Nearly a hundred years ago it wasn't an induction cooktop that made your kitchen look bang up to date but a pedal bin. Invented by Lillian Gilbreth in the 1920s, it was the result of a new and very twentieth-century preoccupation – the study of time and motion. A pedal bin could save precious minutes in the kitchen. It was emblematic of the emerging interest in efficiency in the early twentieth century, a time when architects wanted houses to work like machines and Henry Ford introduced the production line to the factory floor.