Why does the washing machine take two socks and give back only one? Various theories have been advanced over the years, as, for example, that the washing machine eats one of the socks. Arlberg’s brilliant monograph, “The Dynamics of Laundry,” demolished this theory with laboratory evidence.
Postmortems on more than 1,200 washing machines which had expired suddenly during the rinse cycle showed no trace of socks in their digestive systems. Arlberg’s investigations showed that the washing machine thrives almost entirely on a diet of crushed buttons, navel lint and small turtles left in the pants pockets of young boys.
After Arlberg the next important contribution was made by Klosson, under contract to the CIA. Richard Helms, then Director of Central Intelligence, had become alarmed by the mystery. On repeated occasions Mrs. Helms had loaded her machine with Helms’s shirts, jeans, shorts and socks, and returned to find that though shirts, jeans and shorts were all present, one pair of Helms’s socks had been reduced to one sock.
Naturally, Helms considered the possibility that an alien power was tapping his socks. He requested Klosson, Berkeley’s distinguished Nobelist in laundry, to conduct a study at the Livermore Starch and Detergent Laboratory. Klosson was asked to answer two questions. No. 1: Had an enemy power developed a socknapping capability? No. 2: Was it possible to develop a washing machine that could filch one of Leonid Brezhnev’s socks out of the Kremlin laundry and deliver it to the CIA for debriefing?
A brilliant theoretician, Klosson constructed a model laundry in a model Kremlin, placed one pair of a model Brezhnev’s model socks in a model washing machine and conducted three months of sock games. His astonishing conclusion was that washing machines were developing human impulses.
Klosson theorized that washing machines were stealing the individual socks under the illusion that they were single-footed creatures, that they were unhappy with the monotonous lives they led, and that they were secretly storing up a supply of socks against the day when they could make a break for freedom and go into the world decently dressed.
To test the theory, Klosson proposed putting in a pair of shoes. If the washing machine took one of the shoes, he reasoned, scientists could verify his theory by monitoring the airport to see whether a renegade washing machine wearing a sock and a shoe boarded a flight for South America.
The $300-million appropriation to buy shoes for further research was abandoned when one of Klosson’s young associates discovered most of the missing socks on the floor under the washing machine.
The young man turned out to be the brilliant Elmendorf, the father of gestalt laundry. The accidental discovery of those missing socks on the floor was ultimately to bring him fame and the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Pre-Soaking, but not before his hands had crinkled into prune folds in the hot, sudsy pursuit of knowledge.
With the publication of “The Sock Dichotomy: Solecism, Solipsism, Paradigm and Epistemology” (written with the assistance of William F. Buckley, Jr.), Elmendorf advanced the argument that the American washing machine was developing delusions of grandiosity.
In a nutshell, Elmendorf’s argument held that the washing machine had confused itself with the United States Government and had begun levying taxes for its services. By taking one sock of every two, Elmendorf contended, the washing machine was behaving as it conceived a Government should.
The sock revenue collected under the machine in Klosson’s laboratory would eventually, he went on, be redistributed to people and institutions the washing machine liked. The oil industry would get a sock, two or three would go to the water softening cartel and the bulk of them would go to the Pentagon to improve the national sockurity.
Elmendorf was unable to verify his theory, due to an unfortunate onset of mental breakdown. It occurred one evening as he was dressing for a dinner at which he was to be introduced to the great Aptheker, the Viennese master of the spin cycle.
Noting that not a single pair of matched socks had come up from the laundry, Elmendorf went to the basement and searched under the washing machine for the missing mates. The floor was utterly bare. Elmendorf’s theory, with all its years of work, was down the drain, leaving him nothing to do but become unhinged.
And so the mystery remains. Only the great Aptheker could possibly solve it, and he has no time, having dedicated the rest of his life to discovering whatever happened to tattletale gray.