Josephine Cochrane

Josephine Cochrane (born Garis, 1839 to 1913) was an American inventor who invented and manufactured the first successful hand-powered dishwasher. Once her patent issued on December 28, 1886, she founded the Garis-Cochrane Manufacturing Company to build her machines. She showed the new machine at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where nine washers were installed in restaurants and pavilions of the fair, and won the prize for best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work. The company grew through a focus on hotels and other commercial customers, where hot water access was not an issue, and was renamed Cochran's Crescent Washing Machine Company in 1897. After her death it became part of KitchenAid through acquisition by Hobart Manufacturing Company, and she was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.