Hasta La Ideas

Prior to the invention of the washing machine, rural residents of Eastern Europe developed a way to wash bulky wool items like blankets, rugs and carpets. Water would be diverted from a nearby source into a roughly-made conical tub that was intentionally not made watertight.

Image: PoligraficNet

Because the channel feeding the tub is aligned tangentially with the circumference, the water flowing into it runs around the edges and creates a whirlpool, agitating the items within. No detergent is needed, and as gravity does its thing, the dirty water runs out from between the slats.

Image: Cinabru ES

Image: Cinabru ES

This invention is called, in Romania at least, a vâltoare (Romanian for “whirlpool”). Here’s what it looks like in action:

To control the speed and force of the flow, an attendant works a series of gates. These are just vertically-placed pieces of wood interrupting the incoming flow:

To be clear, these were not something every family would own, and they were typically not used for everyday clothing. Rather, an enterprising villager or family would build and maintain a vâltoare—for profit—with residents traveling from far and wide in springtime for an annual cleaning of bulky fabric items like bedspreads and rugs. “Especially those made of sheep’s wool,” a housewife from Sugag, Romania told Romanian newspaper Adevarul. Said housewife currently uses a vâltoare in the nearby village of Dobra.

“All these [items] are left here in the whirlpool for up to half a day, and the whirlpool of the water cleans them of all the dirt. No detergent or electricity is needed. The whirlpool of water that flows very quickly does everything.”