Remarkable Woman – Josephine Garis Cochrane

I come from a long line of can do women, but was among the first women in my family to become a professional businesswoman as opposed to a civil servant, lawyer or doctor. I truly admire women who led the way such as the one I pay homage to here, today and who lived according the the old saw: Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

Josephine Garis Cochrane (also Cochran) -

American Inventor – The Dishwasher U.S. Patent No. 355,139

Born March 8, 1839 - Died Aug. 3, 1913

“If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself.”

Josephine Cochrane

She married William A. Cochrane at age 19 in 1858 and was widowed in 1883. In 1886 she designed a dishwasher, after noting how many plates were easily chipped through hand washing. She had

become a widow, had significant debt, and needed to achieve everything, as a woman on her own, without a male figure to ease the way. She more than managed!

She received a patent to manufacture a hand- powered dishwasher, and immediately founded a manufacturing company to build her machines, but they were too expensive for normal households. She showed them at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, installing nine of them in restaurants and pavilions of the fair. She won the prize for “best mechanical construction, durability and adaptability to its line of work”. Her company began to focus on scaling the equipment for commercial customers and was renamed Cochran’s Crescent Washing Machine Company in 1897. It was later acquired by Kitchen Aid in 1926, after her death from exhaustion in 1913. In 2006, she was posthumously inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame for her patent.

Josephine Cochrane has never been honored on a United States stamp, but she is commemorated on a 3.30-leu stamp issued by Romania in 2013, part of a set of three honoring famous women.

More details: Josephine Cochrane -Wikipedia.

Nermin K. AHMAD

NFBPWC SECRETARY 2024-2026