Many people rate the smell of clean laundry as their favourite scent. People all over the globe share a common urge: to keep clean and to wash the clothing that covers their bodies.

In fact, this basic instinct has saved lives. Exodus tells us that the daughter of Egypt’s pharaoh came down to the river Nile to bathe when she found Moses in his little basket. And the Odyssey recounts the story of the Phaeakian princess Nausikaa and her handmaidens, who went to the banks at the mouth of a river to wash their clothes and found Odysseus, shipwrecked and naked.

During the great crusades and wars of Europe, the warriors were followed by large groups of women who, among other things, washed their clothes. The 12th-century

Norman poet Ambroise attributes the major number of the deaths during the third crusade (1189-1192) to the fact that the women had been sent home. With nobody to do the laundry, contagious diseases spread in the dirty clothes.

Today, people all over the world do laundry as they have for centuries, washing clothes in a river or a lake. Families in developed countries are more likely to be owners of washing machines that do the entire job for them in about an hour.

A problem with washing machines can be noise and vibration caused by imbalance, especially when something heavy, such as a blanket, is loaded into the machine.

The solution to this problem is DynaSpin^TM from SKF, a device that continually counteracts imbalance in rotating machinery. At first glance it appears to be a ball bearing, but DynaSpin^TM does not carry any external load. Instead it rotates with the axle while balls inside move within a casing.

These freely moving balls automatically shift their position, creating a constant balance regardless of load variations.