Josephine Garis was born in Ashtabula County, Ohio, in 1839, and raised in Valparaiso, Indiana. She was the daughter of John Garis, a civil engineer, and the granddaughter of an innovator. Garis moved to her sister’s home in Shelbyville, Illinois, and there met and married William Cochran in 1858.
Garis was guided by her independent nature and personal confidence, and assumed her husband’s name, but preferred spelling her name with an “e” on the end, much to her in-laws’ consternation. William had returned to Illinois from a disappointing attempt at finding riches in the California Gold Rush, but he then went on to become a prosperous dry goods merchant and Democratic Party politician. William and Josephine had two children: Hallie and Katharine.
The family moved into a Chicago mansion in 1870, and Josephine joined Chicago society. It was in Chicago, after a dinner party, that the heirloom dishes were chipped, and Josephine began exploring alternatives to handwashing dishes.
There had been previous, ultimately ineffective, attempts to produce a commercially viable dishwasher. A hand-cranked dish soaker was developed in 1850, by Joel Houghton. In the 1860s, L.A. Alexander added a geared mechanism so a user could spin racked dishes through a tub of water.
Cochrane’s dishwasher eventually became a success. In addition to time and effort, Cochrane faced numerous obstacles in her journey to becoming a successful female innovator. After William died in 1883, Cochrane was left with only $1535 (approximately $47,000 in 2025) and a significant amount of debt. Not only was Cochrane distressed and in mourning, but she was also in survival mode, and pursued the dishwasher in order to sustain herself financially.
Cochrane designed the first model of her dishwasher in the shed behind her house in Shelbyville, Illinois. George Butters, a mechanic, assisted her. To build the dishwasher, Cochrane first measured the dishes and built wire compartments, each designed to fit plates, cups, or saucers. The compartments were placed inside a wheel that lay flat inside a copper boiler. A motor turned the wheel while soapy water squirted up from the bottom of the boiler and rained down on the dishes. Cochrane’s dishwasher was the first to use water pressure rather than scrubbers to clean the dishes inside the machine. She filed her first patent application on December 31, 1885, and received U.S. Patent 355,139 on December 28, 1886. She founded Garis-Cochran Manufacturing Company to manufacture the machines.
Cochrane’s next challenge was selling the dishwasher to individual households, and at the time, this meant selling to housewives. The first dishwashers were just too expensive for an average household, costing between $75 and $100, and most women in the late 1800s simply declined to spend so much on a single appliance for their kitchens, even if it eased the effort of washing dishes. Further, most homes were not yet equipped to handle the machine’s requirements in using hot water. Eventually, years later, homes began adding boilers that were big enough to meet the water requirements, allowing Cochrane to sell to individual homeowners, which had been her initial end goal.
The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was pivotal to Cochrane’s business, because other companies relying heavily on investors were wiped out in the Panic of 1893. The Exposition turned out to be a great place to pitch her invention, and as a demonstration, nine Garis-Cochran dishwashers were installed in the restaurants and pavilions of the Exposition. Cochrane won the Exposition prize for “best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work.” Many restaurants and hotels placed orders. Colleges and hospitals followed later, but had to work through sanitation requirements. Commercial access to hot water was not an issue at the time. The company was renamed in 1897 as Cochran’s Crescent Washing Machine Company.
Cochrane hired Butters to manage her factory so she could extend her sales north and south, reaching from Mexico to Alaska. Her main customers continued to be hotels and restaurants.
Cochrane died of a stroke or exhaustion in Chicago in 1913, at the age of 74, and was buried in Shelbyville. Dishwashers would not become popular for home usage until the 1950s.
In 1926, Cochrane’s company was sold to KitchenAid, which is now part of the Whirlpool Corporation.
In 2006, Cochrane was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.