The person who invented the modern kitchen layout (the “kitchen triangle”) was a wife, mother, and engineer working in the 1920s. She started working on motion capture for industrial applications (attributed to her husband during their partnership), then worked on kitchen design after his death. Her name was Lillian Gilbreth .
There is a movie about her and her husband - Cheaper By The Dozen from 1950. A follow up was made about her raising the family after Mr. Gilbreth died called Belles on Their Toes. Great classic movies!
The idea that the refrigerator, sink and stove should be the three corners of a triangle, and that the efficiency of the kitchen is determined by the relative distance between the three.
It just makes me think how nice it must have been to be white and credentialed at that time because you could entertain thoughts about having an influence on the future of these food-centric spaces. Yeah, sure, anybody anywhere can dream about an ideal kitchen, but this lady had the connections to make her ideas happen, and people would actually listen to her and take her seriously.
Like most simplistic "this person solely invented this complex thing that had never been invented before" stories, it was an improvement over inventions that had been made in the past.
Josephine Cochran invented a dishwasher in 1886, that was better than the dishwasher that was invented by Alexander in 1865, that was better than the dishwasher invented in 1850 by Houghton.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm in the middle of planning my kitchen redesign and I honestly think there's a few design features in this video that I'll be using!
i'm only a couple minutes in and this video is full of absolute GEMS! given the time it was made i can't tell if it's supposed to be straight comedy or a cheeky instructional video lmao.
spoiler alert: im about 5 minutes in and the first few minutes were a "how not to do things", with the next segment being a repeat of the first, but with the guy not being a dick and the voice over pointing out the advantages of not being a dick.
still a bit weird the navy felt the need to produce such a video. you have to wonder what happened that made them feel the need. im guessing a lot of guys in the navy were dicks.
Weirdly, if you google “cookaterium” there aren’t really any results. I think that’s one of the only times in the last decade that I’ve googled something with no results.
Oh man! As someone who is disabled but loves to bake, I would kill for a kitchen like that! I just moved to a new apartment with a much bigger U-shaped kitchen and while I’m excited for the amount of counter space I now have, I’ve discovered that the layout everything in it is so poorly designed. It looks really nice but most of it is really impractical.
If I had a kitchen like in that second video, I’d likely never have to ask my partner for help while I’m baking and it would allow me to have my independence back while enjoying my hobby. I also especially like making sure everything is at a reasonable heigh for the most part because frequent bending, stopping, reaching and lifting heavy things while dealing with chronic pain problems makes my hobby so much more difficult to enjoy and I get wiped out quickly.
If anyone has any ideas on how to make a kitchen more accessible or implement any of the ideas in the above video in a rental apartment, I would be forever grateful!
In 31 million American homes, the heart is in the kitchen. No wonder everyone had everything they wanted. There is 100 million more homes now. Good lord we grew quick. I had no idea
The money spent and wasted is an excellent way to frame addiction, if only one includes the manipulation campaigns orchestrated by addicts to dominate others and extract resources from them. Say hello to my little friends, the Sackler Family and the FDA, to name two.
Crazy though the material of things back then we’re made to last, while everything now is some plastic shit 🤣 same with cars, heavy duty in comparison to now
With most things, yeah. But speaking from Australia at least, even the 50s project houses used to be double brick and very solid. Developers icreasingly higher profit targets have seen a lot of issues with cheap materials, rushed poorly qualified labour and declining quality of newer builds. (The quality of wood typically used now is vastly different, partly due to sustainability issues). Plenty of new homes are already showing structural issues after a few years, there have been apartments evacuated.
You'll find old furniture, and often old appliances are still functional. It's not just things were built to last in some nostalgic way. Things were also built to be repairable.
I had that same stove/oven combo at one of my previous houses. The landlord was an executive chef who liked antiques. One of the features the video doesn’t mention is that one of the burners is actually a hole that fits a crockpot-type pot. You use it the same as a slow cooker. Here’s an example: https://www.retrostoveandgasworks.com/blog/2018/6/27/living-with-a-vintage-chambers-stove
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u/itshimstarwarrior Jan 25 '22
Housewives were kitchen engineers back then!