> After five minutes of that, the machine would then fill the chamber with hot water for a three-minute ultrasonic bath. This was followed by a two-minute hot rinse cycle. Next, the chamber would drain and the user was blasted with warm air to dry off. They were additionally exposed to both infrared and ultraviolet light to kill germs. All in all, it was a 15-minute cycle.
It's apparently also a tanning booth.
15 minutes means it takes about 3 times longer than a shower, and it doesn't seem to do your hair.
I suppose, one advantage would be that you can use it while almost asleep, while you need a minimum of mental presence for a shower. So if you wanted, you could: wake up; slump into the bathroom and into this thing; press the button; snooze another 15 minutes while part of your morning routine is being done for (or to) you.
Whether this is something you should do is another question...
(Also, it might be possible to extend it with hair washing if you mount one of those barber sinks at the top and then somehow automate it. Exercise left for the reader.)
Flashback to boot camp, we did this with our clothes. One set (well, actually several) of perfectly folded never-used clothes in the wall locker (ready to be inspected by the drill instructor, of course), one set of clothes on your body, and one set in the laundry bag. They did laundry often enough that you could get by with just wearing every set of clothes for two days. Gross, but we collectively decided to hold our nose and say nothing about the aroma of our teammates in return for not having to tweeze t-shirts.
It worked until the drill instructor noticed that the clothes in the wall locker weren't aging.
Need to triple buffer or there’s a condition where you have used a plate from the clean pile, but the dirty wash is still running. You’d just have to stand there in the kitchen like some kind of Sims character.
You are right that for able bodied people it's at best a gimmick. But it might be useful for people with limited mobility, who don't want to depend on other people washing them.
It's probably only that tall so onlookers can gawk at the pretty women's bodies inside through the transparent sides. If it were sitting on the ground, you wouldn't get such a great view.
Yes, the original prototype is obviously just there to show off the models. I was thinking about more practical and less sexy versions that might actually see production.
Yeah, for a production model you'd likely see the chamber dropped down to a reasonable height, and whatever is in the pedestal can be hidden behind an adjacent wall or under the floor or something. There's no real reason it needs to be up on that pedestal apart from just being visually impressive
Depends on how much hair the man still have... some will definitely not do it in 2 minutes. And most women I know don't need 15 minutes to wash their hair.
You're faster than me, a man with short hair :). Rinse, gel, shampoo, rinse, shampoo, rinse - but the warm water also cleans the mind and soothes the soul, so I'm not in that big of a hurry to end one of the best ways to relax and unwind I have. It usually adds up to 10 minutes.
I have a family member, also male with short hair, who used to take 20-30 minute showers every day, driving others in the house insane - but that was the "I'm a first-year medical student, I just learned how many bugs there are on everything, and how ugly diseases they cause; also, have you heard of SARS?" effect. Other symptoms include going though copious amounts of hand disinfectant. Fortunately that went away over time, as they improved their feeling for actual risks.
I have extremely thick hair, but only use shampoo once every few weeks because too much absolutely ruins my hair texture. Nonetheless, just rinsing my hair thoroughly with warm water and then cold water takes at least 5-6 minutes per shower.
I think the greater point is that hair maintenance varies greatly from person to person, and it is absurd to assume every male only needs 2 minutes or every female needs > 15 minutes. A great example of the stupidity of stereotype and how it leads us away from useful thought.
Is that a problem though? The other day I got a whole lecture on HN, complete with math, proving that keeping the water running entire time while showering isn't meaningfully wasteful... I still can't believe it on an emotional level, but the math checks out...
A nominal water aerator limits water around 5L-6L/min levels. For every minute I don't use the water, I spend approximately two full kettles of water.
With every 5L of water I can
- Cook 4 servings (~400 grams) of pasta.
- Brew 5L of tea/coffee
- Water all the plants at home two times.
- Possibly wash most of my handwash-only dishes in one go.
- etc.
So it's not not meaningfully wasteful. However, I can't turn off the water in the winter, because I feel very cold otherwise. However, this doesn't mean I don't waste any water or happy about what I'm doing. My only (half) relief is this water is somehow processed and reused by city for other needs, at least one more time.
Water is by far the most abundant resource on the planet (70+% of earth is water), and we have methods to remove salt and contaminants from almost all of it. We can even turn urine into drinking water.
I wouldn’t worry about wasting it. We’ll die from something else long before water becomes an issue.
Water already is an issue in many places. It's expensive and in limited supply because we can't drink salt water and storage, treatment and delivery cost money.
For the US in particular, water issues come down overwhelmingly to unfettered agricultural use, often with crops like alfalfa that are both mostly water by weight and are shipped out of the country to other places. Domestic use is only a fraction of the total.
I am pretty sure that this is true in all developed countries. When you see farming without irrigation, you will see more poverty. It is very important for human development. That said, it could sometimes be done more efficiently, but more costly.
And in some other places it's so abundant that water companies don't even bother metering it, you just pay one flat fee a month and you can use as much as you like.
The issue in cities where most people live is only sometimes about the actual quantity of water available, but the cost and capacity of infrastructure to collect, treat, and distribute the water.
Currently, my waste water goes right back into the Mississippi. Fresh water galore. That's not the case on the west coast. Residential (lawns aside) isn't a drop in the bucket compared to agriculture though.
The amount, abundance and share of water among everything on this planet doesn't mean anything if none of it is in that dam nearby your city and you can't utilize it.
Similarly, that spring water has no use if you can't extract it and get out from the hands of capitalistic companies (cough Nestlé & CocaCola cough) which monopolize said spring and suck it dry without giving it to you.
Don't forget, Nestlé's CEO told that "water is something they package and sell, and that water is not a human right". So don't expect it to get that abundant resource and use it the way you wish.
So, water is precious. You need to be mindful about it.
We're drinking one of the cheapest drinking water in the world, but this doesn't change the reality of sinkholes appearing where we deplete the water in our country.
So, the prices might not be rising that quickly for now, but sinkholes are giving us the warning.
Prices don't always point correctly, esp. when there are other economic and socioeconomic factors at play.
Assuming you use the same amount of soap and what nots, and get the same amount of dirt and debris off your body, the more water you use during a shower, the easier it is to process the water at your sewage treatment plant, if your waste water is treated.
If your waste water isn't treated, and is discharged to water ways as-is, the more water you use, the more dilute your pollution.
If you've got a septic system, I dunno? Probably doesn't help, but if your system is well sized, no big deal? Some of your outflow probably recharges aquifers, so it's kind of circular (although a lot of the outflow evaporates, so less directly circular there)
Maybe. Though when you add clean water upstream that usually means water clean enough to be fit for drinking (because that what comes out of your tap.)
When they dilute at the treatment plant, they can use somewhat dirtier clean water.
Most people consume produce from irrigated fields. So it depends on how you want to allocate the consumption: to farmers or consumers? (It's just an accounting question.)
I'm convinced there's a pareto distribution of crop water usage. We're depleting our aquifers to grow sileage crops and almonds (which aren't even that good).
Different things happen in different parts of the globe, and water is a fairly local issue.
You are right that me consuming almonds in Singapore can indirectly cause trouble in California, where they grow the almonds. But the well-known solution to that is proper water rights trading, like they do in Australia in water challenged areas.
The Great Lakes have 1/5th of the world's freshwater. Absolutely enormous volumes of that water run out the St. Lawrence into the sea, continually, all the time.
I don't have any reason to leave my taps open all the time, and my water is metered so I would pay for such profligacy in money I could put to some useful purpose.
But I can certainly do it without creating any meaningful environmental stress. This would just briefly divert it from its destiny in the Atlantic.
Just because you live near a lucky point on earth, thinking that everyone has the same luxury is a bit absurd.
I traveled through Mongolia for a week. Every camp we stayed had a water tank, and water use was extremely constrained. Same for electricity and heat.
Your position is akin to getting power from the first distribution point near a nuclear power plant and saying that electricity is indeed infinite for everyone on the planet.
Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury. I have shared a couple of maps down there. Maybe you should give them a look about our planet's state.
> Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury.
If my local water supplier would offer the option to pre-pay, I might take it. I don't think it would change anything about how I use my water, if the price stayed the same.
(I am pre-paying for my mobile broadband, and I don't notice me using it any different than people who post-pay.)
us: the humanity in general, today: the state of world water stress level [0], [1], eligible: the correctness of the thing you are doing regardless of the legality of the thing you're doing.
IOW, "I pay the bill, now get off my lawn" is something you can do. But should you really do it, just because you can do it?
If you think you can do whatever you want regardless of the things you're causing, then we're on a completely different page, and continuing this little chat has no point. We can't converge and agree on a point.
Was that about water, or about energy spent on heating the water? My gut feeling is that keeping the water running would roughly double the amount of water, so double the energy.
I'm not sure Paris has one of the best public transit in the world or maybe that's just an indicative of the sorry state of public transit worldwide. I mean I wouldn't call world-class a system where just a single failure easily strands 1 million people halfway to their destination and where trains are delayed and cancelled routinely, often without information given to passengers.
I'm in favor of more public transportation, but if you think people use car willingly in and around Paris, I don't think you've tried it; it's so bad that only people with no viable choice will use a car. Or maybe you could explain (for example) how my sister in law was supposed to carry her two baby kids to the daycare using an overcrowded metro (and bonus, through stations without working elevators) or how my brother was supposed to carry the equipment he was using to constructions sites he was working. And then you've got all the places where taking a car is a 30 min trip vs 2 hours by bus or public transportation (thankfully the Grand Paris initiatives are helping a lot there).
For now, removing cars in Paris just push them around the city, because the public transportation network isn't ready.
For a lot of destination you can take 2-3 differentes routes.
The rest of your comment try to justify car usage by taking less than 5% of the transit in the city, when there is already exception or infrastructures made for the scenario you described (except elevators and accessibility, thats a big issur in paris intra-muros).
Yes, there are a lot of people that use the car when they can not use it, thats still most of the car traffic.
> Yes, there are a lot of people that use the car when they can not use it, thats still most of the car traffic.
so, do you have any data to back up that assertion? (I won't claim that I have any favorable to my argument, just the observation that driving in and Paris around Paris is pretty bad)
> For a lot of destination you can take 2-3 differentes routes.
most alternative routes usually take longer and end up congested whenever the main route is having issues.
Indicate 13% of the traffic is for utilitary vehicule. This number include people taking their utilitary vehicule for personal reason.
50% is for personal vehicules.
But I don't see anything in the document that shows that people are using personal vehicles for deplacements they could have easily been made with public transportation. Which was your original point that I disagreeing with: people aren't 'brainwashed by cars', but rather can't practically use another way.
Also, according to one of the linked pdf, cars in Paris are barely for Paris-Paris movement, but more for Paris-suburbs, which is still the biggest weakness of the public transportation network.
If you need to go east-west of paris suburb, that's 1h in car, the same time in public transit.
If you need to go north-south of paris suburb, that's 1h in car and 30 mins in public transit.
There are multiple route to get from point A to B.
For example, from Versailles to Invalides, you can take:
RER C then Metro 8.
Or TER N then i can choose from two different metro line at Montparnasse
Or TER U then RER A.
There is also buses, bus since the rail is faster, I never take it.
In case of strike the network is never fully down, people that can remote work do it, so there is a lot less of people transiting.
On the biggest strike you can loose an hour or two while commuting, for small strike, it will get more crowded.
They don't, because that would be the whole point of a total shutdown in a coordinated, all-modes transit employees strike. Ask people in London, they have that on a semi-regular basis.
Otherwise, there is no such thing as "transit employees not feeling like working" - thanks to the magic of economy holding a metaphorical gun to the heads of most people. You work whether you feel like it or not.
Having my children die because someone's poorly maintained octocopter broke down and flew into the side of my home isn't "natural selection against stupidity".
It's like you think the only victims of drunk drivers are the drunks themselves.
"Worse" was not for people in the vehicle but the people below.
After car forced us to be aware of our surrounding when walking, flying car would force us to be aware of the sky too.
I, too, imagine a person in my head, and then immediately wish that they die in a terrible accident, possibly taking innocent lives in the process, because I decided I don't like the imaginary person I just created. In my head.
Today, we would instead make an app that would matchmake important people, who desire to be effortlessly washed, with less-than-important people, who are willing to wash others for less than a minimum wage. It's sharing (and caring) economy!
We would also call this a "minimum viable product" and promise that in some future update, the less-than-important people involved will be replaced by AI (and become even less important).
> Ah, those beautiful times when people actually cared and believed the future will be better
Thinking the future will be worse with all the available evidence is of a huge ego. How main character you have to be to think that it's just as you're alive that a trend of millenia will inverse.
Technologists' very existence is based on the idea of improvement, and, as a result, making the lives of others better. Compared to other approaches, nothing has delivered quite on the same scale, though it's not without its costs.
Yep, and there's no stopping technological progress. Whoever thinks things will get worse is just being what internet investing lingo calls "gay bears" - waiting for the doom that can justify their constant state of depression and existential dread.
In fact people will get upset if you don't agree with them that the world is going to shit (and prove they are smart by predicting it).
Mostly. Sometimes people will do what's good for them, externalities be damned. I like leaded gasoline as an example. It wasn't an oopsie. We know it was bad from the day it was introduced and lead producers fought to keep it known as safe.
I am not sure about this, but it depends on definition of "technologist". Is Gates or Musk a "technologist"?
I think that social democratic movement in 20th century, and also Chinese communist government, made many people's lives better, by improving their material conditions. It often involved technology, true, but the technology is not much if it's not applied en masse. (Communist government of my home country, Czechoslovakia, had famously huge success in eradicating polio.)
And I am not convinced that free market dispersal of technology is more efficient in providing it en masse than government-directed dispersal. For a striking example, watch the ending of "scientific horror story" from Angela Collier: https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?si=rrBJPb6bHASNrPEY&t=2991
And their public mongodb hacked into 6 months later causing the company to go bust 12 months later. 18 months later there is a Github project that impersonates the server as a workaround.
Truly remarkable creative thinking in a way that does not exist today. This was a year after humans landed on the Moon, and I can understand the inspiration that drove the 70s.
Just look at the old design/production and the new one. Japan has simply regressed in design and manufacturing. I'll not pretend that I know why, and I don't think anybody does. But they had a nice run during which they got "dreamy" about the future and then... the bubble burst.
Here hoping that China gives us another run since the US of A has decided the take the back seat, financialize everything and put MBA/Bureaucrats in every corner of the process.
I don’t think we’ve lost the willingness to test products that push human/mechanical boundaries. I think rather it is about not retreading on the learned boundaries that we’ve already established or “solved”. So now we see concepts that test different kinds of human/machine integration. Such as worn AI devices, headsets, and the future idea of brain chips.
As for automatic washers: The idea isn’t totally gone - enclosed automated pet washers are around. (Despite being clearly terrifying for some pets.)
I have a severely handicapped adult son and would very much like one of these. I ended up having one of those sit-down tubs for senior citizens installed for a mere $17,000 but this would be better. Have to admit I don’t love handwashing him.
Came here with the idea of this being about how someone made terrible pre-1970 washing machine UX into something much better. Can’t say I’m disappointed though! I’m wondering if cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?
>cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?
Apart from it being loud as fuck? (They say it's ultrasonic, but there's some harmonic around 15,000 Hz that they all exhibit for some reason- both the bucket cleaners and the plaque picks at the dentist's office- and if you can still hear that frequency it is quite unpleasant.)
Most of the cleaning action of this thing is just mechanically being sprayed; I think they threw the ultrasonic cleaning action in just because they could. I'm sure it makes you feel cleaner though.
I think the application for this is to return some dignity and independence to people who have physical trouble washing themselves. Of course the form factor of the 1970 prototype wouldn’t do that, but that can be fixed.
There was a similar (contemporary?) Japanese model shared on here a few days ago, which was basically the same sans ladder. As long as there's nothing to stumble over on your way in, and it's not too hard to get situated in the chair, one of those would be amazing for people with mobility issues.
There was a New Yorker short story I read years ago about an elderly woman in a nursing home, and this wasn't the point of the story at all, but the main thing I remember is how the woman wanted to live with her daughter until her daughter pointed out that assisted/accessible bathing would be impossible in the daughter's tiny apartment shower.
You’re right, and I’m sorry for not being more specific. I was thinking of people who have trouble washing themselves, since that’s what GP was talking about.
I’ll be more mindful of the diversity of disabilities in the future.
As someone reading this while taking a shower, I'm questioning how this could be redesigned to work today. How are you supposed to use your phone if your head is sticking out?
Reminds me of my high school, where the gym showers were a car-wash arrangement, a corridor of sprays through which all the guys were herded nude after gym class.
At my high school it was a large tiled room with stainless steel columns in the middle. Each column had 6 showerheads around the top. Basically no matter which way you stood, it was full monty exposure to/from almost everyone else in the room.
Our Miele washing machine isn't too bed, if you ever had even a brief look at the manual.
The main annoyance I can find is that it's overly cautious about when it lets you open the door. I guess they take mild annoyance and waiting for the user, over Miele being responsible for major water spills.
The future of the past looked so much more interesting. Not practical, but certainly interesting.
I'm curious why the author of this piece decided to use the gender neutral pronoun for the women who modelled this odd machine. They wrote:
> The demonstration model would climb into the six-foot-tall machine via ladder, then enter the chamber, with their head sticking out of the top. They'd set the water temperature, then the machine would start spraying them with jets of warm water, like the pre-wash cycle at a car wash.
These models were all women. This was the 1970s, and the photos support the reasonable assumption that this was not a demonstration where male models were used. Using gender neutral pronouns is sensible in many cases — I didn't go as far as to look into the author's biography for example, so I refer to them as they for the nonce — but is doing so when the gender is known (and possibly relevant given the social context of that time) now on the rise, or is this just hypercorrection?
I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.
At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)
> the models being women has no impact on the subject
It's part of the context; design doesn't exist in isolation. Was this prototype aimed at women? Was it just sexism or its off-shoot 'sex sells'? Or were there actually male models, but the author isn't mentioning it?
I would also argue that explicitly ignoring the fact that these models were women amounts to erasure, which is probably not intended, but a consequence of doing this.
It was part of a world expo, and from the text we can see it was set as a futuristic vision targeted at anyone that could use the apparatus. The official description also has no focus on the models or who it should be used for in any specific detail.
I get your point on the models all being women, but as that has more to do to the period than the machine itself, it isn't remarkable in itself. It would be like commenting on the show guides being sexy women when discussing Mercedes' prototype at 90s cars. Pointing at the sexism and gender gap doesn't help the subject.
The machine was indeed targeted at all people, male or female. But this show was in Japan in 1970, and using attractive female models was absolutely the norm (heck, this was even the norm at computer industry trade shows I attended around ~2000; they called them "booth babes"). They would not have had any male models wearing little clothing to show off this machine.
You're right that this part of this history isn't necessarily that important to the machine being discussed in the article, but I think the other poster has a good point that this was absolutely part of the culture of the time, for good or bad, and I don't think this part of history should be ignored personally. Part of reading about something like this is to bring the reader back in time to what it was like being at this show in 1970 and seeing devices like this. Part of the experience was absolutely seeing pretty women modeling things or otherwise being part of the exhibit, because that's something that's completely different these days.
I think it might also be interesting to point out that while having "booth babes" is now out of vogue in the US, it's still the norm here in Japan. Go to an industrial trade show here and it'll be full of men walking around seeing the demos and talking to (generally male) company representatives, while there's a bunch of attractive well-dressed women standing in front handing out brochures and swag and scanning your QR code to put your email address on a mailing list, but who don't actually know anything about the company or products.
I think it's historically been OK to refer to any person using they/them/their. More recently, even in progressive circles I think, it's still OK as long as you don't have information about the person's preference that would make neutral pronouns offensive to them. Basically, it's fine until you know it's not.
It's true that all the supporting pictures in the article are of women, and you're likely right that all the demonstration models were probably women. But the machine is not gender-specific, the process of using it doesn't seem like it would be gender-specific, and the author was generalizing a series of demonstrations instead of a specific demonstration with a specific model. The subject of the sentences/paragraph you're concerned about - 'the demonstration model' - is itself gender neutral. For all of these reasons I think it makes sense why they/them pronouns were used here. Not strange or controversial at all.
But if it worked that way (using a small amount of water over and over to clean) would be gross and unsanitary in this case. One could filter it but that costs a lot of energy and changing a filter weekly on your shower pod would not be very green.
The issue is that water would be so dirty and gross. The same water that washed your rear end will then be sprayed on your face. If you are only using a few gallons (not like a bath which has dozens) that's pretty gnarly.
It looks like it completely fills and drains that big chamber at least a couple of times. If it were just a sprayer mechanism yeah that could be somewhat water-efficient.
This should have multiple stepper sizes, and I will use the kids' settings regularly for my kids. Yes, I know the security concerns, and I will watch them, talk to them, or read a book while they are being washed.
I've had this vision where we create a niche in a building for restroom placement by fork lift. For the low end ones the interior can be 3d printed melted down and recycled. They can be pressure washed with high pressure steam.
For the high end ones you can have the marble finish with gold trimmings then when it tickles your fancy have it replaced with a different color marble, different light and different ornaments.
You can do various lease formulas where you get to enjoy the fancy designs until you [need to] downgrade to the economy version.
That formula could also allow exotic designs that wouldn't sell as permanent installations. You could have a different marvel character theme every week/month while you wait for the steam punk and Victorian units to become available. Star wars, startrek etc. I mean, you wouldn't want a ycombinator themed restroom permanently but for a week or~so it would be hilarious.
Paying someone with a mop and broom minimum wage to clean the bathrooms and everything else is always going to be more cost effective.
You aren't making money on customers or employees using the toilet so there's no incentive for investment beyond the bare minimum. Businesses wouldn't have bathrooms at all if it were legal.
I went to the toilet in a very understaffed kfc and it was so dirty that I will never eat there again. The kitchen cant possibly be any better than the restroom.
I mean, washing isn't some kind of profoundly enjoyable experience, is it? The soaking in hot water is what feels good, and this lets you do that without any of the annoying scrubbing and such.
Edit: the Wikipedia page above says "the ultrasonic action is relatively benign to living tissue but can cause discomfort and skin irritation.". So maybe it was just a gimmick. Ultrasound cleaning was fairly new at the time, so maybe it sounded modern.
Thanks for your contribution to science. On a related topic, I guess there are more than 1 person that tried looking directly into a laser, though. And multiple times.
Back in high school lab I remember we were told not to put our hands into ultrasonic cleaners because it messes with your bones or joints or something like that.
It's apparently also a tanning booth.
15 minutes means it takes about 3 times longer than a shower, and it doesn't seem to do your hair.
reply