Laundry
an establishment where clothes are washed and ironed. The Monday washboiler, tub, furrowed wash-board, rubber wringer, clothesline, clothespins, ironing tables, and flatirons are time-honored institutions. The operations of boiling, rubbing, rinsing, wringing, drying, and ironing are familiar to the housewife. Washing machines of various types have lessened somewhat the labor of rubbing, but fine goods must yet be washed by hand.
Many European cities, especially French cities, provide public laundries. In Paris there are large establishments to which laundrymaids in white caps and trim aprons bring their baskets of clothes, and from which they return with a pile of neatly folded clothing or laundered linen. The women furnish their own soap. For a few sous they are provided with water and utensils, and are given a place at the long heater, tub room, drying facilities, and tables at which to iron. Even laundry maids who take in washing at so much per dozen do their work at the public laundry. At Geneva public washrooms, long, low, shed-like buildings, line the Rhone just below the bridges for some distance. Instead of Caesar's legions barring the passage of the Gauls, an array of bare armed, short skirted women may be seen dipping their buckets in the swift waters or doing their washing under cover of a friendly shed roof. They carry their wash home to dry and iron.
So far as this country is concerned, the large laundry with steam appliances originated at Troy, New York, the home likewise of the collar and cuff industry. Nearly every considerable town in the Union now has its "Troy Laundry." In these large establishments three distinct steps may be recognized--washing, drying, and ironing. The first operation is performed usually in a machine known as a reverse washer. The clothes are placed in an inside cylinder of wood or brass, perforated to admit the free passage of steam and soapsuds. This cylinder is run on an axis inside of a larger watertight casing of galvanized iron or wood. Hot water and steam are admitted by means of pipes. The cylinder containing the clothes is revolved several times in one direction, then in the other, thus loosening up the clothes and enabling the current of subs to cleanse them thoroughly.
Instead of passing the wet clothes through wringers to break buttons, they are placed inside of a second perforated copper cylinder, called an extractor, and subjected for ten or twenty minutes to a rotary motion of a thousand revolutions a minute. Nearly all the moisture is thrown out by centrifugal force. The pieces are then hung on racks and sent through a steam-heated drying room. A current of air drawn by a fan carries away the moisture.
In the ironing department hand work has been superseded largely by machines. Collars and cuffs are starched and are passed between a series of drums and rollers. The drums are covered with felt and padding, like an old-fashioned ironing-board. The rollers, relied upon to put on a polish, have themselves bright, polished, steam-heated surfaces of metal. An ironing machine of this sort may have rollers of sufficient length, from one to four feet, to busy several operators in feeding and in carrying away the finished work. One large machine is capable of polishing as high as 3,000 dozens of collars or cuffs in a working day of ten hours. Shirts require the use of several machines--one for the neckband, one for the bosom, another for the cuffs, etc. Towels, sheets, table linen, and other flat pieces are smoothed by stretching them on a swiftly revolving, steamheated drum. In the laundry such a machine is known as a mangle.