within the frame, secure it in the frame,
(08:50):
and then put the suspend the frame near the stove
and the heat would would end up evaporating the water
out of the clothing. So, uh, it's in that pattern,
is in the records, so you can actually go and
look at it. And if you look at it, you'll
see it is not a tumble dryer. It's not the
same style as posh on. So that tells me something else.
It tells me that some of the websites that I
(09:11):
pulled up while I was doing this just didn't go
and look at the patents. They just reported it as
being like this was an improvement on that tumble dryer,
And uh, always go that extra step. I'm saying that
to all of our listeners because I expect that they
will occasionally have to write things like if you're a student,
you may have to write a paper. This is why
(09:32):
taking that extra step, Like if you just find a
web page that says it's about that stuff, see if
you can find a primary source, because it's always going
to give you a better idea of what the real
story n Then we have a patent by Seward H.
Davis for his clothes drying machine. And it's interesting. So
now he's decided to incorporate an oven directly into the
(09:56):
device to generate heat. So we're still creating an oven.
It's pre heating air because obviously an oven's not going
to generate heat at the speed where you could just
blow air across it and it's going to be hot, right,
so you would. But he also incorporate a motor in
his It was a motor that was connected by pulleys
to a rotating drum, so going back to that post
on approach, right, and it would rotate in one direction
(10:17):
for a few turns and then go back the other way. Yeah,
because according to Davis, you didn't want to continuously rotated
in one direction or else the clothes would become hopelessly
entangled with one another, and uh, it would just end
up being a big mess. So his design had it
where it would rotate one way then the other, and
that would prevent the clothes from getting, yeah, from clumping
and getting all like super friendly inside the dryer. You
(10:40):
want your clothes to be a little bit antagonistic, Yeah,
you don't. You don't want any fraternization inside the tumblers.
What I'm saying, um, so yeah, pretty interesting. And then
he also he also specifically pointed out in the pattern
that the whole idea was to allow the clothes to fall,
to tumble, like you didn't want to just spin and
try and force the water out, but to tumble, because
that tumbling motion would have it go through that hot
(11:02):
air and thus evaporate the water much more quickly, pushing
the air through it. And therefore sure, yeah, yeah, kind
of cool. Nine Henry Sieben he attempts a different approach.
His patent has a closed dryer that is more like
a heated cabinet with wire shelving inside it. So imagine
that you have like a little like cabinet or closet
and it's got wire shelves, and you put the clothes
(11:24):
on the shelves, and then you have an electric fan
that draws air through the machine, which allowed for faster drying. Now,
he didn't specifically include an element that with heat air,
but you would presumably have this near some sort of
other device that would heat the air, like a stove.
So this cabinet would just pull the air through, which
would circulate through the clothes, so kind of similar to
(11:45):
Seward H. Davis's approach of tumbling, but they're stationary, so
it's just pulling the air. So again this another idea
that becomes important in uh in modern day dryers. So
the important thing to remember here is the fan that
holes the air through. These are all various elements, the
tumbler pulling the air through. These are all things that
(12:06):
are going to come into play with the modern day dryers.
Now you still had to preheat the air though with
something like a stove. Then we get to nineteen thirty seven.
Now here's the guy that most people credit as Yeah,
although again the citations different from what I was able
to find. Okay, see, because he filed for a patent
in ninety seven, this is James are more James right?
(12:28):
Thank you? Um, it wasn't granted until, which we suspect
World War two probably had something to do, had other
stuff on their minds, right, the patent office was probably drafted.
Uh So yeah, seven is the filing and is the
awarding makes perfect sense. But it was for a closed
drying machine. And this is the basis for closed dryers
(12:49):
as we now know them. And so he what he
did was he added applying heated air that didn't need
to be preheated in an oven. He wanted to have
a heating element either a gas hour or electric and
in fact would eventually create both types. Right. He He
also created a ventilation system so that air can can
move through the dryer and then exhaust out of it,
(13:09):
carrying that water vapor out. So you see, this is
the combination of that rotating drum and that idea of
the cabin exactly. So by combining the two, he has
the best approach. And in fact, you could tell us
the best approach because it's the one that lasted the
test of time. So yeah, he uh as often cited
in a lot of the websites we saw as having
(13:32):
patented this this approach as early as nineteen thirty. But
I went to the patent office, I mean online to
the patent office. He didn't like, you didn't go there.
I didn't actually take a trip to the patent office.
I think they probably would have thrown the out of
the patent off. They were like, how did you find
your way in here? And I was like, I'd like
to see your archives from nineteen thirty. Yeah, that probably
(13:55):
would not have gone over. Well, they said, you've heard
of the internet, right, Well, you can actually do searches
online on the patent office. Google has a great patent
search function, but you can also go to the U
S Patent Office and use their search function. I use
both because I could not find it in one, so
I wanted to try both versions. You need to find
a keywords pretty pretty acutely. Yeah, but it but it's
(14:18):
it's a little more forgiving. But with the US one
you can find everything listed in chronological order, whereas with
Google you get it by order of relevance to your query.
So in other words, you might see the first one
pop up and say nineteen forty five, and the next
one says nineteen twenty seven, and the next one says
nineteen eighty three, and you're like, oh man, it's gonna
take forever to find the oldest one. U S Patent
(14:38):
does it chronologically, with the oldest being the last on
the list. I went through both. The earliest I can
find was nineteen thirty seven as a filing date, let
alone a patent granted date, So I have no idea
where they pulled this date of nineteen thirty They also
said that he sold the patent in nineteen thirty six,
but he didn't even file for a pat until nineteen
thirty seven. I don't know where you get your informa
(15:00):
Asian Internet, so you should check it more carefully. Yeah,
So anyway, he did file in nineteen thirty seven, and
he did end up working with another company in nineteen
thirty eight. That company would be the Hamilton's Manufacturing Company
located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, Pride and Joy of Wisconsin
of Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Anyway, they actually have a museum
(15:20):
dedicated to this former manufacturing company, and they used James R.
Moore's design. They actually paid him for this, and they
released in ninety eight the June Day Clothes Dryer based
off this design. The early models used gas for heat
to heat the heating element, so you'd have to like
light the pilot light every time you wanted to dry
(15:41):
a load of laundry, and then once you were done
drying that load of laundry, should probably remember to blow
it out. Yeah, you had to extinguish it or else
you would just be wasting lots of gas or possibly
creating a fire hazard, which, by the way, dryers big
fire hazards. In general, do not run your dryer and
then leave the house just in case. I mean, I
don't want to scare anybody, but it is, but lint
(16:03):
fires can happen. Yeah, so just a little word of
caution in the middle of the episode. But yeah, later
models were electric and they still created the gas ones too,
but manufacturing was interrupted shortly after they started. They produced
about six thousand of them and then stopped suddenly, all
because of the event we have already referenced in this podcast,
(16:23):
afore mentioned World War too. Yep, so World War two
causes a manufacturer to stop. This was the case across
multiple industries because yeah, the war effort needed all that
material and and labor and a lot of the factory space. Yes,
so all of that meant that dryers were not seen
as being important to the war effort. It was put
on hold. World War two was was over and the
(16:47):
Hamilton's Manufacturing Company got back into this, but they were
no longer the only game in town. By this time.
Another big company, much bigger than Hamilton's Manufacturing actually got
into the closed dryer game, and that would be General Electric.
And so then it was off to the races, but
but not not fast races and not not cheap races, no,
(17:08):
incredibly expensive races, very very slow, expensive races. Around the
same time, the first electric dryer to include a glass
window in the front was introduced. And this is a
design element, you know, it's it's it's just kind of
nice to look at. But I wanted to mention it
because it was designed by Brooks Stevens, who's another wisconsinite.
He was a Wisconsin designer who also worked in in architecture, furniture,
(17:32):
and auto design, including that greatest car of all, the
Oscar Meyer Weenomobile. Man truly a visionary. We could do
a full episode just on that. Actually I should mention
all the inventors we've talked about have done some pretty
phenomenal things besides inventing dryers. So but this, I mean,
(17:52):
no one approached creating the Auscar Meer Wiener mobile aso.
You know, we won't go back and fill those out
nineteen fifty s. Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
a dryer in the mid nineteen fifties cost about two
thirty dollars, which if you adjust for inflation, would be
closer to two thousand dollars for a dryer. Yes, so
(18:13):
not a whole lot of people could afford it. On um.
I shall also point out that this same paper cited
some of the erroneous sources that I mentioned earlier. Um,
the ones that could not be supported by, say, the
Patent Office. I guess the Bureau of Labor Statistics in
the patent offices don't don't talk to each other frequently. Yeah,
(18:33):
this inner departmental stress type thing. This was I had
to include it. I mean, there are some crazy patents
out there, y'all. If you if you ever have a
really slow day and you just want to amuse yourself,
just start typing random words into a Google patent search
and then enjoy. But one of the crazy ones I
(18:54):
found was filed by William C. Sholin and the title
of the patent is hair drying attachment for clothes dryer.
This this cannot be what I think it is. I mean, well,
if you think it's you're putting your hair in a
clothes dryer, it's not. But if you think it's a
tube connected to your clothes dryer that's used as a
hair dryer, it totally is. It's a tube using the
(19:16):
heat from the the dryer. I guess, I guess. You know,
it's good to conserve energy, and so if you're already
creating that heat, you might as well, yeah, dryer your hair,
even though even though you're mostly using steam at that point. Yeah,
so the hair dryer. It's one of those where it's
got like the whole thing that comes of the fad,
(19:37):
the helmet. Yeah, I have no idea what those are called.
My hair days are long over, but anyway, it would
fit over the person's head and uh, and presumably dry
it using the heat from the hair dryer. Um. I
don't know how popular this invention was if it were
ever actually uh, you know, built because just because something's
patented doesn't mean that you're going to have real examples
(19:59):
of it. But if you want to look this up,
I got a treat for you. Here's the patent number.
You can put into a search, three million, sixty four thousand,
three hundred sixty and you can look at the illustrations.
Depending upon the patent search you put in, you may
or may not need to use the commas in that number.
You just could put in the digits three zero six
four zero. It's entertaining, but obviously I can't really show
(20:23):
it on an audio podcast at any rate. In Um,
a vacuum chamber related dryer was proposed. Yeah, William Lambert
Chanley filed a patent for a drayer that would use
a vacuum chamber. And this makes sense when you think
about it, in the sense that in a vacuum, it
takes less heat to evaporate water. Yeah, so if you're
(20:45):
able to create a partial vacuum. We're not talking like
a complete vacuum, but if you were able to create
a partial vacuum within a dryer, then you could pressure
and yeah, you don't have to heat up the air
as much, so you don't have to pourse my energy
in it. As we'll talk about a little bit later,
it takes a lot of energy to power a dryer.
In fact, it's one of the most energy hungry appliances
(21:08):
that typical house has, so this will be a way
of reducing that. Also, Channeling maintained that the high quote
unquote roasting temperatures of clothes dryers and the fast rotation
of the drum meant that clothing was being damaged and
turned into lent, and that his invention would appeal to
people who wanted to get a more gentle drying of
their clothing. It wouldn't require as much rigor. Now this
(21:30):
particular approach has been experimented with a few times, but
it's tough to make a chamber that is a partial vacuum,
particularly if you need to have an exhaust to the
outside to get rid of steam. Then you can't really
make a vacuum without crazy valves and then having a
venting time as well as a vacuum time, and and
(21:51):
and and more energy being put in even than a
regular dryer. Yeah, you can't. You obviously can't keep introducing
hot air into such a thing because then you wouldn't
have a vacuum. So it's it's one of those that
was an interesting idea, but no one i think, has
really found a way of implementing it where it really
made sense. Plus it it makes it you know, it's
hard to make a partial vacuum. It means they would
make it more expensive. Yeah, they are working. NASA is
(22:13):
funding someone to work on something related to that. But
I'll talk about that way at the end of the podcast. Excellent,
there's a little teaser for you. So in the nineteen seventies,
again going back to our friends at the Bureau of
Labor Statistics while they're not talking to the patent office.
The price of a dryer was closer to a hundred
ninety dollars, which in today's money is closer to a
grand so half the expense of what it was in
the nineteen yeah and about forty of all households had one.
(22:38):
So when we get up to nineteen seven, the unit
price is about three hundred forty dollars. So remember it
was a hundred ninety dollars in nineteen seventies, three forty
ninety seven, and you think, oh, what the heck the
price went up. It didn't go down well, except that
when you adjust for inflation from nine seven, it's still
pretty close to three and forty dollars. So the value
(22:58):
has of that money has increased, the buying power has
increased um for that amount for three dollars, so you
don't so it's actually cheaper in the long run. Um
and of households owned a dryer by this time. That
same year, over in Europe, a manufacturer called Electrolux would
develop an energy efficient type of machine, the heat pump
(23:19):
or hydraulic dryer. Over the next couple of years, UM
that they had gained market share kind of slowly but
surely over in Europe and also in Australia, although they
have not caught on yet in the United States. UM.
More on how those work later on. But but they're
pretty cool. They use some like forty ft of the
amount of energy the traditional dryers do, so that's that's
pretty awesome. Yeah, and now we're getting up to just
(23:42):
about today, right yeah. Okay, So so every year Energy Star,
which is a program within the e p A, the
the US Environmental Protection Agency, UM, they announced an area
of technology that's deserving of what they call an Emerging
Technology Award, and in it was advance clothes dryers UM,
which makes sense. According to Consumer Reports, dryer's account for
(24:05):
some six percent of US home energy use, which accounts
for for three or more per year, which is think
about this. You aren't running your dryer constantly. Your run
your dryer occasionally when you have to do laundry, and
you don't necessarily have to do laundry every single day.
So if you're talking about an appliance that you only
use occasionally and it makes up six percent of your energy,
(24:28):
that's that's incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it means that you know,
really small innovations could make for pretty huge savings and
in terms of both money and you know, overall carbon footprints. Um. So.
So the e P A specifically or energy star I
guess I should say specifically called out a Samsung model
uh named Cleverly DV for rolls off the tongue does
(24:51):
um uh that it estimates could save enough energy to
run an efficient clothing washer for eleven months um and
also has an integrated smart system for monitoring your clothes
remotely via app Yo dog, your shirt is dry? Uh, well,
I mean, I mean you're you're you're joking, But there
are sensors in these new kinds of dryers that will
(25:12):
test moisture in your clothing. They can shut off automatically
when your clothes are dry. That that was one of
the one of the specific considerations for this award. It
had to the dryers they were looking at had to
contain at least two types of sensors for determining when
your clothes are dry. And just that way, you cut
off the cycle. Yeah, you don't have it continuing for
some predetermined amount of time when the clothes are already dry.
(25:35):
There's no need to keep it going. I mean, you're
just wasting energy and shrinking clothes unless you're strapped for entertainment,
and that's just you know, you're just sitting there watching
the clothes tumble, in which case, Hi, dr horrible. Uh.
You know, we got a lot more to say. Specifically,
we're going to cover how these things are actually working.
But before we get into that, let's take a quick
break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So now we're back
(25:57):
with ratists specifically dig into how Ryer's work, and we've
kind of mentioned a lot of the elements already. You've
got a typical clothes dryer, so we're talking about just
your basic model that, yeah, most of mostly in the
United States, is the type you're going to run into.
UM has a rotating tumbler. So that's your drum that
rotates around and around and the clothes tumble within it.
(26:19):
You've got some kind of heating element to heat air,
which is then somehow drawn through that tumbler, right, So
you probably have holes in the tumbler to allow air
to pass through, and then you've got an exhaust pipe
of some sort so you can vent out that the
warm humid air. Yeah, because no, you don't want to
keep the steam in there. It's just gonna make the
clothes take even longer to dry. So by venting it
(26:42):
out and constantly replacing it with dry, warm air, you're
gonna end up, you know, drying a much faster. You
just vent out all the steam. So let's start talking
about all these various elements and how they work together.
Let's start with the fans. Yeah, yeah, let's start. Let's
start at the end. Yeah, the because the end is
the beginning. The beginning is the end. It is the
(27:02):
alpha and the omega of d it's a flat circle. Yeah, yeah,
it is. We didn't mean to get all philosophical, but
it is pretty late on a Thursday afternoon, guys, and
things get weird. So the fan is located at the
exhaust end of the dryer. It's not at the very
front of the dryer's at the very end of it.
But it ends up when it turns pulling air in
(27:23):
from the dryer and exhausting it out the exhaust vent.
That's the direction of air flow, so it's not blowing
air in, it's essentially pulling air out of it. So
that means you kind of have some place for air
to come into the dryer or else it is trying
to create a vacuum, right, which is less effective. That's
less effective. Yeah, if you just have a heating element
and you create a vacuum, then you've got a hot
(27:44):
spot in your in your dryer and no air inside
the tumbler, and that's not going to help. So these
dryers have vents or holes that are in them that
allow air to pass into the actual dryer and and
be pulled in. Yeah, pulled in and then passed over
a heating element, which, as we mentioned before, is either
powered by gas or electric power. So this heating element, um,
(28:08):
we'll talk about that in just a second, but that's
what's creating the increase in temperature in the air, which
will then, once it is warm, continue into the tumbler
where the clothes are. Yeah, I mean, if you've loaded
your dryer correctly where the clothes should be exactly. If
the clothes are not in there, you've done something very wrong,
you know, and we've made some assumptions and we apologize,
(28:29):
but no, you put the clothes in the tumbler, that's
where the warm air goes into. Next, it passes into
the door area. That's where the lent screen. The air,
not the clothes. Yes, the air. Yes, if you close
are passing through the door area, you have not replaced
the lent screen, and you should do that. So the
LN screen is there obviously to capture lent from clothing
so it doesn't end up clogging up the rest of
the system. But that's where the airflow goes to next.
(28:52):
So it's coming in through these venting areas into the
tumbler out through the door venting area. Pulled passes through
the fan because that the next stop is where the
fan is, and then the fan blows it out the
exhaust area, which usually you have some sort of weird
that that tubing stuff, you know, the tubing stuff that
you can cut in half and then you can have
robot arms. My cosplay is different from your cosplay. That
(29:16):
is accurate. I have a video that proves that. So
that's your basic airflow, and that is the secret to
drying the clothes is that introducing this dry warm air,
possibly dry hot air. It all depends upon the mode
you've set it on. We'll talk about that in the
second certainly. Okay, so let's talk about how it gets
warm or hot. What is this heating element? Like, Okay,
have you ever seen a toaster and you know when
(29:40):
you when you we're not talking about cylons, right, No, No,
I mean no, because I've seen those two. We don't
want to talk about the cylons because they might show up. No,
we're talking about toaster toaster, So we're talking about you know,
you put a put a piece of bread in a
toaster and you set it down. Then you see those
little wires turn red hot. That's essentially what we're talking about.
SAME's of a a heating element, it's without of nichrome wire.
(30:03):
So what you're doing is you're passing a current through
this wire. The wire has a resistance to current. Resistance
means that quite a lot of resistance. Actually yeah. Um,
it's sort of the opposite of what you want to
do in any kind of electronic wire technology, where you're
trying to insulate it so much that that it has
as low of a resistance as possible. Right. Yeah, when
with low resistance you make it really really efficient, right,
(30:24):
you're not losing energy to heat. But in this case,
what you want to do is generate heat, is lose
as much energy to heat as possible because that's the
kind of energy. One is the heat energy. You're not
interested in passing electricity on to some other points. So
in this case, this electricity gets converted into heat due
to that electrical resistance. And this is the element of
the dryer that consumes the most power that the rotating
(30:45):
drum not even close, the fan not even close. It's
this heating element. So a typical dryer is pulling in
like four thousand to six thousand watts. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah,
Now we've got the tumbler. Uh, it's it's a really
simple pulley system. Actually, you know, you got a motor,
the motor, electric motor or gas powered motor. A belt
attaches from the motor to the tumbler, and the motor turns.
(31:10):
That ends up turning the belt, which ends up turning
the tumbler. It's pretty it's one of the simplest machines ever. Actually.
The policy system, so yeah, usually you have to have
maybe you know, two pulleys that are involved. One is
creating tension on the other so that it stays in place,
because obviously, like if it slips a belt, that's when
you're starting to get this weird noise. And your dryer
is not gonna be turning properly, and then you need
(31:30):
to shut things down before your motor burns out. But
assuming everything's working fine, it's just gonna turn the tumbler. Next.
We have the controls. So we have two different types
of controls. Right. The modern dryers you would buy in
an appliance store today, most of them have digital controls,
which involves having a micro controller. But if you're going
with an old dryer, let's say like the kind of
(31:52):
dryer I grew up with where it had like a
dial and buttons. Yeah, you punch the button saying okay,
I'm going to do permanent press, and you push the
permanent press button and it and it clicks in and
then you would turn the dial to the right setting
and then uh, it would be possessed and start rumbling.
And that's because there would be a series of of
gears and cams. So and it worked a little bit
(32:16):
like a like an egg timer. Yeah, yeah, kind of. Yeah,
you have like a you have you can you have
a physical capacity that that when it ran out, it
would it would cause a shot off valve, a shot
off circuit disconnect. Yeah, because with the cam you can
think of it as like, think of it like a
metal key, and when the metal key makes contact with
a contact point, it completes a circuit. Right, So when
(32:37):
the circuits complete, electricity can flow. And then as long
as that that key is making contact with the contact point,
it'll stay in place. The electricity will continue to flow.
But at the time or when the timer comes out,
a mechanical piece will push the key out of the way,
breaking the circuit and thus the dryer. Yeah, so we're
talking about programming something through actual phizz iCal moving pieces,
(33:02):
mechanical pieces, but it's it's doing the same source of
stuff that digital controller is doing digitally, it's just doing
it all mechanically and with electronic pieces. So yeah, it's
kind of exciting stuff. Like if you ever were to
take one of these apart, first of all, I hope
you don't need it afterward, because if you do anything,
you know, if you're anything like us, you're not going
(33:22):
to get that back together. No. No, we might be
able to put something back together, but it ain't gonna work.
Let's just put it that way. It'll look really interesting though. Yeah,
so you could actually see that there are all these
little moving parts that need to come into play so
that they touch these contact points and create these circuits.
They also usually have In fact, as far as I know,
(33:43):
dryers are required to have temperature shut off switches. And
these aren't to measure the temperature of your clothing, but
the the temperature of the overall unit, so that if
it gets too warm, um, and is in danger of
melting down the motor or any of the other operative
parts or causing a fire. Causing a fire, it can
shut down. Yeah, It'll just break that contact and you
will lose the circuit, and thus the dryer will shut down. UM.
(34:06):
So you know, it's kind of a fail safe there.
And uh, some of them, like we said, have the
humidity sensors, so they can actually measure how much humidity
is within the dryer and if it reaches below a
certain threshold, then the dryer will shut off because your
clothes are dry, so that doesn't have to continue to
operate and thus consume more energy. Now, there are other
(34:26):
types of clothes dryers out there. That's the basic type,
that's the one that's the most common United States. But
like you were saying, Lauren, it's not the only kind
out there. One of them is called a condensing clothes dryer.
So these don't have a vent to exhaust steam. They
don't have that fan pulling the air through inventing it out. Instead,
these dryers allow water to condense and then collect, either
(34:49):
draining into a collection pan or tank, or more likely
draining into the house water waste system. So if you
have a washer dryer combo, something that can act is
both washer and a dryer, it's usually this type of dryer.
It's a condenser dryer more often than not. Uh, And
so putting an exhaust on a washer that would be
really not good. Yeah, I mean you've got like the
(35:11):
wastewater exhaust. But if you had just a pipe that
was supposed to allow air to go through, water would
go through that too. Yeah yeah so yeah, which would
make it an inefficient washer. So yeah, then you have
the heat pump dryers, like you were saying, yeah, yeah,
these these have a these have just just a normal
old heat pump. I mean, I mean the kind of
thing that we were talking about in in in our
(35:31):
refrigerator episode. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's a heat exchanger. You've
got a hot side and a cold side, so the
cold side is really important because you've got that hot,
steamy air and when you have hot steamy air meat
a cold service, that's when you have water condensing, and
then that condensed water can then flow into a pan
or a drain, just like in the condenser style. The
warm side of the heat pomp can reheat the air
(35:51):
inside the dryer. So as the dryer air is losing
energy because it's encountering that wet water and causing it
to evaporate, that means that the air temperatures to go down.
But this heat pomp continues that cycle, so the cold
side is removing the water, the hot side is increasing
the temperature, so you can have a more efficient means
of drying out the clothes inside. So again, no need
(36:13):
to exhaust unless which is great because if you don't
have to exhaust this thing, like by exhaust, I mean
you don't have to have a pipe where the exhaust
air flows through. There's no need for that in this model,
and that's great because when you have an exhaust pipe
that's open to the environment, that means that you're losing
some of the heat that you want to put inside
the clothes just going out the exhaust pipe. Oh sure, sure,
(36:35):
and you're you're losing through that exhaust pipe that heat
out into your house, which, for example, during the summer months,
can make you run your acemore more intensely. Yeah. So, uh,
it's kind of a domino effect, right, So then we
can talk a little bit about these future dryers. One
of the which one of the ones that you mentioned.
So first of all, there was an idea back in
the nineteen sixties to try and use microwaves as a
(36:57):
as a means of drying clothes, So you would make
a special old dryer would be a microwave dryer. Supposedly
there are some of these in Japan, but I've never
seen like an actual source source about it. But the
real problem with this is arcing. So arcing is when
you get these little plasma forms. If you've ever accidentally
put something metal in a microwave, and here's where I
(37:17):
tell you do not put metal in a mica that's
very bad. But if you've ever accidentally done it, then
you might have seen arking where you see these little
plasmas lightning bolts. Yeah, or if you've ever had one
of those plasma balls where you put your fingers on it.
It's kind of like that too. In fact, it is like,
that's what's happening. Um, it's not good for your microwave
(37:39):
in general. I used to have a microwave that had
a special stand that came with the microwave. Okay, that
was meant for popcorn, Like you put a bag of
microwave popcorn on it, and it would elevate the popcorn
so that it would have more uniform heating. Despite the
fact that this came with the microwave, which I would
assume means it's say, to put in the microwave, it
(38:02):
would occasionally mark. Not all the time, but sometimes you
would get a mark, and I would think, I do
not want microup microwave popcorn that badly. Yeah, that's vaguely terrifying. Yeah.
So anyway, if you were to put stuff that's like
if you had metal stuff in your clothes, either like
change or zippers or yeah, or buttons or other clasps
things that are metal, then that could possibly cause this
(38:22):
arcing problem which could damage clothing. And in fact, that's
the main reason we haven't really seen it implemented. There
have been other people who have tested it, and there's
still people who are thinking that there might be a
way of doing this in a in a in a
manner that's not going to make your clothes burn up
or right right, which is really the purpose of me
drying my clothes. I don't know about everybody else. Well,
there are occasionally shirts where I'm like, no, never mind,
(38:45):
we'll see step one for me, as I want to
get my clothes dry, but step two is I do
not want to burn holes in them. Yes, but okay,
So as unlikely as it sounds that this could be
a really viable plan. This, this is the kind of
system that that NASA has granted some some money too.
They granted one company specifically called Umqua all in capital
letters because why not, ye it's spelled exactly the way
(39:08):
it sounds. They granted them some funding through their Small
Business Innovative Research Program back in Tleven and um that
the system that UMA is working on the last time
I checked, involves ceiling clothes in in a vacuum bag
and um cleaning them by jetting water and soap through
the bag and then drying them via microwave radiation and
(39:31):
then furthermore making them all soft and cuddly with jets
of air. Interesting, so You've got a whole bunch of
things in there that are are similar to approaches that
were considered failures. Yeah, so maybe this could be a
terrific failure in space. Space. In space, nobody can clean
your underwear. It's a problem. I mean yeah, I mean,
(39:54):
I mean you either you either have to bring infinite
changes of underpants with you, right, which, try and get
that through customs, right right, I mean, and it's really
expensive to bring stuff into space. You don't want to
do that, I mean you you want to be able
to wash him. Everyone wants to clean underwear. Yeah, no,
that is very and if you don't, you should. Okay,
(40:15):
we're not judging. We're just I'm judging. Okay, we're judging
a little all right. So anyway, that wraps up this
discussion about clothes dryers. I hope that Thomas enjoyed this episode. Uh,
we've already received a request for what will eventually become
the third part of our series of cleaning clothing. Who knew?
H Yeah, dry cleaning. Yeah, dry cleaning will be the
(40:36):
next one we tackle. Obviously, it will not be the
next episode. Now we'll figure out. Gonna give it a
break for a little minute. You know, we gave it
a couple of months for for washing clothes and dryers,
so the same sort of thing is going to apply
at least so but we will get around to it.
If you have a request, whether it's clothing related or
something completely unrelated the clothing but still related to technology
(40:56):
and you want to learn more about it, let us know.
Will take that burden of responsibility off your shoulders and
we'll carry it proudly into the future. Just send us
an email or at least into a microphone or at
least into a microphone. Yeah, send us an email the
addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us
a line on Facebook, Tumbler, or Twitter or handle at
all three is tech stuff h s W and we
(41:19):
will talk to you again. Releasing for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it has stuff works
dot com
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Karah Preiss
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