Inventions
Clothes Iron
Electrical Engineering
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A clothes iron, also called a flatiron or smoothing iron, is a small handheld appliance that is heated and used to press clothing to remove wrinkles by loosening the bonds between fibers so that fabric holds a new, flat shape as it cools. The American inventor Henry W. Seely patented the electric flatiron on June 6, 1882, an early design that used electrical resistance heating but weighed around 15 pounds and took a long time to heat; an earlier carbon-arc-heated iron reportedly appeared in France around 1880, though historians regard that claim as doubtful.
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