In today’s programme we will make a
\nforay into the history of washing machines. Our first stop is the Village Museum
\nin Bucharest to see how people used to wash their clothes before washing
\nmachines were invented. The museum exhibits a fulling mill from Borlova, in
\nCaras Severin county, south-western Romania. These fulling mills are made
\nentirely of wood and are water-powered. Used as far back as ancient times,
\nfulling mills were more widespread in areas with lots of sources of water and
\nwhere the flow of water was relatively constant, so as to prevent the machine
\nfrom freezing in winter, given that it was made of oak, beech and alder. The
\npiece on display in the museum was made in the first quarter of the 20th
\ncentury. Surprisingly, a similar mill is still very much operational today in
\nthe village of Dobra de Jos, in Alba county, western Romania. Ioana and Mircea
\nAvram, the couple who own it, say the mill is 101 years old and still running.
\nIoana Avram explains how the fulling mill works, without using any detergent or
\nelectricity:<\/p>\n
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The clothes are laid down here,
\nwheeled around and left here for the water to fall on them for two days. We use
\nthe fulling mills to wash blankets, carpets, rugs and bed covers. Mountain
\nwater is the best. My mother-in-law used to say that the water from the snow yields
\nthe best results. In spring you would get what we called ‘white water’, that is
\nwater resulting from melting snow. This water is very good for washing.<\/p>\n
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The fulling mill is a machine
\ncharacteristic to the sub-Carpathian regions. Its component parts are the
\nwooden wheel, a horizontal spindle, the axis in fact, and two or more hammers.
\nThe structure is made of beams and a roof made of shingle. The whirlpool forms
\npart of the mill and is in the shape of a truncated cone, with a small base
\nsunk into the ground. It is made of planks of wood attached one next to the
\nother on the interior side of two circular rings: one below, towards the small
\nbase, and the other above, towards the large base. The water enters at a fast
\npace through the mill race located above, causing the cloth to spin, just like
\nin the case of modern washing machines. Mircea Avram inherited the fulling mill
\nfrom his family and understands everything about how it works, something he has
\nalso explained to us:<\/p>\n
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First you have two hammers, as we
\ncall them. We lift them, we let them drop, and then we put the rugs in the pot,
\nand we put wood in the cauldron to heat up the water, until it reaches 37 to 40
\ndegrees Celsius. Then we activate the wheel and let it run for about two or
\nthree days. The whole machinery is made so that it runs by itself through
\ninertia, because of how the hammers are made.<\/p>\n
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Mircea Avram still has the documents
\nshowing how much his family invested in the fulling mill 101 years ago when it
\nwas first built:<\/p>\n
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This is how much my father spent on
\nmaking the mill. He took out a loan from the bank, and this here is the
\ninterest rate he paid for half a year. This is a list of all the people who were
\nemployed to build the mill: Dumitru Panfiloi got 820 lei for the stone, Toma
\ngot 500 to transport the stone, and so on and so forth. Income tax was also
\npaid on this.<\/p>\n
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The total investment amounted to
\n19,608 lei at the time. The mill is now on the heritage list of Alba county and
\nMircea Avram is responsible for maintaining it:<\/p>\n
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When it breaks down, the most
\namount of work is involved in the whirlpool. It is best maintained by replacing
\nthe edges that cause it to spin. In 1994 I replaced the spindle and the main
\nwheel with a diameter of 130 cm and sometime after 2006 I replaced the cauldron
\nwhere the cloth is placed. It’s made of oak wood brought from somewhere near
\nMedias.<\/p>\n
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After this foray into the history of
\nwashing machines, we can only be thankful that today we have washing machines
\nthat we can even operate from a distance via the Internet.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The fulling mill is an old method of washing cloth and one such mill is still in operation in a Romanian village.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":136036,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42520],"tags":[43245],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-136035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inside-romania","tag-fulling"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n