Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Bogelbaum. Here. If your home has a corner cabinet, odds are it has a lazy Susan tucked away inside. Perhaps there's a lazy susan a top the center of your dining room table, or you've spun one around to reach a tasty dish well seated at a round restaurant table. Whatever its use or location, the lazy susan arguably has the most enigmatic moniker of all
household appliances. We don't call a napkin holder holder helen, or a mixing bowl mix and max, or at least we haven't until now. So how did the lazy susan get its name? First, let's take a closer look at how a lazy susan works. A lazy susan refers to a round disk that rotates on a set of bearings located underneath. This spinning platform can be made of any number of materials, ranging from wood or plastic to gloss
or marble. Commercially crafted sizes come in even number diameters, with the most common sizes ranging from twelve to forty eight inches, which is about thirty centimes. Even a small lazy susan often is used to store condiments in silverware
on a tabletop, putting them with an easy reach of diners. However, in some restaurants and homes, a large lazy susan of at least twenty two inches or fifty six centimeters is placed in the middle of the table to hold dishes of food that can then be rotated to each person. It may be a derivative of the European dumb waiter, which was a piece of furniture situated near the hostess at a dinner table. The dumb waiter had three or four round trays that decreased in size from the bottom
to the top. The trays were used to store desserts, cheeses, silver and extra plates, anything the hostess might need to quickly access. While the exact origins of the lazy susan are lost to history, there is a plausible theory about
a name. Susan was a generic term popularized in the seventeen hundreds by employers referencing their female made servants, and at the time it was fairly common for people who employed servants to complain that they were lazy According to Marcus Kreevsky, a professor of media history at the University of Basel, Switzerland, the term lazy Susan was probably common at the time. Later, in the two decades leading up to World War One, technological advances became substitutes for human power.
With the advent of the ring or washing machine and similar inventions, it became prohibitively expensive for some households to continue to hire servants, as rotating wooden trays cropped up in kitchens and on dining room tables, replacing the need for servants to dish food. The term lazy Susan likely became a mashup of a reference to both the lazy employee and the substitution of technology for human power. There
are other theories as well. Although most experts agree that this ubiquitous household aid probably didn't have a single inventor or a solitary namesake, some believe that Thomas Jefferson may have invented the lazy Susan in the eighteenth century, referencing a daughter in the naming. As the story goes, his daughter Susan wasn't a fan of being served last at the dinner table, and thus became his inspiration. The only problem with the story is that Thomas Jefferson doesn't seem
to have had a daughter named Susan. Others point to Thomas Edison as the inventor, believing that the turntable he created first phonograph evolved into the Lazy Susan. Despite the murky origins of its name, the Lazy Susan was forever cast into the American lexicon in nineteen seventeen when an advertisement appeared in Vanity Fair touting a rotating round tray called a Lazy Susan. Turns out the name may have been invented by an anonymous copywriter tasked with increasing sales
during the holidays. Today's episode was written by Laurie L. Dove and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other rotating topics, visit how Stuff works dot com. Brainstuff is a production of iHeart Radio or more podcasts my Heart Radio visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.