About the Invention of the Motor Driven Vacuum Cleaner
Motorized vacuum cleaners evolved from large horse-drawn gasoline-powered behemoths to the bagless types we know today. Early in the 20th century, the necessity of removing dust and dirt from the home and workplace fueled countless designs, only a few of which survived. It's hard for us to imagine hiring a company to bring its crew and huge machine to our house to vacuum the carpet. Determined inventors soon improved the size and efficiency of the machines to the ones we take for granted today. Does this Spark an idea?
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History
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Hand-powered vacuums were around as early as the 1860s, but motorized models that could be purchased and used by the home consumer where not available until around 1906. Jim Kirby invented his model in 1906, and made his first cloth-type dust removal model in 1907. In 1908, James Murray Spangler, a janitor who was tired of coughing dust from lack of an efficient way to remove it, patented his "portable electric suction cleaner." Spangler sold the rights soon after to his cousin's husband, William Hoover, and the Hoover line of vacuums was born. Fred Wardell was unhappy with the weight of the vacuums of the time and in 1909 began producing his own model, the Eureka, a lightweight model with attachments.
Types
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Methods used to power early vacuums were large and varied, from hand-powered bellows to gas engines. In 1905 Chapman and Skinner produced an electric unit with an 18-inch fan weighing 92 pounds. It required a strong husband to move about while the wife vacuumed. The methods for removing the dust varied also. A wet sponge was used to extract the dust in Corinne Dufour's 1901 model, while many early types used water tanks for the same purpose. It wasn't until the first decade of the 20th century that cloth or paper was used as the filtering device.
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Size
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Many of the early machines for vacuuming were quite large compared to today's models, some being carried on wagons and requiring several operators. In 1901, a fleet of Hebert Cecil Booth's massive model, the Puffing Billy, were used to clean the barracks used by the Royal Navy at London's Crystal Palace, ending an outbreak of spotted fever and removing an estimated 26 tons of dust. By the time the Hoover Model O came out in 1908, it weighed a mere 40 pounds and could be handled by one person.
Misconceptions
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John S. Thurman is credited by many as being the inventor of the motorized vacuum cleaner in 1899, but his gasoline-powered contraption did not vacuum or suck up the dirt, but rather blasted air onto the carpet and into a container along with the dust and debris. He called his machine a "pneumatic carpet renovator." It was so large it had to be carried door-to-door on a horse-drawn wagon and set up outside, where hoses for the air where placed in the house through the windows and doors.
Significance
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The necessity for removing dust and dirt became evident after the Industrial Revolution, when pollution from factories filled the air and former countryside. At approximately the same time, the acceptance of germs as the cause of many maladies brought a surge in house cleaning and its techniques. The removal of dirt and dust became an industry in itself, and soon the motorized vacuum evolved.
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