Nineteenth-century socialite Josephine Cochrane, frustrated by chipped dishes, invented the first practical automatic dishwasher. Rejecting scrubbing, she pioneered using water jets to clean, a revolutionary concept. Image Credit: via Wikimedia Commons Every time you fill up gleaming dishes to place inside your cabinets and hit the switch for cleaning them, you rely on a tradition that did not originate in a laboratory of the future but in a kitchen of the nineteenth century. Our perception of devices used in the kitchen is often confined to thinking about how these tools are nothing more than innovations brought forth suddenly by some…