L.B. Maytag: Iowa Time Machine August 24, 1888

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On August 24, 1888, Lewis Bergman (LB) Maytag was born. He helped turn the family’s Iowa manufacturing firm into a nationally recognized appliance maker.

L. B. Maytag grew up in a family already invested in Newton’s industrial life. His father, Frederick Louis “F. L.” Maytag, had become a partner in the Parsons Band Cutter & Self Feeder Company in 1893, making farm machinery. The firm added its first washing machine in 1907 and reorganized as the Maytag Company in 1909 to concentrate on that growing product line. In an age when many rural homes lacked electric service, Maytag built machines powered by hand cranks, electric motors, or gasoline engines, placing the company in the wider struggle to mechanize household labor.

L.B. Maytag graduated from Iowa State College with a mechanical-engineering degree in 1910, entered full-time Maytag employment that year, became a company director in 1911, and rose to vice president in 1918.

In 1921, when F. L. Maytag stepped down from the presidency to devote more attention to Chicago ventures, L. B. assumed the presidency. He pressed for a redesigned washer featuring a polished cast-aluminum tub and a bottom-mounted agitator, central ideas behind the Gyrafoam washer introduced in 1922. Its agitator moved water through clothing rather than relying on friction, a change that helped propel Maytag from the nation’s 38th-largest washer maker into first place. #Iowa #OTD #History #Innovation #Technology