Guest Post by Elaine Codling:

Many of the machines that frame our lives in the modern world are ‘skill-saving’ rather than ‘labour-saving’ as we generally think of them. If you look around you’ll find very few that are actually labour-saving. That is: sparing us the drudgery of difficult, repetitive, non-productive work. The shining example of a labour saving machine is the washer. Even before I saw Hans Rosling’s fascinating TED talk “The Magic Washing Machine” I knew that the development of the automatic clothes washer was a huge step forward for women in the western world. His talk made me realize that of all the modern domestic appliances available it’s the washing machine I would be miss the most.