The fall of the former household staple can be traced to a surprising source: the perceived danger of stairs.

Talk to virtually anyone who grew up in a home with a laundry chute, and chances are they'll have at least one story about a game they played using the shafts designed to transport dirty clothing, or even a particular mishap where something -- or someone -- got stuck. But these slide-like tunnels weren't designed for play: the labor-saving home feature has roots in the domestic science movement (later known as home economics) of the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and its quest to make running a household as efficient as possible by applying scientific principles to everyday living. Though once ubiquitous, today, the household features have become relics -- easier identifiers of a home's dated construction, and extremely uncommon in new builds. So, what happened to the trusty laundry chute?

One of the first mentions of laundry chutes in the popular press came in an 1891 blurb in the Springfield Republican reprinted in the New York Times, which described "a wilted linen chute" leading to the common laundry room in the basement of a model tenement. It compares the laundry chute to one for mail, cautioning residents against "sending their correspondence to be washed." Around the same time, laundry chutes were likely found in Victorian-era homes of the gentry in England, says Thomas Hubka, an architectural historian and author of How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900-1940. Hubka estimates that laundry chutes made it stateside around 1900, first installed in multistory upper-class houses with servants, then made their way into middle-class homes. "Because laundry chutes were seen in wealthy, elite households, it was appealing to housewives who wanted their home to be the best, most efficient place," he says. "They wanted what rich people had."

While the Gilded Age saw wealthy and even middle-class American households employing domestic servants, by the 1910s and '20s, there was a shift toward having a "servantless home" for all but the richest. This ushered in an era of labor-saving technologies and devices -- gas, electricity, vacuums, washing machines -- intended to make life easier for the housewives saddled with managing and operating a household. Servants or no servants, most upper- and middle-class homes had a laundry area in the basement, as did some working-class houses. (Working-class households without basements typically did their laundry in the kitchen, Hubka says.) In the days before automatic washing machines were popularized in the late '30s, doing laundry still involved multiple steps, including hauling all the dirty clothing and linens down to the basement. A laundry chute eliminated that task.