The box mangle is said to have been invented in the 17th century. It consisted of a heavy frame containing a large box filled with rocks, resting on a series of long wooden rollers. Washing and rinsed laundry was carefully laid flat on a washed and rinsed sheet and the sheet was then wound round one of the rollers. When the rollers were filled, two people pulled on levers or turned cranks to move the heavy box back and forth over the rollers.
The weight of the box not only squeezed all the water out of the laundry, it flattened and smoothed it. Flat items, like sheets and tablecloths, usually needed no further ironing.
The box mangle was a large and expensive affair and required a fair bit of labor to operate it. It was most often used by very large households or commercial laundries.
In the late 19th century the commercial steam laundry replaced the box mangle with the steam mangle, turned by steam power.
The linen to be mangled is coiled round a roller, which is placed on a table, and then the batler is placed on the top, and pushed forwards and backwards on the roll under pressure of the hands.
Simple boxmangles were in use in the 18th century, but they needed two people to push and pull the heavy box back and forth with leather straps or wooden handles.
The boxmangle was itself a development from the much older custom of pressing with hand-held mangle boards: boards with a variety of names in English: bittle, batler, beetle and battledore among them.
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