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Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions" Question

Here's what I understand to be the source. The slogan "Goodbye Blue Monday" was coined in the 1930s by a company which was trying to develop an automatic clothes washing machine. The washing machine failed, but the company sold some of the technology they'd developed for the washing machine to the government, which used it for bomb detonation mechanisms. Apparently the company held onto the slogan even as it changed over from making washers to bombs. If it's true (and I suppose it is), this would be perfect example of those dark ironies that Vonnegut loved so well.

Of course, you might as well ask yourself why the novel was titled "Breakfast of Champions." ;)
 
Thanks.

Thank you. I appreciate the response. That story sounds very familiar, actually. I seem to recall now "Blue Monday" was wash day for the American domestic. OK, that makes sense. I was having no luck on Google with this earlier. But since I added "wash day" to the search, I found this:

http://www.5minutesformom.com/1229/org-blue-monday/

The World Wide Web or "Internet" is a great tool.

Cheers.
 
Doesn't this reference also appear in the book? I don't remember -- it's probably been 30 years since I read it last. In which case, Vonnegut probably made up the washing-machine-to-bomb company story as a device to illustrate his feelings about the essentially amoral qualities of industry, technology and science.
 
IJ Reilly is right

the company in question is called "Barrytron Limited" and they are also the ones that end up polluting the river, although they try to be environmentally aware....
 
Dave Bartholomew wrote a hit song for Fats Domino in 1957 called Blue Monday. It was about how difficult the week was beginning on Monday. Working all week for hard earned pay and partying on Saturday night. The song begins:

Blue Monday how I hate Blue Monday
Got to work like a slave all day
Here come Tuesday, oh hard Tuesday
I'm so tired got no time to play

I don't think the song had anything to do with washing clothes. I don't think Vonnegut paid much attention to it either.
 
rayle said:
I don't think the song had anything to do with washing clothes. I don't think Vonnegut paid much attention to it either.
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Why would he? He wrote the book in 1973, and blue monday was a saying even before the song came out

Do you think he paid attention to how the term was used in the 19th century?
source
One of the earliest commercial laundries was established in San Francisco in 1854, in part to compete with Chinese who provided laundry services. Where commercial services were either unavailable or unaffordable doing laundry over scrub boards remained the alternative. Women doing their laundry at home would spend Monday’s above a steaming scrub board, scrubbing her laundry, rinsing it, wringing it out and placing it on a clothes line to dry. In the popular literature at the turn of the century “blue Monday” came to describe the difficult laundry process.
Click to expand...
 
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