The Vacuum Cleaner

The modern-day robotic vacuum cleaner may look different from the original, cumbersome incarnations, but the truth is, they’ve always sucked…

From dust-blowing bellows to horse-drawn carts, the evolution of a useful appliance.

For many centuries, removing dust and dirt from one’s floor covering meant heaving it off the ground, hanging it up somewhere, and beating it into submission with a paddle. Eventually, people decided there had to be an easier way.

In 1860, an inventor from Iowa named Daniel Hess added a breath of (not so) fresh air to the carpet- cleaning game, registering the patent of an invention “that consists in drawing fine dust and dirt through the machine by means of a draft of air.”

Problematically, the operator of this machine had to use a bellows to create the air needed to draw in the dirt, which rendered it little more than useless, but Hess’s idea got other people’s creative cogs turning

– manually, of course. And in the case of Ives McGaffey of Chicago, with a hand crank.

In 1869, McGaffey devised the ‘Whirlwind’, a machine that stood upright and used said crank to rotate a fan which moved the air around. At 25 dollars a pop (about $450 today), Whirlwind owners found the machine so difficult to use that its time in the limelight lived up to its name.

St Louis inventor John Thurman then burst onto the carpet-cleaning scene with his 1899 offering of the catchily- titled ‘pneumatic carpet-renovator’. While the first of its kind to be powered by a motor rather than a human, it actually did the opposite of what a vacuum does – dislodging dust from carpets by blasting them with jets of compressed air, which were blown into a receptacle.

As Thurman toured the UK touting his invention, he caught the inspiration of Hubert Cecil Booth, who nonetheless saw the f law in Thurman’s design and thought how a sucking device would be far more effective.

Apparently, Booth was so intrigued that he placed a handkerchief on the plush velvet seat of a restaurant chair, put his mouth to the handkerchief and sucked the air in, choking on the dust he pulled out of the chair. When he saw just how much dust was gathered on the handkerchief, he knew his idea had merit.

His creation, a vacuum cleaner with an internal combustion engine powering a piston pump which pulled the air through a cloth filter, was patented in 1901 and became known as ‘Puffing Billy’.

The machine’s obvious drawback was its size. Enormous, red, and petrol-powered, it was pulled by a horse-drawn

carriage, and due to its size, only its tubes were able to be inserted through the windows. Nonetheless, Puffing Billy was the talk of the town and soon became a common sight around the streets of London, where it was employed for some high-profile jobs, including cleaning Westminster Abbey for the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in 1902.

By then, Booth’s device was being built right into the homes of the wealthy, in the form of a central vacuum. Due to their expense and size, vacuums were limited to society’s upper crust. Everyone else had to deal with their own layers of crust via more traditional means, while new patents across the world tried to capitalise on Booth’s innovation.

As is often the case, the one who succeeded was driven by necessity. Sixty-year-old Ohio department store janitor James Spangler had to clean the entire building each night, a long, tedious task that also made his asthma flare. An inventor on the side, he devised his own contraption using a broom handle, a tin soapbox, a sateen pillowcase, and an electric motor he pulled out of a sewing machine, which powered a fan and a rotating brush.

While rough looking, the machine did an impressive job of sucking up dirt and blowing it out the back into the attached pillowcase. Spangler patented it in 1907 and quit his job, opening the Electric Suction Sweeper Company, with investors helping him try to produce his invention. But after buying 75 motors, obtaining factory space and using his own house as collateral, Spangler was so cash-strapped that he turned to his wealthy cousin Susan Hoover, wife of successful leather goods manufacturer William Hoover.

Buying the patent from Spangler in

1908, Hoover hoovered money into marketing, research and development, redesigning the vacuum cleaner by placing it in a steel box and designing attachments for the hose. He later added disposal filter bags and designed the first upright vacuum cleaner in 1926. The addition of door-to-door salesmen transformed Spangler’s invention into a business success and the name Hoover into one still synonymous with vacuuming today.

To think, if they’d honoured Spangler by keeping his name in the business, we might still be calling the action of vacuuming ‘spangling’, instead of ‘hoovering’.

So how have vacuums changed since? Not a great deal, to be honest. They’ve gotten cleaner, thanks to the introduction of less porous cloth bags in the 1930s and the modern-day HEPA filters and bags. There was that lovely invention of the button that sucked up the cord in one satisfying swoop, only occasionally taking out an ankle along the way. At the same time, cords themselves started to become superf luous, culminating in Black and Decker’s 1975 cordless vacuum patent and the 1978 introduction of the Dustbuster.

1978 was also the year a man called James Dyson found himself dissatisfied with his vacuum cleaner’s sucking performance and realised that his machine’s dust-clogged bag was to blame. Having just built an industrial cyclone tower for his building that used centrifugal force to separate paint particles from the air, he wondered if the same could be done for a vacuum, and five years later, the first bagless vacuum cleaner was born.

More recently, in 2002, the Roomba made its way into circulat ion, taking vacuuming into the robot ic era. While most of us thought robot ic vacuums would look l ike the robot cleaner Rosie from The Jetsons, the automatic vacuum was a sleek little circle that sashayed under seats and into small spaces, and has a sensor to detect obstacles or sharp drops such as stairs. Current models also have a home base where it can empty itself. Now that’s the kind of hands- off technology that really changes the game of domestic housework.

Even with all these innovations, though, a vacuum of today still does the job about as well as it’s done for more than a century. It still sucks.

HOOVER HOOVERED MONEY INTO MARKETING AND RESEARCH