Talkin’ ’bout the car wash
Evan Zabawski | TLT From the Editor June 2016
Taking a spin through yesteryear.
The need for this novelty was destined to be short-lived.
THERE ARE SOME OF US who look forward to a warm summer day as a good time to give our vehicle a really good cleaning. Modern, touchless carwashes have improved significantly, leaving manual washing to those with a special love of their vehicle.
The history of the car wash began in Detroit in 1914 with an Automated Laundry. A misnomer really, since the cars were pushed manually through an assembly line-like tunnel past one attendant who would soap the car, a second who rinsed and a third who dried. But one of the oddest entries in the history of car washing comes to us from a 1921 patent for a washing bowl.
Invented by Carl P. Bohland, the washing bowl debuted in his hometown of St. Paul, Minn., and its original design was a smooth concrete bowl about 24 m (80 feet) in diameter with tangential entry and exit points. Vehicles would drive into the bowl, filled with water 40 cm (16 inches) at its deepest point, and complete several laps around the bowl at 16-19 km/h (10-12 mph), rinsing the mud off the chassis, running gear, wheels and mud guards. The bottom of the bowl contained a settling basin for the accumulation of mud and other heavy material and had to be emptied manually into a wagon after the water was drained.
The second iteration arrived 19 months later and featured a radial ribbed-bottomed bowl to aid cleansing through vibration of the vehicle and increased agitation of the water. Sprinkling devices were added to the egress ramp to further clean the vehicle, as well as a removable rotary arm that was equipped with angled brushes to guide the foreign matter towards the settling basin.
Upon reaching a reported 300 cars per day, Bohland advertised licenses to build an Auto Wash Bowl in other cities, an offer taken up by C.G. Burkhartsmeier of Chicago. At a cost of $20,000 Burkhartsmeier built his Neway Auto Wash Bowl and service station on the southeast corner of Diversey and Elston on the city’s North Side in 1924. A second location was built at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and South Michigan Avenue on the city’s South Side (
pictured).
At a cost of 25 cents per vehicle, a busy Saturday could see about 75 cars per hour go for a spin, as it were, before exiting into one of the bays where the remainder of the car was cleaned. A year later a competitor opened Chicago’s first hand-free carwash, consisting of several rows of small, fixed streams for the car to drive past. The following year Neway’s North Side location was sold to a local realtor, and the South Side location was gone sometime in the following decade. Given the increasing number of paved roads and the diminishing number of horses sharing the roads (and leaving their droppings), the need for this novelty was destined to be short-lived.
The first automated conveyor-style car wash opened in Hollywood in 1940, but it still needed a team of men inside the tunnel to do the actual washing. Six years later, Thomas Simpson invented the first semi-automatic car wash, which used an overhead sprinkler, three sets of manually operated brushes and a 50-hp air blower. In 1951 Archie, Dean and Eldon Anderson out of Seattle automated the brushes as well and truly automatic car washing became a lucrative business.
By the 1960s car washing had evolved to the automated, articulated, rotating, soft-cloth, wraparound carwash. This design proved popular with most drivers for decades; that is to say that some drivers were no longer impressed after one of the articulated arms broke off an aerial or mirror.
Modern carwashes have added extra nozzles specifically for wheel cleaning, extra rinse stages for wax application and intelligent sensors to ensure up-close spraying that avoids protrusions like aerials, and overlapping coverage to ensure the entire vehicle is clean.
Still, I think it would have been fun to try the Auto Wash Bowl.
Evan Zabawski, CLS, is a reliability specialist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. You can reach him at evan.zabawski@gmail.com.