Imagine you are a housewife living in the early 1900s. You cook, look after the children, clean, look after your husband, look after the household, do the washing - the list never seems to end! You sometimes think that you work much harder than your husband, but it is generally work you love to do. The only thing you really don't enjoy is wash day. Scrubbing the clothes on the washboard in the hot soapy water is terrible for your hands.
When I showed the children this washboard (which has been beautifully restored) their reaction was very interesting. Many had not seen a washboard like this before and were amazed to realize that it was something which every household would once have owned. Some of the children recognized it as a washing implement but had not seen a glass washboard before, only those with a metal scrubbing surfaces. Most intriguingly, some of the children recognized the washboard not as a washboard but as a musical instrument having seen bush bands use them in the past.
So what exactly is a washboard? A washboard is a washing tool used for hand washing clothes. It is most commonly made of a wooden frame with a corrugated piece of iron or other metal as the washing surface. The one I showed the children is unusual as it has a glass washing surface. Washing boards have a long history though and were probably originally made completely of wood. We cannot know for certain when people first started to cut notches in wooden boards to wash their clothes with (an improvement to banging wet clothes on the rocks), but it seems likely that this first happened in the Scandinavian countries, as this seems to be where the earliest examples come from. However for centuries women in Italy and in England had used boards without grooves to help in washing clothes and there were also washing bats (for stirring and beating clothes) which had grooved patterns on the paddle piece. We do know though that by the 19th century wooden washing boards were being used in Europe and America, though they were not an item every household would have owned.
The invention of metal and wood washing boards is easier to pin down and these were certainly an American invention. On February 9, 1833, Stephen Rust of New York patented a washboard with a fluted piece of tin, sheet iron, copper or zinc as the washing surface, which is thought by many to be the first patent granted for a metal washboard. The metal surface was an improvement on the original wood as the wood grooves were worn down by repeated washing, while the metal, if cared for, would be more resilient. Later in the 19th century, glass washboards started to be produced, certainly before 1877 when a gentleman called Hermann Liebmann patented an improvement for glass washboards. His patent also shows that, at this time, there were washboards with porcelain and terracotta inserts available! These, and the glass washboards would be resistant to rust which was a problem with the metal boards, but would have been easier to break, which might explain why they were less common. They were probably also more expensive than a metal one, especially a cheap tin version! Washboards were, by the 20th century an item which would have been present in virtually every household and continued to be used until washing machines became common. Today, they can still be purchased and some still prefer to wash using them, but their chief use today is as a popular percussion instrument.