Inventor of the only self-cleaning house

FRANCES GABE June 23, 1915 - Dec. 26, 2016

For decades, Frances Gabe did not clean her house, nor did anyone clean it for her. Yet for all that time, it was spotless.

Ms. Gabe, a once-celebrated inventor who died in obscurity late last year, was the creator, and long the sole inhabitant, of the world’s only self-cleaning house.

In January, the only public announcement of Ms. Gabe’s death appeared on the website of The Newberg Graphic, covering the Oregon community where she had long made her home. Spanning barely two dozen words, it gave little more than her death date — Dec. 26, 2016 — and her age, 101.

But between Ms. Gabe’s birth, on June 23, 1915, and her death lay, unheralded, the life of a true American original, equal parts quixotic dreamer and accomplished visionary.

“Locally, she was just the kind of unique person that you often see in these small towns,” Allyn Brown, Ms. Gabe’s former lawyer and a longtime friend, said in a telephone interview last week. “I don’t think anybody really knew her name.”

There was a time, however, when Ms. Gabe’s name was known round the world. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, her house was featured in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Guardian and People; on Phil Donahue’s talk show; and in several books, among them Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fugitives & Refugees” (2003), about the curious characters around Portland, Ore.

“When I’d come out and see her,” Ms. Brown recalled, “I would be conflicted on whether she was delusional or whether she was so much smarter than I that I just didn’t have the ability to recognize her genius.”

More than half a century ago, incensed by the housecleaning that was a woman’s chronic lot, Ms. Gabe began to dream of a house that would see to its own hygiene: tenderly washing, rinsing and drying itself at the touch of a button.

“Housework is a thankless, unending job,” she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996. “It’s a nerve-twangling bore. Who wants it? Nobody!”

And so, with her own money and her own hands, she built just such a house, receiving U.S. patent No. 4,428,085 in 1984.

In a 1982 column about Ms. Gabe’s work, humorist Erma Bombeck proposed her as “a new face for Mount Rushmore."

Yet her remarkable abode — a singular amalgam of “Walden,” Rube Goldberg and “The Jetsons” — remained the only one of its kind ever built.

The house, whose patent consisted of 68 individual inventions, also included a cupboard in which dirty dishes, set on mesh shelves, were washed and dried.

To deal with laundry, Ms. Gabe designed a tightly sealed cabinet.

In addition, her sink, toilet and bathtub also were self-cleaning.