A 14-year-old girl in India’s Kerala state has invented a novel washing machine to solve the problems of doing laundry by hand and dealing with power shortages. Built using a bicycle’s pedals and chain, the machine needs no electricity to run. It cost about 2,000 Indian rupees to build.
The girl, Remya Jose, lives in Kizhattur in Kerala’s Malappuram district. She was in her 10th-grade year when her mother fell ill. Around the same time, her father was undergoing cancer treatment. As a result, washing clothes — along with other household chores — fell to Remya and her twin sister. Commuting to school alone took them nearly four hours a day, and hand-washing clothes left Remya without enough time to study.
To solve the problem, Remya decided to build her own washing machine. She first studied how electric washing machines work, then designed a machine that could be powered by bicycle pedals instead of electricity. Her father took the design to a local automobile workshop, where the machine was built.
The machine turns an internal drum using a pedal-and-chain system like a bicycle’s. After clothes, water and detergent are loaded in, pedaling turns the drum. Clothes are soaked for at least 10 minutes, then about three to four minutes of pedaling completes the wash. Draining the water and pedaling again wrings out excess water from the clothes. According to the National Innovation Foundation, this process dries the clothes to about 80%.
Remya’s invention later came to the attention of India’s National Innovation Foundation, which registered it as a “washing-cum-exercise machine.” She has received national recognition for the invention, which has also been patented.
Born out of an everyday problem, Remya’s invention shows that useful technology can be created from need and creative thinking alone, without major technical resources.