How does the Downy fabric-softener ball work?
How does the Downy fabric-softener ball work? The Downy fabric-softener ball has to be one of the simplest inventions ever. The ball is a self-contained timing device, meaning that you don’t have to wait for the spin cycle to insert the liquid fabric softener into a load of laundry. The ball utilizes Newton’s first law of motion — “An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force” — in an ingenious way to dispense the liquid at the correct time during the wash. Initially, the ball floats on top of the water in a top-loading washer (front-loading washers cannot use the ball because it needs a vertically aligned cylinder for the release mechanism to work). The ball stays this way through the first few normal cycles. The liquid fabric softener is kept inside the ball by a rubber gasket connected to a rubber weight that hangs toward the center of the ball. The sea