“IF NOBODY ELSE IS GOING TO INVENT IT, I'LL DO IT MYSELF.”

Sometimes invention begins with an enormous scientific problem.

Sometimes it begins because people keep breaking your good china.

Josephine Garis Cochran was born in Ohio in 1841 and later lived in Illinois, where she entertained regularly.

She owned expensive dishes.

And apparently wasn't terribly impressed when they were chipped while being washed.

So she began thinking about a better way to do it.

Her answer was a mechanical dishwasher.

Cochran designed a system that held dishes securely while pressurised water cleaned them, rather than relying on somebody scrubbing them by hand.

She was granted a US patent for her dishwasher in 1886.

But Josephine did something else that's particularly important.

She didn't merely invent her machine and hand the idea to somebody else.

She went into business.

She established a company to manufacture and market her invention and found a particularly receptive market among commercial kitchens, hotels and restaurants.

Her business eventually became connected with the company we know today as KitchenAid.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame credits Josephine Cochran with developing the first practical dishwasher.

It is easy to look at an everyday machine and forget that somebody had to imagine it first.

Somebody had to design it.

Somebody had to build it.

And somebody had to convince people to buy it.

In this case, that somebody was a woman in Victorian America.

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Leading to Wrinkles in the Fabric with Dr Kathryn Spurling.

Science isn't always about discovering distant galaxies.

Sometimes it's looking at an annoying problem in your own house and deciding:

Fine. I'll fix it myself.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame credits Cochran with the first practical dishwasher, her 1886 patent and the company she created to manufacture and market it.