A janitor's soap box and his wife's pillowcase gave the world the Hoover
In 1907 James Murray Spangler, a department store janitor in Canton, Ohio, rigged an electric fan to blow dust into a soap box fitted with one of his wife's pillowcases, adding a spinning brush to loosen dirt. Lacking money to build it, he sold the patent to a local leather goods maker named William Henry Hoover.
Hoover gave the machine a steel shell, casters and attachments, and released it in 1908 as the Model O for 60 dollars. The beater bar followed in 1919, disposable filter bags in the 1920s, and an upright in 1926; the firm took the name Hoover Company in 1922. The brand became so dominant that in Britain and Ireland people still say they are hoovering, while parts of New Zealand, especially Southland, use lux the same way.
Hand-powered ancestors came first. Daniel Hess of West Union, Iowa, built a bellows sweeper with a rotating brush in 1860, and Ives McGaffey's hand-cranked Whirlwind appeared in Chicago in 1868. Some early powered models blew rather than sucked: John Thurman's pneumatic carpet renovator of 1898 rode to customers' homes on a horse-drawn wagon, run by a combustion engine, as a door-to-door service.
True suction machines arrived in 1901, invented separately by the British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth, who may have coined the name vacuum cleaner, and the American David Kenney. Booth's horse-drawn Puffing Billy pulled air through a cloth filter; Kenney's was a fixed steam-powered plant weighing some 1,800 kilograms, piped into every room of a building. In 1905 Walter Griffiths of Birmingham offered a portable domestic model worked by squeezing a bellows.
Vacuums stayed a luxury until after the Second World War. They remain most common in Western homes, since elsewhere floors tend to be tile or wood rather than wall-to-wall carpet. Europeans prefer canister models on wheels, and Electrolux showed the first cordless robot cleaner, the Trilobite, on the BBC's Tomorrow's World in 1997. A British hovering cleaner, AiRider, floated on an air cushion in 2004.
Source: Vacuum cleaner
