I was at the laundrette today, to wash a duvet, and the owner was taking apart one of the tumble dryers – it needed new bearings for the drum.
It struck me that the tumble dryer is a device that hasn’t changed much in… oooh, a very long while.[1] It’s basically a big perforated drum, which rotates over a heat source, with a special area for one of your socks to get trapped in when you’re taking everything else out.
So is this it for the tumble dryer? Why hasn’t the technology moved on? Well, it has, but the tumble dryer seems to be a classic example of ‘incremental innovation’ – where small, steady improvements are made to a basic concept over time. Indeed, a quick search of the worldwide patent database shows a steady stream of new patents for tumble dryers – at least 12 last year, and one already this year. But none are the ones that, if you excuse the pun, set the tumble dryer world alight. No drying using nuclear fusion, genetic modification, anti-gravity or superconducting gizmos, as far as I can see.
Most innovation is like that though – it builds on what’s been built on before – not so much standing on the shoulders of giants, as rebuilding those shoulders to be able to bear more weight (with apologies to those in the Analogy Preservation Society). Radical innovation (the n-dimensional nanoparticle plasma dryer which doesn’t even need to be near your clothes to dry them) is much rarer.
One day, maybe there will be a revolution in tumble dryer technology. But meanwhile, we’ll take those small improvements, those small steps (or spins) forward, hopeful that in amongst all the tumble dryer research in the world, there’s someone out there dreaming up the next big thing.
1 I can’t find (I haven’t looked hard) who invented the tumble dryer. Several websites all state that “a Frenchman named Pochon” created a hand-cranked one in 1799. About gives more details, but I’m suspicious that none cite a reference, and Pochon seems not to have any more details – like a first name.
In the end, I reckon it all comes down to money. The thing with yer basic tumble dryer is it’s very cheap to make – a heat source, a spindle driven by an electric motor and … er, that’s it. You can buy a basic home model for much less than £100, and it’ll do the job, day in, day out, for years and years. Any radical improvement in technology is likely to cost so much more that people will just keep using the tried-and-tested version. It’s rather like microgeneration using solar panels or a domestic wind turbine—everybody would like to have such things, but they cost a lot to install and the payback time is longer than the projected lifetime of the product. So unless there’s a radical reduction in price, take-up rate will remain small.
Like Henry has done elsewhere, I started answering here but it became a post in its own right.
Mine senses when the clothes are dry (you can set it to the desired level of dryness) and stops without the need for a timer. That’s pretty cool, especially since the old one didn’t even have a working timer and I had to remember to switch it off manually. I’m happy with that level of innovation!