If you want to get yourself clean, there’s baths and there’s showers, and then there’s pretending that dousing yourself in body spray is the same thing.
But in Japan, there’s another option that might suit you: a human washing machine!
The full name is Mirai Ningen Sentakuki, which means “human washing machine of the future.”
It’s both an old idea and a new one.
There was an invention at the Japan World Exposition in 1970 from the Sanyo Electric Company called the Ultrasonic Bath, which people described as a human washing machine.
That project never made it to market, but one young Expo visitor apparently never forgot what he saw there.
Yasuaki Aoyama grew up to lead a company that manufactures shower heads and bathtubs, and his firm has developed its own people washer.
Futurism compared it to the hypersleep chambers in the movie Alien; it’s an enclosed pod where you can have a seat during your own personal 15 minute wash and dry cycle.
The company also says its pod tracks the bather’s heart rate to make sure they’re comfortable, and will adjust water temperature and even project calm images if needed.
Now, I don’t know if this is going to replace the combination shower and bathtub that a lot of us have in our houses here in the US.
It may be more of a draw in Japan, which has long had a bathing culture.
But there could be another use for these machines: people who are older or have health issues that make standard bathing and showering difficult.
And of course if this machine doesn’t end up finding an audience, maybe history will repeat itself, and some youngster who’s fascinated by this new pod might try building a new one in 50 years or so.
Today in 1881, a big moment in baseball history, though people didn’t know how big until many years later.
Roger Connor of the Troy Trojans hit a home run to give his team a come from behind walk-off victory.
That was unusual enough in the so-called “dead ball” era, but because the bases were loaded at the time, researchers later figured out that this was the first grand slam in Major League Baseball history.
And it was the only come from three runs behind game-winning grand slam until Babe Ruth did it in 1925.
Japan’s Innovative “Human Washing Machine” Can Clean up and Dry a Person in 15 Minutes (My Modern Met)
Grondahl: Historian finds first grand slam in MLB history – in Rensselaer (The Times-Union)
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Photo by Thomas via Flickr/Creative Commons