A 150 year overnight success - the surprising innovation history of the dishwasher

The appliance sitting in your kitchen is the result of 150 years of obsession, failure, and brilliance. And most people have never heard the real story. It starts in 1850 with a leaky wooden contraption patented by Joel Houghton, winds through dozens of competing inventors, and arrives at one remarkable woman — Josephine Cochrane, a debt-ridden widow in Illinois who declared: "If nobody else…