Clothes Iron
A clothing iron, also referred to as simply an iron, is a small appliance: a handheld piece of equipment with a flat, roughly triangular surface that, when heated, is used to press clothes to remove creases. It is named for the metal the device is commonly made of, and the use of it is generally called ironing. Ironing works by loosening the ties between the long chains of molecules that exist in polymer fiber materials. With the heat and the weight of the ironing plate, the fibers are stretched and the fabric maintains its new shape when cool. Some materials such as cotton require the use of water to loosen the intermolecular bonds. Many materials developed in the twentieth century are advertised as needing little or no ironing.
The electric iron was invented in 1882 by Henry W. Seeley, a New York inventor. Seeley patented his "electric flatiron" on June 6, 1882 (patent no. 259,054). His iron weighed almost 15 pounds and took a long time to warm up. Other electric irons had also been invented, including one from France (1882), but it used a carbon arc to heat the iron, a method which was dangerous.
Read more about Clothes Iron: Features, History and Development of Flat Iron, Collections
Famous quotes containing the words clothes and/or iron:
“West Germans are tall, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they’re indistinguishable from Americans.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe together with the greater part of the Reich. Over all this territory, which with the Soviet Union included, would be of enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.”
—Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)