The automatic washing machine — Bendix Home Appliances

1936 – 1956

A licensed name, and a real first: The most consequential piece of household technology ever to carry a South Bend address was not made by the Bendix Corporation at all. In 1936 the corporation licensed its name — for a 25 percent stake — to Bendix Home Appliances, another South Bend company, founded by Judson S. Sayre; the Powerhouse Museum's collection record gives the founder's first name as Jason, and the two forms stand as their sources give them. What that company did is not in dispute. In 1937 it marketed the first domestic automatic washing machine: the Bendix Home Laundry, a front-loading machine with a glass porthole door and a rotating drum, driven by an electrically powered mechanical timer, that would autofill, wash, rinse and spin-dry a load without a hand touching it — and, having no drum suspension, had to be bolted to the floor to keep it from walking across the room in the spin cycle. The Powerhouse Museum's record states the priority plainly: patents applied for in 1936, and "first one made at South Bend Indiana in 1937." The patent record of the machine's own development is a South Bend record — Kenda Clark of South Bend filed the washing-machine patent of 9 August 1937, assigned to Bendix Home Appliances, for a machine "operated automatically in a predetermined cycle to wash and rinse and dry clothes."

The course: By the time the United States entered the Second World War, 330,000 of the machines had been sold; production resumed in 1946 and reached 2,000,000 by 1950. In 1953 the company innovated again with the Duomatic, the first combination washer-dryer. The ownership line runs out of the city: Bendix Home Appliances was sold to the Avco Manufacturing Corporation and resold to Philco in 1956. The claim tested in this entry is the priority claim, and it stands at the strength the museum and reference record give it — first company to market a domestic automatic washing machine, 1937 — with its two necessary qualifications printed beside it: the maker was a licensee, not the brake corporation; and "automatic" is the operative word, electric washing machines of the hand-tended kind having been sold since Alva J. Fisher's Thor of 1907.

Sources:

1. Powerhouse Collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney — the Bendix washing machine record: "Patents applied for in 1936, and first one made at South Bend Indiana in 1937"; the name licensed by Vincent Bendix to Bendix Home Appliances, founded by "Jason Sayre"; "claimed to be the first automatic washing machine."
2. Bendix Corporation, standard company record — the 1936 license to Bendix Home Appliances, "another South Bend company founded by Judson Sayre," for a 25% stake; the 1937 Bendix Home Laundry described; 330,000 units sold by the U.S. entry into the war; production resumed 1946, 2,000,000 by 1950; the sale to Avco and resale to Philco in 1956.
3. U.S. Patent 2,208,662 (filed 9 August 1937; granted 23 July 1940) — Kenda Clark, of South Bend, Indiana, assignor to Bendix Home Appliances, Inc.: a washing machine "operated automatically in a predetermined cycle."
4. Consumer NZ, "A brief history of the washing machine" (2023) — the 1937 Bendix as "the first automatic domestic washing machine"; the bolted-to-the-floor qualification; the 1953 Duomatic as the first combination washer-dryer; Fisher's Thor of 1907 as the first electric machine.