The earliest accounts of using irons for smoothing out wrinkles in fabrics were from China in the 1st century BC. Flat irons came to be used in the 17th century. The invention of the electric iron is credited to an American inventor named Henry Seeley in 1882. An iron heated by a carbon arc was introduced in the same year in France, but it was discarded because of the risk involved in its use. During this period, irons were not thermostatically controlled.
Later, steam irons came to be used. Thomas Sears was the brain behind the invention. The first electric steam iron was made commercially available in the year 1926 by a New York dry cleaning company called Eldec without much commercial success. The Steam-O-Matic intro-duced in 1938 proved to have better popularity than previous versions. In the 1940s and 1950s, electric irons started being used on a wide scale.
