The invention: The first portable domestic vacuum cleaner successfully adapted to electricity, the original machine helped begin the electrification of domestic appliances in the early twentieth century.
The people behind the invention:
H. Cecil Booth (1871-1955), a British civil engineer
Melville R. Bissell (1843-1889), the inventor and marketer of the
Bissell carpet sweeper in 1876 William Henry Hoover (1849-1932), an American industrialist James Murray Spangler (1848-1915), an American inventor
From Brooms to Bissells
During most of the nineteenth century, the floors of homes were cleaned primarily with brooms. Carpets were periodically dragged out of the home by the boys and men of the family, stretched over rope lines or fences, and given a thorough beating to remove dust and dirt. In the second half of the century, carpet sweepers, perhaps inspired by the success of street-sweeping machines, began to appear. Although there were many models, nearly all were based upon the idea of a revolving brush within an outer casing that moved on rollers or wheels when pushed by a long handle.
Melville Bissell’s sweeper, patented in 1876, featured a knob for adjusting the brushes to the surface. The Bissell Carpet Company, also formed in 1876, became the most successful maker of carpet sweepers and dominated the market well into the twentieth century. Electric vacuum cleaners were not feasible until homes were wired for electricity and the small electric motor was invented. Thomas Edison’s success with an incandescent lighting system in the 1880′s and Nikola Tesla’s invention of a small electric motor that was used in 1889 to drive a Westinghouse Electric Corporation fan opened the way for the application of electricity to household technologies.
Cleaning with Electricity
In 1901, H. Cecil Booth, a British civil engineer, observed a London demonstration of an American carpet cleaner that blew compressed air at the fabric. Booth was convinced that the process should be reversed so that dirt would be sucked out of the carpet. In developing this idea, Booth invented the first successful suction vacuum sweeper.
Booth’s machines, which were powered by gasoline or electricity, worked without brushes. Dust was extracted by means of a suction action through flexible tubes with slot-shaped nozzles. Some machines were permanently installed in buildings that had wall sockets for the tubes in every room. Booth’s British Vacuum Cleaner Company also employed horse-drawn mobile units from which white-uniformed men unrolled long tubes that they passed into buildings through windows and doors. His company’s commercial triumph came when it cleaned Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. Booth’s company also manufactured a 1904 domestic model that had a direct-current electric motor and a vacuum pump mounted on a wheeled carriage. Dust was sucked into the nozzle of a long tube and deposited into a metal container. Booth’s vacuum cleaner used electricity from overhead light sockets.
The portable electric vacuum cleaner was invented in 1907 in the United States by James Murray Spangler. When Spangler was a janitor in a department store in Canton, Ohio, his asthmatic condition was worsened by the dust he raised with a large Bissell carpet sweeper. Spangler’s modifications of the Bissell sweeper led to his own invention. On June 2,1908, he received a patent for his Electric Suction Sweeper. The device consisted of a cylindrical brush in the front of the machine, a vertical-shaft electric motor above a fan in the main body, and a pillowcase attached to a broom handle behind the main body. The brush dislodged the dirt, which was sucked into the pillowcase by the movement of air caused by a fan powered by the electric motor. Although Spangler’s initial attempt to manufacture and sell his machines failed, Spangler had, luckily for him, sold one of his machines to a cousin, Susan Troxel Hoover, the wife of William Henry Hoover.
The Hoover family was involved in the production of leather goods, with an emphasis on horse saddles and harnesses. William Henry Hoover, president of the Hoover Company, recognizing that the adoption of the automobile was having a serious impact on the family business, was open to investigating another area of production. In addition, Mrs. Hoover liked the Spangler machine that she had been using for a couple of months, and she encouraged her husband to enter into an agreement with Spangler. An agreement made on August 5, 1908, allowed Spangler, as production manager, to manufacture his machine with a small work force in a section of Hoover’s plant. As sales of vacuum cleaners increased, what began as a sideline for the Hoover Company became the company’s main line of production.
Few American homes were wired for electricity when Spangler and Hoover joined forces; not until 1920 did 35 percent of American homes have electric power. In addition to this inauspicious fact, the first Spangler-Hoover machine, the Model O, carried the relatively high price of seventy-five dollars. Yet a full-page ad for the Model O in the December, 1908, issue of the Saturday Evening Post brought a deluge of requests. American women had heard of the excellent performance of commercial vacuum cleaners, and they hoped that the Hoover domestic model would do as well in the home.
Impact
As more and more homes in the United States and abroad became wired for electric lighting, a clean and accessible power source became available for household technologies. Whereas electric lighting was needed only in the evening, the electrification of household technologies made it necessary to use electricity during the day. The electrification of domestic technologies therefore matched the needs of the utility companies, which sought to maximize the use of their facilities. They became key promoters of electric appliances. In the first decades of the twentieth century, many household technologies became electrified. In addition to fans and vacuum cleaners, clothes-washing machines, irons, toasters, dishwashing machines, refrigerators, and kitchen ranges were being powered by electricity.
The application of electricity to household technologies came as large numbers of women entered the work force. During and after World War I, women found new employment opportunities in industrial manufacturing, department stores, and offices. The employment of women outside the home continued to increase throughout the twentieth century. Electrical appliances provided the means by which families could maintain the same standards of living in the home while both parents worked outside the home.
It is significant that Bissell was motivated by an allergy to dust and Spangler by an asthmatic condition. The employment of the carpet sweeper, and especially the electric vacuum cleaner, not only
H. Cecil Booth
Although Hubert Cecil Booth (1871-1955), an English civil engineer, designed battleship engines, factories, and bridges, he was not above working on homier problems when they intrigued him. That happened in 1900 when he watched the demonstration of a device that used forced air to blow the dirt out of railway cars. It worked poorly, and the reason, it seemed to Booth, was that blowing just stirred up the dirt. Sucking it into a receptacle, he thought, would work better. He tested his idea by placing a wet cloth over furniture upholstery and sucking through it. The grime that collected on the side of the cloth facing the upholstery proved him right.
He built his first vacuum cleaner—a term that he coined—in 1901. It cleaned houses, but only with considerable effort. Measuring 54 inches by 42 inches by 10 inches, it had to be carried in a horse-driven van to the cleaning site. A team of workmen from Booth’s Vacuum Cleaner Company then did the cleaning with hoses that reached inside the house through windows and doors. Moreover, the machine cost the equivalent of more than fifteen hundred dollars. It was beyond the finances and physical powers of home owners.
Booth marketed the first successful British one-person vacuum cleaner, the Trolley-Vac, in 1906. Weighing one hundred pounds, it was still difficult to wrestle into position, but it came with hoses and attachments that made possible the cleaning of different types of surfaces and hard-to-reach areas.
made house cleaning more efficient and less physical but also led to a healthier home environment. Whereas sweeping with a broom tended only to move dust to a different location, the carpet sweeper and the electric vacuum cleaner removed the dirt from the house.
See also Disposable razor; Electric refrigerator; Microwave cooking; Robot (household); Washing machine.
