Ironing boards
Materials and history of the ironing boards; definition of
Most of the women affirm that there’s nothing more annoying than ironing the cloth, and although we find in the market many technological steam irons this task is still a headache for many of us girls; but to perform the activity of ironing we need an object that is crucial in the procedure, the ironing board. An ironing board is a flat and large surface that could be made of wood or metal, it is covered with a heat-safe padding on where we place the clothing we need to iron in a safe way; ironing boards didn’t have many shapes years ago, but as time went by, new designs came out. The standard ironing board is not very expensive, since its shape is basic and its applications are not too many; it includes a flat bed for ironing and foldable legs that can be hinged or slip, they help us to fold the ironing board down to storage it. The most well-known ironing boards consist of a flat pan which contains several holes in order to accommodate paint from running off where the manufacture process is carried out, in this way the ironing board disseminates the heat from the steam iron. The legs that support this board are very light and have a tubular shape, and to keep them from slipping they come with padded feet. The most expensive ironing boards may have another little board included in order to accommodate larger goods for ironing, it doesn’t matter the shape or what is made of, every ironing board must have a padding that covers the metal bed to keep the heat away from the steam iron and avoid accidents. |
Ironing board structureMost of ironing boards are made of raw materials, but many of them contain rolled steel: these are long rolls of steel that start the building process of this ironing board as cold metal. The widths vary and depend on the production process, we can use widths of 1,9 cm till widths of 71 cm; the steel rolls are several hundred feet when we talk about their length, and may weight 20,000 kg, that will depend on the width. Metal rivets, plastic or rubber tips on the board feet are also part of the ironing board construction, oil based paint is also used as degreasing agents in order to remove other types of oils that can remain on the ironing board during the construction process. When the board is done, some companies include cotton padding to cover the ironing part, but some other boards are released without any safe surface to perform the ironing, so in that case we need to buy a pad to avoid accidents with the steam iron. |
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Ironing boards historyNot many people know that ironing boards were used at the time of the Vikings; inside such community in history, women used to carry their ironing board along with them, but of course these boards were not as good and comfortable as the ones we have nowadays; they were made of whalebone. Women, during this period, used heated rocks to smooth their cloths, later; people continued this process by using flat items in which they could do their ironing. Centuries later, a very practical object started to be sold in the market, but it wasn’t an ironing board, it was a kitchen table, but women found this device very useful since they used to cook the dinner and iron the cloths at the same time on that surface, by that time this flat object was called a kitchen table till someone finally patented the ironing board. It was in 1858 when W. Vandenburg patented what he named the ironing table, this man would file an additional six ironing board patents, but later many other interested people took his device as an example and starting building different types of ironing boards. One of them was Sarah Boone who patented her especial ironing board in 1892, her ironing board was a bit more advanced than the one known by that time, built with better materials which made it last even more. We can say that Sarah didn’t invent the ironing board, what she did was to improve it, its shape was more narrow and contained an additional board to place larger clothing, this became very practical when women needed to iron shirts with long sleeves. With the time, this invention improved till becoming in what we know now, a very practical board that allows us to iron anything of any size. |
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