1904 Electricity in the home1912 Electric Cookery 1945 The launderette2000? The house of the future THE LAUNDERETTE. 1s. in slot will do the washing From the Daily Mail,  October 11 1945 A shilling-in-the-slot washing machine will shortly go into production in Britain. It will help to solve the laundry problem. The machine is automatic, looks like a radio set, and is even simpler to work. Washing has never been easier It will wash 10lb of clothes in 40 minutes, the housewife having to do no more than put the clothes in, add soap powder, and turn on a switch. Once she has started it the housewife does not need to touch the machine. She can do her shopping or have tea, come back, and collect. The machine fills itself with water, washes the clothes, triple rinses them, and damp-dries them. It also empties and cleans itself and shuts itself off. And, in addition, it collects any buttons that may come off the garments it has washed. On show today "Laundrettes" equipped with 10 or 12 machines will soon be opened in many parts of the country. They will also be installed in working-class blocks of flats. The new machine will be made in Birmingham by a British company, which is showing it at the Women's First Electrical Exhibition which opens today in London. New lighting systems on show at the exhibition make it clear that the day of the bulb hanging in the middle of the room is over. Instead you can see a "transparency," framed like a picture, on the wall, or light springs from an opaque panel let into an occasional table, with a bowl of flowers on top of the table, giving novel colour effects.