Long before the automatic washer, French chefs and cooks were using primitive salad spinners made out of wire baskets within solid baskets that spun from a pull-string. They operated much like a kid's toy top; you wound the string around an axle and yanked it. You can still find these in antiques stores. Since many clothes washing contraptions were invented by farmers I wonder if the first spinner was a hijacked lettuce dryer.

I still remember an evening, not too long ago, when a bunch of us were in stiches as our friend Rich and his wife Barb were describing a dinner with Rich's mother in Arkansas, proudly presenting her salad at the dinner table and announcing that she had washed and dried the greens in her GE mini-basket. She got an "A" for ingenuity, but, alas, flunked sanitation.