October marks the centennial celebration of Maytag Brand, the Benton Harbor, Mich.-based company, which has been churning out the device that contributed to both the liberation of women from laundry duty and grass stains from pant knees for 100 years.

From a wooden tub with a hand crank to a highly mechanized appliance, washing machines are spin-cycling their way into technological innovation. Sleeker, roomier and more energy-efficient, Maytag is attempting to answer the clarion call of chore-haters everywhere with a new crop of washers.

"Saving water and saving energy," said Frank Nekic, the senior category manager at Maytag, of the new 'it' consumer priority. "A whole plethora of washers have come out to meet those needs."

Front-loading, environmentally friendly and available in spiffy colors like "arctic blue," the washer is morphing from a household workhorse to a squeaky-clean status item.

"People tended to buy washers when washers wore out," said Nekic. But that trend is no more, he continued. The technology is becoming more appealing and the look of the appliance carries as much water as the performance.

"More and more (home) laundries are coming out of the basement," he added.

The washer is moving on up, and taking social norms along with it. Laundry, 100 years ago was traditionally woman's work, and using the washboard was a laborious, tedious and exhausting task. Even Maytag's first model, the Pastime, took some serious muscle to get going.

"The first washers were hand-powered," Nekic said. "They required some pretty good arm strength."

Two years after Pastime came the Hired Girl, which was powered by a tractor motor.

That name, as it turns out, is ironic.

"I think it was a good thing," said Roberta Garner, chair of the sociology department at DePaul University. "It eliminated the job of laundry woman and as a whole, that was a good thing. Laundry was repetitive, hard labor."

Although laundry women lost their jobs, the machine contributed to equality among the classes -- any and all women could operate the washing machine. And if any woman can use it, any man could, too.

"It probably made men more inclined to do the laundry," Garner chuckled. "I'd say it was a net positive."

And speaking of nets, is there any way we can catch some of those mysterious, vanishing socks in the wash?

"There are some cases," Nekic said of sock disappearance, "when someone overloads a washer."

The more laundry someone crams into the washer, the more likely small items, like socks, may get jostled around and spun right out of the tub and into the plumbing, he said. Then poof, they're gone. Never to be recovered. Like a sudsy black hole.

"It's called a black hole because the gravitational pull is so powerful, that even light, when close enough, can't escape," said Cal Jordan, a research associate of astrophysics at the Flash Center of the University of Chicago. "If you have a bunch of matter in a small space, you get an intense gravitational pull. It gets so strong that once things get close enough, they get sucked in."

Just like socks in a washing machine. Jordan may understand the principle, but does someone with a grasp of astrophysics lose socks in his washing machine?

"Oh god, all the time," Jordan said.