July 5, 2021 • 41 mins
Tracking the history of how we clean and why our cleaning needs have shifted also tells the story of human progress in a wider sense. How did we get from natural-fiber brooms to gasoline-powered vacuum cleaners and ultimately to the home-use models we know today?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy. This
is one of those episodes that occurred to me via
what I will forever call the Ralph mcquarie method going forward,
(00:26):
meaning that I had started and sputtered out on several
other topics. This is not uncommon. We're I'll start four
different episodes in a given week and they'll be like no. Uh.
And after wrestling with it and trying to figure out
what was wrong with me and what I actually wanted
to do for a while, I just went to bed
and then I literally woke up in the middle of
the night, no joke, thinking vacuum cleaners. And then I
fell back asleep, and then I was still thinking it
(00:48):
when I woke up to my alarm clock several hours later. Uh,
And I was like, well, I got to look up
vacuum cleaner history and see if that's interesting, And it
turned out that it is to me very fascinating. Hooray.
Um track in human history how we clean and why
are cleaning needs have shifted kind of tells the story
of human progress in a wider sense. So this becomes
(01:09):
a really interesting way to look at human history. Plus
we get to see the appearance of one of those
topics that just pops up repeatedly on the show over
and over, and that is Paxton's Crystal palace. Uh. And
also my personal and sincere hope is that I will
maybe finally be able to spell the word vacuum after
this without looking it up every time. Yeah, we we
(01:31):
just in this recording session recorded the podcast on the
Dreyfast Affair, and I was having the same experience with
the word alsace. Yeah, there are just some words that
everyone struggles with the spelling on, and vacuum has always
been mine. So before there were vacuums, getting floors and
draper reason things clean was of course a lot more
difficult and also a lot less effective. But people have
(01:53):
been trying to keep their living areas tidy for millennia,
and all of this effort is for good reason side
for just looking neater. You've probably heard that household dust
is composed of a lot of gunk. An estimated of
it is sloughed off human cells. Not all that pleasant
(02:13):
to think about. About twenty percent that's left can have
all kinds of stuff in it that's not exactly great
for your general health and well being, like pollen and
bacteria and animal dander and lent insect particles. I'm gonna
say dust mites that can be in there. You get
the idea. Yeah. I also wonder if you have a
(02:33):
house like ours where there are many cats, how those
proportions change. We have evidence of rudimentary brooms going all
the way back to in Egypt in India, so a
long time ago people figured out that they didn't want
all of this dust and gunk around, even if they
didn't know how it was composed. The ancient Romans were
(02:57):
known to use brooms as well, and sometimes an early
sort of mop that kind of had a sponge on
the end of a stick instead of the plant material
that was usually used for brooms. Brooms would continue to
be used, of course, throughout human history, although it is
not until the eighteenth century that brooms used in the
US got a pretty significant upgrade. Before that, brooms were
(03:19):
made by tying materials like hay or corn husks to
a larger stick that served as a handle. This was functional,
was not really amazing in terms of the cleaning ability
the hay or straw or whatever that was used to
make the bristles that would eventually fall out and need
to be retied. The story goes that in a Hadley, Massachusetts,
(03:44):
farmer named Levi Dickinson got the idea to upgrade the
household brooms by using tassel like sorghum, which is a
cereal crop that he had growing on his farm, to
make the brooms, and this offered such enhanced performance other
households started asking him to make them for him as well,
(04:05):
and those became so popular that this grew into a business,
so soon Dickinson was growing more sorghum to meet demand.
By eighteen ten, a machine called a foot treadle broom
machine had been developed to make better brooms that lasted
longer than hand tied ones, and by the eighteen thirties,
Levi's company, the CD, Dickinson and Sun Company, was supplying
(04:25):
other manufacturers with the equipment to make brooms. He had
really like had a whole career trajectory over this, and
so clearly the cleaning industry had taken off. I really
feel like I was in a museum somewhere in New
England that had one of these foot treadle machines. Probably
I remember the docents talking to me about it and
then trying to figure out which museum that was um
(04:48):
I could not. I ran into just roadblocks. Throughout the
nineteenth century, not only did broom manufacturer increase, but thanks
to the Industrial Revolution, textiles for the home became more
available and more financially accessible to a wider range of households,
and that meant there were more surfaces to clean. They
(05:09):
were surfaces that could easily absorb all of that dust
and then would that would get recirculated into the air
through the motion of sweeping. You've probably seen photos or movies,
maybe you've done this yourself, people beating the rugs or
the draperies with paddles as they hang them outdoors, and
that was really the only way to loosen up the
(05:30):
dirt and the dust from the fibers. Unfortunately, doing that
also caused wear and tear on whatever was being beaten,
so you've got a cleanliness at the expense of damage.
To be clear, these kinds of textiles and their cleaning
needs have been around for a lot longer than this,
but before the Industrial Revolution, they tended to be owned
(05:53):
by the sort of people who also had a staff
to take care of the cleaning. Yeah, the the luxurious
and sumptuous textiles that were found in fancy homes up
to that point, those owners didn't really understand the level
of elbow grease that went into keeping them clean and beautiful. Uh.
(06:14):
In The first British patent for a mechanical sweeper was
issued to Edmund Hemming of London. This was not a
home sweeper, to be clear. It was a street sweeper,
but its design was similar to the carpet sweepers that
would follow. It had a circular brush that was basically
a cylinder with broom bristles on it and that rotated
as the wheels of the horse drawn cart rolled forward,
(06:37):
displacing the swept debris behind into the sides of the mechanism.
That's basically how a lot of floor sweepers work, but
it wasn't until eighteen eleven that a home use product
with a similar design was first patented in Britain. That
was James Hume's sweeping machine, which required the user to
place the rolling box in position and then turn a
(06:59):
hand and crank to rotate the wheels and then they
would move it the next position. This just sounds very
fitly to me. It sounds arduous, like you put it down,
you crank the wheel to get the brush to do
the thing. You pick it up, you do the same thing.
I would give up and just be like, well, I
live with a dirty floor, that's what's up um. In
eight three, another English inventor named James Hadn't Young patented
(07:22):
his hand sweeping apparatus. This integrated the handle, the brush roller,
and the dustpan into one simple machine, and it had
a fabric cover. This one is interesting because it lists carpets, floors,
and pavements as the surfaces it could sweep in the patent,
and that makes it the first home you sweeper that
mentioned a carpet. Young invented a sweeper that had a
(07:45):
lot of features you would find on a carpet sweeper today,
and he really solidified the design with his follow up
a year later. In that second iteration, the dustpan was
hinged for easy access and the fabric cover was omitted
in favor of a box cover made of would. So
it probably is starting to sound like something you have
seen or used before. Lucius Bigelow got a British patent
(08:07):
for his carpet sweeper several years later on Juty eight.
This one is almost identical to a modern model, had
large wheels at the sides that also drove the rolling brush.
The first time I ever saw one of these was
in the library at my high school or my middle school,
(08:29):
i think, And it was really good for like getting
the little paper bits from our three from our like
spiral notebooks up off of the library floor. Like that
was really the scope of its ability to lift things
it's primary function. Also in eighteen fifty eight, Boston resident
(08:50):
Hiram Herrick got a patent for a carpet sweeper, and
this one looked an awful lot like the British patent
for the same device. It is basically identical to bigelow sweeper,
and it was almost certainly copied since British copyright law
did not apply in the US. There were several similar
patent applications filed in late eighteen fifty eight that also
(09:11):
almost certainly copied Bigelow's design. One of those, designed by
Reuben Shailer of Connecticut, had actually refined the box that
contained all of the components into a lower profile form.
More than two hundred fifty patents for variations on carpet
sweepers were issued in the US in the last four
decades of the nineteenth century, although only about one fifth
(09:33):
of them were ever actually made, and most of those
pretty quickly fell by the wayside. They didn't stay in production.
Even Herrick, who had managed to get his into production
and seemed to be doing pretty well for himself, found
a lot of his high volume orders were canceled as
this U S Civil War began. In eighteen sixty a
man named Daniel Hess in West Union, Iowa, was granted
(09:56):
a patent for a carpet sweeper that introduced the use
of air. Quote. The nature of my invention consists in
drawing fine dust and dirt through the machine by means
of a draft of air, forcing the same into water
or its equivalent, for the purpose of destroying it substantially.
This machine needed a bellows to operate. He probably never
(10:19):
actually built one. Yeah, he may have built a prototype,
He certainly never went into production on it. On June
eighteen sixty nine, Ives W. McGaffey of Chicago got a
patent for his sweeper design that used a fan in
an upright machine called the whirlwind. It required a hand
cranking to operate that fan. McGaffey was clear in his
(10:40):
goal in his patent quote, the accumulation of dust and
dirt in dwelling houses is a source of great annoyance
to all good housekeepers. To obviate these difficulties is the
object of my invention. The whirlwind was expensive twenty five dollars.
This is at the end of the nineteenth century, and
(11:01):
while it was teetering on the brink of creating the
kind of suction that could effectively lift the dirt out
of carpets, the fact that it was hand cranked meant
that it was a lot of work to get the
fan going fast enough to pull the dust and the
dirt into the receptacle bag. So this whirlwind did not
really take off. He's so close, though. He has the
(11:24):
idea of trying to hand crank a thing or use
a bellows while also trying to sweep the sweeper like
that just seems like way too much effort. Yeah, you
have to be um Like I I envisioned something like
those one man band contraptions where somebody is just super
dexterous and can do many things at once. In eight
seventy six, two carpet sweepers were brought to the US
(11:46):
market that proved very, very popular. The first was manufactured
by the Gore and Edgecomb Company of Indiana, and that sweeper,
which was called the Lady's Friend, became a very big seller.
It was a very simple sweeper, but it had rubber
friction drive that helped the brushes pick up a lot
more dirt and dust from carpets. Yea, As I was
(12:06):
looking for a picture to accompany this episode, it became
clear that the idea that sweepers and vacuums and things
might make a good gift for a woman that goes
back to the very beginning of their existence. Unsurprisingly, we
are about to talk about another sweeper, and one that
(12:27):
has a name that you'll probably recognize. But before we
get to that and how it was innovative, we will
take a quick sponsor break. The other popular sweeper of
eight seventy six came from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and it
was patented by Melville R. Bistle. Bissell and his wife
(12:51):
Anna were in the crockery business when they started tweaking
the design of a sweeper that they used in the
shop to make it more effective at managing the dust,
and soon they were manufacturing their own sweepers. The Bustles
sweeper moved the reduction gears that moved the brush to
the center of the brush so it was away from
the ends where the cogs were on other sweepers, and
(13:13):
that meant this Bustle sweeper could get right up to
the baseboards and sweep up as much debris as possible.
They upgraded that center positioned gear drive to a belt
friction drive and they named that the Bustles center bearing sweeper,
and the Bustles had Hustle like. They sold their sweeper
from their wagon. They would take it out in the
(13:34):
streets and they would be on either side of it
kind of talking to potential customers, and they would demonstrate
its effectiveness by using dirt that they picked up from
the road to toss onto a rug that they traveled
with in the wagon, and then they would show how
effective their design was it managing that dirt, and this worked.
People were convinced, so the Bustles quickly built up not
(13:55):
only direct to consumer sales but also shipping contracts with retailers,
and they had to pretty rapidly expand their manufacturing facilities
just to keep up with demand. They also started building
luxury models made with beautiful wood finishes and marketing them
as holiday gifts like Tracy reference right before the break
it was like, this is a beautiful gift to give
(14:16):
your wife. No thank you. Uh. Thirteen years into the
life of the Bistles carpet Sweeper company, Melville died of pneumonia,
and at that point Anna became one of the first
women executives in the US because she took control of
the company. She grew the company substantially, and she rolled
out one of the first employee health benefit packages in
(14:37):
the country. And even Queen Victoria approved of Bustles sweepers
being used in her residence. That's a pretty big endorsement
and it was a huge boon to expanding their international sales.
In A gasoline powered carpet sweeper device was invented by
John S. Thurman of St. Louis, Missouri. His patent for
(14:58):
it includes the inventor's own and endorsement of its efficacy quote,
I have found, by observation of a machine with which
I have conducted experiments that the renovator relieves and collects
nearly all, if not all, the dust and dirt from
the carpet over which it has traveled. So this still
did not have vacuum power the way we would think
(15:18):
of it today, but it did use what Theurman referred
to as an air blast to do the work. This
was a shot of highly compressed air that both served
as a force to beat the dust out of the
surface and as a blowing mechanism to send the resulting
uplifted dirt and dust into a waiting container. And his
patent paperwork for the Pneumatic Carpet Renovator, Thurman described it
(15:39):
this way quote The invention may be said to consist, briefly,
and a pneumatic dust extractor designed to be placed over
or in close proximity to the carpet, whereby an air
blast is projected into and through the carpet, forcing the
dust out and into the collector where it's accumulated is
(16:00):
subsequently removed. But while Thurman's invention was pretty effective, it
also was not something that the average person could purchase,
and it wasn't really intended for that. It was intended
to be a service vehicle. And we say vehicle because
it was the size of a carriage and you absolutely
had to have a horse to pull it. And for
four dollars you could have Thurman's Pneumatic carpet Renovator visit
(16:22):
your home to give it a deep clean. Yeah. Also
on my list of no thank you is like anything
with an internal combustion engine to be used in my
house powered by gasoline. Well it's outside, but the and
then the hoses ran in. Yes, um. But the description
of it as as gas powered it first made me
(16:43):
be like, sounds terrifying. It does. So this is where
we get to Hubert cecil Booth. Booth saw all the
efforts to improve on Thurman's pneumatic cleaner, but also felt
like they were missing something and he believed correctly that
suck shin was the key element that every effort was missing.
(17:04):
Bellows had been used on some versions of sweepers over
the years. We talked about a couple earlier and that
that sort of pulled in the dirt a little bit,
but that was not a very effective method. So a
brief and very oversimplified explainer on suction. It is all
about air pressure. So usually this is explained when most
people are saying here's how this works. Uh, it's in
(17:27):
terms of drinking through a straw. Right when you suck
on a straw, you're creating a pressure differential between the
top of the straw and the bottom, and your beverage
travels from the area of higher pressure at the bottom
to the area of lower pressure at the top. In
a vacuum cleaner, it's the same basic idea. Air in
a chamber is blown out of the chamber by a
fan upward, creating a drop in pressure that creates suction
(17:51):
at the air inlet. So if a machine has such
a chamber and a fan blowing air out quickly, as
you run that inlet hole over a surface with particle
is on it, those particles are sucked up into the chamber,
and a filter keeps those particles from flying out the
exhaust hole. And we should note that there is not
actually a vacuum and a vacuum cleaner, if you want
(18:12):
to be really scientifically um specific about it. This isn't
an absence of air which would define a vacuum. But
Booth claimed to have coined the term vacuum cleaner when
he was working on his problem. Other people have said
he was not the one, but regardless of whether it
was him or someone else who first called it a
vacuum cleaner, that is the name that stuck. According to Booth,
(18:35):
he once had a conversation with an inventor of a
motor driven cleaning rig at an expo at London's Empire
Music Hall, and he said quote the machine consisted of
a box about a foot square, having a bag on
top to which compressed air at ninety pounds pressure was supplot.
The air was blown down in the carpet from two
(18:55):
opposite directions, as inventor trusted to the reflection for the
surface underneath the carpet to drive the dust and air
into the box. Booth didn't see how this would really
clean properly, since he suspected that a lot of the
dust would get blown out to the sides as those
two streams of compressed air met, and he asked the
(19:16):
inventor if the man had tried to find a way
to suck out dust rather than beat it out of
the fabric with air blasts. And apparently this query was
met with some bristle, Although we only have booth side
of the story, but according to his account quote, he
became heated remarking that sucking out dust was impossible, as
it had been tried over and over without success. He
then walked away. That quote and the one describing the
(19:39):
mechanism are from an article that Booth wrote in the
nineteen thirties, and he doesn't name John Thurman specifically in
that writing, but based on records, it appears that that
was who he was speaking with and who he consequently irritated.
Booth out a background and engineering, and it was a
pretty impressive one. At the time, he was working for
the firm Modsley, Sons and Field, which designed things like
(20:01):
ferris wheels and suspension bridges all over Europe. So Booth
put his engineering know how to work and he set
out to tackle this suction problem himself. Okay, uh, this
is gross. So just know if you are really picked out,
which specifically having lived through the last year and a half,
this might really really horrify you. Just know, maybe hop
(20:24):
ahead a little bit. Uh. In that same article from
Booth described a really unhygienic thing that he did to
test whether suction worked and how much suction was really
going to achieve cleanliness in the way that he thought
it could. So he wrote quote I thought over the
matter for a few days and tried to experiment by
(20:46):
sucking with my mouth against the back of a plush
seat in a restaurant in Victoria Street, with the result
that I was almost choked. I came to the conclusion
that I could construct a machine to work by suction. This,
to me, is so contrary to all of his smartness
in engineering. I'm like, wait, you just put your mouth
on public stuff. Yeah. I'm also like, did you not
(21:09):
have a plush surface in your own house? So at
least it would be your own dirt at that point. Anyway,
the result of his efforts was a contraption he dubbed
Puffing Billy, for which he received a patent in August
of nineteen o one. It was large, like Thurman's machine,
and it was pulled by horses. This trolley vacuum was
(21:31):
a bright red box that looked almost like a shed
on wheels, and the first iteration of puffing Billy had
a piston suction pump, but he later switched that to
a turbine fan, and Puffing Billy, which had been named
after a locomotive, apparently, quickly became a popular site around London.
It was colorful, and it was large, and for Booth
it was quite lucrative. Like Thurmon, he charged a fee
(21:54):
to visit customers homes and he had a team of
operators employed by his company, Boost British vacuum cleaner company,
and those operators would arrive on site, they would run
hoses into the windows for the customer, and then they
would start up the gasoline motor on the cart and
air was drawn through the hoses and filtered as it
reached that red cart. There was also a showmanship aspect
(22:16):
to all of this work, because the dirt that accumulated
was held in a glass walled receptacle that both the
client and passers by could see to know how effective
the process was. A little bit of advertising while you're
doing your job. This was a huge success, but Booth
was dogged by legal problems early on. Other inventors claimed
(22:36):
that Booth had taken their idea and he was able
to prove he had not, And some people also lodged
formal complaints about the trolleys themselves, saying that they were
a nuisance that clogged streets and scared the horses. I
mean it seems like it could, yeah, for sure. Uh
you know it's It was not a small contraption by anything,
(22:57):
like I said, a shed on wheels. But Boo was
able to weather those early problems and soon his customer
base actually included some very prestigious contracts. He was asked
to clean Westminster Abbey in nineteen o two in preparation
for the coronation of King Edward the seventh, and after
that he kind of became a favorite of the royal family.
Edward and his wife, Queen Alexandra actually purchased two puffing
(23:19):
billies for the two major homes of the royals, Windsor
Castle and Buckingham Palace. Hubert Booth was also able to
file a U S patents, and his brother Stone Booth
ran a second office of their business in Boston, Massachusetts.
During World War One, multiple puffing billies were used to
clean the Crystal Palace. We have talked about Paxton's Crystal
(23:40):
Palace on the show before. It was an immense structure
and during the war that fame structure was used as
a training facility for the Royal Navy, and when there
was a spotted fever outbreak, Booth and his billies were
called in and they cleaned a reported twenty six tons
of dust and debris from the building in a rafters
down full suite. Even though Booth had cracked the problem
(24:02):
of section this machine was enormous. There were buildings outfitted
with their own setups based on Booth's design in the
early twentieth century to create central vacuum systems, but those buildings,
whether they were homes or hotels, needed to have a
spare room that they could dedicate to housing the main
gasoline powered engine. And again this means there's a gas
(24:25):
powered engine inside your home, which is not great for
various reasons. Obviously, it was not something the average family
could really manage, even if they did have the money
for such a thing. In an advertising poster from about
nineteen o six, the British vacuum cleaner company was obviously
appealing to very wealthy clientele with an image of a
(24:45):
woman in a maid's uniform hugging and anthropomorphized vacuum sweeper
and with the caption friends. Ultimately, though puffing Billy was
outpaced by much smaller models. Your maids will love it
very clear message. As electricity became more ubiquitous in the
(25:06):
early twentieth century, electric vacuums were developed no longer gas powered,
thank goodness. And this is a period when a lot
of names that we associate with vacuum cleaners still today
started manufacturing vacuum cleaners, such as Electrolux and Kirby. Eventually,
of course, the vacuum cleaner became compact enough that it
could be put into a form that you could push
(25:27):
along the floor while standing upright, the way most folks
use them today. And we will tell you how we
got to that after we hear from some sponsors that
keep stuff you miss in history class going. In nineteen
o seven, the idea of a personal vacuum cleaning device
(25:50):
took a huge step forward. That was thanks to a
man who had both asthma and a job that involved
heavy duty cleaning, which is obviously not a great combination.
That man was James Murray Spangler. Spangler was sixty and
was working as a night janitor in a Canton, Ohio
department store. He got the idea to start tinkering around
(26:10):
with existing technologies for vacuum cleaners. He's famously said to
have combined a setine pillowcase, a broom, and an electric motor.
The way this story is often relayed. It kind of
sounds like he was just a random guy he was
trying to solve a personal problem. But really Spangler was
an inventor. He had invented a velocipede wagon, a hay tedder,
(26:33):
and a rake, as well as a grain harvester, and
he took the cleaning job to make ends meet and
put together the funds so that he could just keep
inventing things. He was supporting his invention habit with this
cleaning job. Yeah, and he was initially actually modifying abistle
carpet sweeper. He only attached a motor to it initially,
(26:54):
which made the work go faster, but he still had
problems with his asthma from the dust that it kicked up,
and after that he decided he needed a receptacle for
the dust. So then he built a machine from scratch
using a wooden soapbox, a motor from an electric fan,
and a section of broom handle that he had cut
down to size and made into a circular brush by
stapling goat hair onto it. And he used the aforementioned
(27:17):
pillowcase as the dust bag and attached a broom handle
to push it around. And proof of concept was established
at this point, so he soon made a second version
that had a metal drum instead of a wooden box,
and he refined the movement of the brush. Spangler's device
sucked up dirt and then it blew it into the
attached pillow case. And just in case you're wondering, satine
(27:37):
is a very tightly woven fabric, so it would have
pretty effectively contained most of the particles while also allowing
the air to slowly pass through it. This worked really well,
and it was compact enough and upright so that a
single person could manage it. You didn't need a whole
crew of people to come with a cart outside your house.
(28:00):
Now I'm kind of like, I don't know that sounds
fun too. You still can do that in some ways. Uh. Spangler,
buoyed by how well his project had turned out, applied
for a patent in the autumn of nine seven, and
then once he had that patent in hand, he quit
his janitor job and he opened his own company, Electric
Suction Sweeper. But while Spangler was clever and inventing things,
(28:21):
he did not have a head for business. He had
investors and ordered motors and set up a production space,
but he spent a lot more than his investors had committed,
so he took out a loan and then he used
his house as collateral. Yeah, these are basically like any
rules of business. He was like doing the opposite of
(28:41):
This was obviously not the wisest move, and Spangler was
soon in a position where he was not only going
to lose his business, he was going to lose his house.
But the day of sex Makina in this story came
in the form of his cousin who had one of
his early vacuum cleaners and loved it, and whose last
name you will recognize in relation to vacuum clean That
cousin was Susan Hoover. William Hoover was Susan's husband, and
(29:05):
when his story meets up with Spanglers, the Hoover company
was focused on leather goods, specifically horse accessories. It was
not exactly a booming business as automobiles were coming into
the picture, but William Hoover, unlike his wife's relative, did
actually have a head for business, so he bailed Spangler
out by purchasing the patent from him, and then Hoover
(29:27):
took a very methodical approach to developing a business model
around this invention, He and his son's reorganized Spangler's company
and assumed both its assets and its debts, and Spangler
remained with the company as a salaried employee, and he
also got royalties from sales, with Hoover helming a more
structured rollout. Under this new setup, the vacuum cleaner went
(29:50):
to market with an army of door to door salesman
ready to demonstrate the machines cleaning power and ease of use.
The Hoover Model OH went to market at a price
of sixty dollars. Attachment accessories were an extra package. An
ad was placed in the Saturday Evening Post offering free
(30:10):
and home demonstrations, and requests for home trials quickly outpaced
their production numbers. The Hoover Vacuum division stepped up to
the challenge. Engineers were hired to improve and refine the
design for better function, and after having to throttle their
advertising and pull it back a little bit to catch
up to interest, ads came back touting the long life
(30:32):
of the motors that they had developed and reminding consumers
that quote dust is full of disease. From there, the
home consumer market for vacuum cleaners was established, and soon
manufacturers were springing up everywhere, either attempting to patent their
own models or licensing the rights to manufacture other people
and companies designs. Here's perhaps the most surprising part of
(30:54):
the vacuum cleaner's life SPAM as a home use product,
it has not really changed very much in century. Uh.
They still all work and basically the same section principle.
But there have of course been some innovations, and we'll
talk about those, and one of the biggest was the
introduction of a vacuum that you could pick up in
one hand to deal with small messes. In seventy five,
(31:16):
Black and Decker applied for a patent for a cordless vacuum,
and this was a development that was many years in
the making. While Black and Decker had a reputation as
an innovator in the nineties and fifties, over time their
mass market appeal had led to a perception that they
were making things that were kind of like a budget
brand for the home user, only they got fewer and
(31:38):
fewer high end contracts. This then impacted their products for
the home market, though, because the innovation from those professional
contracts was driving the technology that would eventually end up
in consumer products. Yeah, that's still in most fields today.
Like how a lot of it works. It's kind of
like how people are like, why do we need oat couture,
(31:59):
and it's like those are developing designs that you'll see
on on racks in your local store in a couple
of years. Similarly, electronics and technology things are often developing
high end contracts for things that they will figure out
how to make at a more cost effective level for
a home consumer. And that's exactly what happened here because
in the early nineteen sixties, Black and Decker gained a
(32:22):
contract with NASA to develop cordless no torque tools that
would be safe for astronauts to use on missions. You
have probably seen photos from the Apollo fifteen mission of
David Scott drilling on the lunar surface, and that tool
that he's using was a drill specifically designed for the
mission by Black and Decker. A tool was also used
on the Apollo sixteen and Apollo seventeen missions. Through the
(32:45):
company's work with NASA, Black and Decker was able to
do enough research and development to start designing cordless products
for the consumer market that led to the company's cordless
vacuum patent. After the dust Buster was launched in nineteen eight,
and in a home appliance market that was being flooded
with competition, that handheld vacuum for dry messes just clicked
(33:08):
with consumers that outperformed all the projected sales numbers. We
had one at my house growing up. Because it did
so well, another pattern was quickly filed to protect the
product's design form. Now, of course, there are vacuums that
are much smaller for all kinds of specialized tasks like
cleaning keyboards and sewing machines. At the time, this was
(33:30):
pretty revolutionary. Oh. I remember literally this being like discussed
in my school and people being like, my mom is
getting a Dustbuster and it being this huge thing. Uh.
It was. It was the the acid washed genes of
the cleaning world at the time. In famously, James Dyson
(33:54):
introduced a bagless vacuum cleaner, one that pivoted on a
ball rather than having two small wheels on the back end.
He had already used the ball as pivot concept on
another invention, which he called the ball barrow. Yes, that
is a wheelbarrow with a ball where the wheel would
normally go, and it was while solving a problem with
the painting of his ball barrows that he got the
idea for the cyclonic separation that would be central to
(34:16):
the design of his new vacuum cleaner. The air filter
in his factory was getting clogged with powder particulate from
the finishing spray that was used on the ball barrows,
so he used a cyclone tower to separate out the
powder particles from the air and prevent that build up
on the filters. Cyclotic separation works like this. The air
is pumped through the top of a cylinder. It's conical
(34:39):
at the base, and as the air, which is moving
really quickly rotates through the cylinder, the particles in the
air are flung out to the outer wall of the
cylinder because they're heavier than the air is. As a consequence,
the air down at the base of the cylinder has
less particulate in it, so in a vacuum cleaner, when
it passes up through a central tube to the exhaust,
(35:01):
it can be filtered. That leaves less debris build up
on the filter than if you had just sucked up
the dust and dirt through a typical vacuum cleaner. The
build up around the sides of the cylinder can then
just be dumped into the trash. Yeah, this was huge
at the time. When James Dyson developed his vacuum cleaner
based on this idea, he actually had a really hard
(35:21):
time getting it to market. That gets into a whole
discussion of like why people did not want to adopt this,
that we're already making vacuum cleaners. The prevailing discussion being
around how that selling of vacuum bags was his own
whole moneymaker and nobody wanted to sidestep that. Uh. He
had patented it in ninety nine, but it actually took
(35:43):
more than a decade to get it perfected, and even
then no one in the industry was interested. Eventually he
had to introduce his g Force model through the Japanese market.
At that point it was a whopping eighteen hundred dollars.
But from that bumpy start, the Dyson vacuum cleaner line
has can tinued and flourished still without bags to present day,
with a range of models available. They're still kind of
(36:05):
expensive for a lot of folks. So the low end
is around three fifty dollars depending on where you shop,
but certainly far less than that initial price tag. I'm
just gonna say, credit card reward points is how I
bought myself. In two thousand two, the Roomba debut, and
that ushered in an era of vacuums that will bounce
(36:26):
around at home doing the little maintenance cleaning without a
lot of human involvement. The first room bo was a
thirteen point four inch diameter disc that was three and
a half inches high. Others almost immediately were on the
market by the end of two thousand three, and estimated
five hundred thousand robotic vacuum cleaners were sold worldwide. And
(36:47):
in the Friday episode, Holly is going to talk about
how their room but died in Neto Robotics created a
robotic vacuum cleaner that uses light our technology to scan
a room and then map out the most deficient pattern
for cleaning. And who knows what comes next, something else
very magical that we'll talk to you, We don't know.
(37:09):
This made me shockingly eager to vacuum because now I'm like, oh,
now I understand how this works, which is a miracle
in and of itself. Yeah, I it is really interesting
to me. I had not. I mean, it's obvious in
some ways, but I hadn't really thought about how much. Um,
you know, that availability of textiles really drove this, like
(37:30):
we gotta figure out to clean it's better. There was
one book that I read that said carpets are either
the hero of the story or the villain, depending on
your point of view. Because that's what made everybody suddenly
be like, how do we clean these? Yeah? I don't
want to pick it up and take it outside every time.
It just needs a little maintenance. Uh. And now almost never.
(37:51):
My first apartment was all hardwood floors and had I think,
like one small area rug next to the bed so
that when I got out of the bed at my
feet did not hit cold wooden floor. And I did
not have a vacuum of any sort the whole time
I was living there. I think I had like one
tiny handheld thing that I used for that little little
(38:12):
area rug. It was your inherited dustbuster. Probably it was not.
It was I got it for Christmas. I think it
had a cord, uh, and it had a little it
had a revolving brush that it was a little more
involved than a dustbuster was. And now there are rugs
that you could just throw in the wash and side
step needing to vacuum clean them. Have one of those
(38:33):
two us too, um, which is a whole other thing
that I can also talk about on the On Friday show.
Because I don't like carpeting in rugs, um. But I
do like this listener mail because it's about cooking. Uh.
This is from our listener Greg who writes, Hi, Tracy
and Holley. I enjoyed listening to your recent discussion of
(38:54):
ancient cookbooks. It reminded me of learning how to cook
from my grandmother. Seems there are things that transcend the
centuries when it comes to lack of detail in the instructions.
Before going off to college many years ago, I sat
down with my grandmother to document some old family recipes.
She is from the Old Country, having been born in Greece.
One of these recipes was for petstizzo, a Greek dish
(39:16):
similar to lasagna, which by the way, delicious. Among the
ingredients was a quart of milk, with her instructions to
take a quart of milk and pour it over the mixture,
followed by the baking. Making the dish for the first time,
it was a disaster. The taste was roughly correct, but
the consistency was more like a noodle soup. My roommates
were not impressed. It turns out quart of milk was
(39:38):
just a description of the container and was not intended
to convey any sort of measure of how much to
actually use. So grab the carton of milk and pour
in just enough to saturate the mixture is what she
actually intended. That corrected. The next attempt came out much better.
Future recipes were documented by me watching her actually making
the dish, stopping her as needed to measure what she
(40:00):
actually used. Keep up the great work, Greg, Boy, do
I know this story and grandmother's And it's funny because
I um I mentioned before, like my mom was not
into me being in the kitchen or any of us
kids because that was like her domain. But like you know,
in talking to her or my grandmother, there were never
any measures discussed. It was like, oh, you want to
(40:22):
put in some cheese there, and you'll do a little
bit of this, and it frustrated me to no end.
I'm like, we need accuracy and numbers or I'm never
going to figure this out. And now I do the
same horrible thing when people asked me how to make stuff,
I'm like, I don't know. I just I threw in
a little bit. I don't know it came out okay. Um,
I'm just trying to be better about it. Um. But
(40:46):
that's sometimes the fun, as you figured out. Also, you know,
sometimes those accidents can lead you to realizations that help
you develop new dishes. So it's all in good fun. Plus,
as I always say, which I learned from my father
in law. When he retired, he started cooking a lot,
and he said, sometimes I mess up, but I can
always eat the evidence, which is a great approach to
cooking unless it's abysmal. If you would like to share
(41:09):
your cook ae, disasters or triumphs with us, you can
do that by writing us at History podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as Missed in History And if you would like
to subscribe to the podcast and just haven't gotten to
that yet, it's super easy. You can do that on
the iHeart Radio app for pretty much anywhere else you
listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(41:34):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio, app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy. This
is one of those episodes that occurred to me via
what I will forever call the Ralph mcquarie method going forward,
(00:26):
meaning that I had started and sputtered out on several
other topics. This is not uncommon. We're I'll start four
different episodes in a given week and they'll be like no. Uh.
And after wrestling with it and trying to figure out
what was wrong with me and what I actually wanted
to do for a while, I just went to bed
and then I literally woke up in the middle of
the night, no joke, thinking vacuum cleaners. And then I
fell back asleep, and then I was still thinking it
(00:48):
when I woke up to my alarm clock several hours later. Uh,
And I was like, well, I got to look up
vacuum cleaner history and see if that's interesting, And it
turned out that it is to me very fascinating. Hooray.
Um track in human history how we clean and why
are cleaning needs have shifted kind of tells the story
of human progress in a wider sense. So this becomes
(01:09):
a really interesting way to look at human history. Plus
we get to see the appearance of one of those
topics that just pops up repeatedly on the show over
and over, and that is Paxton's Crystal palace. Uh. And
also my personal and sincere hope is that I will
maybe finally be able to spell the word vacuum after
this without looking it up every time. Yeah, we we
(01:31):
just in this recording session recorded the podcast on the
Dreyfast Affair, and I was having the same experience with
the word alsace. Yeah, there are just some words that
everyone struggles with the spelling on, and vacuum has always
been mine. So before there were vacuums, getting floors and
draper reason things clean was of course a lot more
difficult and also a lot less effective. But people have
(01:53):
been trying to keep their living areas tidy for millennia,
and all of this effort is for good reason side
for just looking neater. You've probably heard that household dust
is composed of a lot of gunk. An estimated of
it is sloughed off human cells. Not all that pleasant
(02:13):
to think about. About twenty percent that's left can have
all kinds of stuff in it that's not exactly great
for your general health and well being, like pollen and
bacteria and animal dander and lent insect particles. I'm gonna
say dust mites that can be in there. You get
the idea. Yeah. I also wonder if you have a
(02:33):
house like ours where there are many cats, how those
proportions change. We have evidence of rudimentary brooms going all
the way back to in Egypt in India, so a
long time ago people figured out that they didn't want
all of this dust and gunk around, even if they
didn't know how it was composed. The ancient Romans were
(02:57):
known to use brooms as well, and sometimes an early
sort of mop that kind of had a sponge on
the end of a stick instead of the plant material
that was usually used for brooms. Brooms would continue to
be used, of course, throughout human history, although it is
not until the eighteenth century that brooms used in the
US got a pretty significant upgrade. Before that, brooms were
(03:19):
made by tying materials like hay or corn husks to
a larger stick that served as a handle. This was functional,
was not really amazing in terms of the cleaning ability
the hay or straw or whatever that was used to
make the bristles that would eventually fall out and need
to be retied. The story goes that in a Hadley, Massachusetts,
(03:44):
farmer named Levi Dickinson got the idea to upgrade the
household brooms by using tassel like sorghum, which is a
cereal crop that he had growing on his farm, to
make the brooms, and this offered such enhanced performance other
households started asking him to make them for him as well,
(04:05):
and those became so popular that this grew into a business,
so soon Dickinson was growing more sorghum to meet demand.
By eighteen ten, a machine called a foot treadle broom
machine had been developed to make better brooms that lasted
longer than hand tied ones, and by the eighteen thirties,
Levi's company, the CD, Dickinson and Sun Company, was supplying
(04:25):
other manufacturers with the equipment to make brooms. He had
really like had a whole career trajectory over this, and
so clearly the cleaning industry had taken off. I really
feel like I was in a museum somewhere in New
England that had one of these foot treadle machines. Probably
I remember the docents talking to me about it and
then trying to figure out which museum that was um
(04:48):
I could not. I ran into just roadblocks. Throughout the
nineteenth century, not only did broom manufacturer increase, but thanks
to the Industrial Revolution, textiles for the home became more
available and more financially accessible to a wider range of households,
and that meant there were more surfaces to clean. They
(05:09):
were surfaces that could easily absorb all of that dust
and then would that would get recirculated into the air
through the motion of sweeping. You've probably seen photos or movies,
maybe you've done this yourself, people beating the rugs or
the draperies with paddles as they hang them outdoors, and
that was really the only way to loosen up the
(05:30):
dirt and the dust from the fibers. Unfortunately, doing that
also caused wear and tear on whatever was being beaten,
so you've got a cleanliness at the expense of damage.
To be clear, these kinds of textiles and their cleaning
needs have been around for a lot longer than this,
but before the Industrial Revolution, they tended to be owned
(05:53):
by the sort of people who also had a staff
to take care of the cleaning. Yeah, the the luxurious
and sumptuous textiles that were found in fancy homes up
to that point, those owners didn't really understand the level
of elbow grease that went into keeping them clean and beautiful. Uh.
(06:14):
In The first British patent for a mechanical sweeper was
issued to Edmund Hemming of London. This was not a
home sweeper, to be clear. It was a street sweeper,
but its design was similar to the carpet sweepers that
would follow. It had a circular brush that was basically
a cylinder with broom bristles on it and that rotated
as the wheels of the horse drawn cart rolled forward,
(06:37):
displacing the swept debris behind into the sides of the mechanism.
That's basically how a lot of floor sweepers work, but
it wasn't until eighteen eleven that a home use product
with a similar design was first patented in Britain. That
was James Hume's sweeping machine, which required the user to
place the rolling box in position and then turn a
(06:59):
hand and crank to rotate the wheels and then they
would move it the next position. This just sounds very
fitly to me. It sounds arduous, like you put it down,
you crank the wheel to get the brush to do
the thing. You pick it up, you do the same thing.
I would give up and just be like, well, I
live with a dirty floor, that's what's up um. In
eight three, another English inventor named James Hadn't Young patented
(07:22):
his hand sweeping apparatus. This integrated the handle, the brush roller,
and the dustpan into one simple machine, and it had
a fabric cover. This one is interesting because it lists carpets, floors,
and pavements as the surfaces it could sweep in the patent,
and that makes it the first home you sweeper that
mentioned a carpet. Young invented a sweeper that had a
(07:45):
lot of features you would find on a carpet sweeper today,
and he really solidified the design with his follow up
a year later. In that second iteration, the dustpan was
hinged for easy access and the fabric cover was omitted
in favor of a box cover made of would. So
it probably is starting to sound like something you have
seen or used before. Lucius Bigelow got a British patent
(08:07):
for his carpet sweeper several years later on Juty eight.
This one is almost identical to a modern model, had
large wheels at the sides that also drove the rolling brush.
The first time I ever saw one of these was
in the library at my high school or my middle school,
(08:29):
i think, And it was really good for like getting
the little paper bits from our three from our like
spiral notebooks up off of the library floor. Like that
was really the scope of its ability to lift things
it's primary function. Also in eighteen fifty eight, Boston resident
(08:50):
Hiram Herrick got a patent for a carpet sweeper, and
this one looked an awful lot like the British patent
for the same device. It is basically identical to bigelow sweeper,
and it was almost certainly copied since British copyright law
did not apply in the US. There were several similar
patent applications filed in late eighteen fifty eight that also
(09:11):
almost certainly copied Bigelow's design. One of those, designed by
Reuben Shailer of Connecticut, had actually refined the box that
contained all of the components into a lower profile form.
More than two hundred fifty patents for variations on carpet
sweepers were issued in the US in the last four
decades of the nineteenth century, although only about one fifth
(09:33):
of them were ever actually made, and most of those
pretty quickly fell by the wayside. They didn't stay in production.
Even Herrick, who had managed to get his into production
and seemed to be doing pretty well for himself, found
a lot of his high volume orders were canceled as
this U S Civil War began. In eighteen sixty a
man named Daniel Hess in West Union, Iowa, was granted
(09:56):
a patent for a carpet sweeper that introduced the use
of air. Quote. The nature of my invention consists in
drawing fine dust and dirt through the machine by means
of a draft of air, forcing the same into water
or its equivalent, for the purpose of destroying it substantially.
This machine needed a bellows to operate. He probably never
(10:19):
actually built one. Yeah, he may have built a prototype,
He certainly never went into production on it. On June
eighteen sixty nine, Ives W. McGaffey of Chicago got a
patent for his sweeper design that used a fan in
an upright machine called the whirlwind. It required a hand
cranking to operate that fan. McGaffey was clear in his
(10:40):
goal in his patent quote, the accumulation of dust and
dirt in dwelling houses is a source of great annoyance
to all good housekeepers. To obviate these difficulties is the
object of my invention. The whirlwind was expensive twenty five dollars.
This is at the end of the nineteenth century, and
(11:01):
while it was teetering on the brink of creating the
kind of suction that could effectively lift the dirt out
of carpets, the fact that it was hand cranked meant
that it was a lot of work to get the
fan going fast enough to pull the dust and the
dirt into the receptacle bag. So this whirlwind did not
really take off. He's so close, though. He has the
(11:24):
idea of trying to hand crank a thing or use
a bellows while also trying to sweep the sweeper like
that just seems like way too much effort. Yeah, you
have to be um Like I I envisioned something like
those one man band contraptions where somebody is just super
dexterous and can do many things at once. In eight
seventy six, two carpet sweepers were brought to the US
(11:46):
market that proved very, very popular. The first was manufactured
by the Gore and Edgecomb Company of Indiana, and that sweeper,
which was called the Lady's Friend, became a very big seller.
It was a very simple sweeper, but it had rubber
friction drive that helped the brushes pick up a lot
more dirt and dust from carpets. Yea, As I was
(12:06):
looking for a picture to accompany this episode, it became
clear that the idea that sweepers and vacuums and things
might make a good gift for a woman that goes
back to the very beginning of their existence. Unsurprisingly, we
are about to talk about another sweeper, and one that
(12:27):
has a name that you'll probably recognize. But before we
get to that and how it was innovative, we will
take a quick sponsor break. The other popular sweeper of
eight seventy six came from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and it
was patented by Melville R. Bistle. Bissell and his wife
(12:51):
Anna were in the crockery business when they started tweaking
the design of a sweeper that they used in the
shop to make it more effective at managing the dust,
and soon they were manufacturing their own sweepers. The Bustles
sweeper moved the reduction gears that moved the brush to
the center of the brush so it was away from
the ends where the cogs were on other sweepers, and
(13:13):
that meant this Bustle sweeper could get right up to
the baseboards and sweep up as much debris as possible.
They upgraded that center positioned gear drive to a belt
friction drive and they named that the Bustles center bearing sweeper,
and the Bustles had Hustle like. They sold their sweeper
from their wagon. They would take it out in the
(13:34):
streets and they would be on either side of it
kind of talking to potential customers, and they would demonstrate
its effectiveness by using dirt that they picked up from
the road to toss onto a rug that they traveled
with in the wagon, and then they would show how
effective their design was it managing that dirt, and this worked.
People were convinced, so the Bustles quickly built up not
(13:55):
only direct to consumer sales but also shipping contracts with retailers,
and they had to pretty rapidly expand their manufacturing facilities
just to keep up with demand. They also started building
luxury models made with beautiful wood finishes and marketing them
as holiday gifts like Tracy reference right before the break
it was like, this is a beautiful gift to give
(14:16):
your wife. No thank you. Uh. Thirteen years into the
life of the Bistles carpet Sweeper company, Melville died of pneumonia,
and at that point Anna became one of the first
women executives in the US because she took control of
the company. She grew the company substantially, and she rolled
out one of the first employee health benefit packages in
(14:37):
the country. And even Queen Victoria approved of Bustles sweepers
being used in her residence. That's a pretty big endorsement
and it was a huge boon to expanding their international sales.
In A gasoline powered carpet sweeper device was invented by
John S. Thurman of St. Louis, Missouri. His patent for
(14:58):
it includes the inventor's own and endorsement of its efficacy quote,
I have found, by observation of a machine with which
I have conducted experiments that the renovator relieves and collects
nearly all, if not all, the dust and dirt from
the carpet over which it has traveled. So this still
did not have vacuum power the way we would think
(15:18):
of it today, but it did use what Theurman referred
to as an air blast to do the work. This
was a shot of highly compressed air that both served
as a force to beat the dust out of the
surface and as a blowing mechanism to send the resulting
uplifted dirt and dust into a waiting container. And his
patent paperwork for the Pneumatic Carpet Renovator, Thurman described it
(15:39):
this way quote The invention may be said to consist, briefly,
and a pneumatic dust extractor designed to be placed over
or in close proximity to the carpet, whereby an air
blast is projected into and through the carpet, forcing the
dust out and into the collector where it's accumulated is
(16:00):
subsequently removed. But while Thurman's invention was pretty effective, it
also was not something that the average person could purchase,
and it wasn't really intended for that. It was intended
to be a service vehicle. And we say vehicle because
it was the size of a carriage and you absolutely
had to have a horse to pull it. And for
four dollars you could have Thurman's Pneumatic carpet Renovator visit
(16:22):
your home to give it a deep clean. Yeah. Also
on my list of no thank you is like anything
with an internal combustion engine to be used in my
house powered by gasoline. Well it's outside, but the and
then the hoses ran in. Yes, um. But the description
of it as as gas powered it first made me
(16:43):
be like, sounds terrifying. It does. So this is where
we get to Hubert cecil Booth. Booth saw all the
efforts to improve on Thurman's pneumatic cleaner, but also felt
like they were missing something and he believed correctly that
suck shin was the key element that every effort was missing.
(17:04):
Bellows had been used on some versions of sweepers over
the years. We talked about a couple earlier and that
that sort of pulled in the dirt a little bit,
but that was not a very effective method. So a
brief and very oversimplified explainer on suction. It is all
about air pressure. So usually this is explained when most
people are saying here's how this works. Uh, it's in
(17:27):
terms of drinking through a straw. Right when you suck
on a straw, you're creating a pressure differential between the
top of the straw and the bottom, and your beverage
travels from the area of higher pressure at the bottom
to the area of lower pressure at the top. In
a vacuum cleaner, it's the same basic idea. Air in
a chamber is blown out of the chamber by a
fan upward, creating a drop in pressure that creates suction
(17:51):
at the air inlet. So if a machine has such
a chamber and a fan blowing air out quickly, as
you run that inlet hole over a surface with particle
is on it, those particles are sucked up into the chamber,
and a filter keeps those particles from flying out the
exhaust hole. And we should note that there is not
actually a vacuum and a vacuum cleaner, if you want
(18:12):
to be really scientifically um specific about it. This isn't
an absence of air which would define a vacuum. But
Booth claimed to have coined the term vacuum cleaner when
he was working on his problem. Other people have said
he was not the one, but regardless of whether it
was him or someone else who first called it a
vacuum cleaner, that is the name that stuck. According to Booth,
(18:35):
he once had a conversation with an inventor of a
motor driven cleaning rig at an expo at London's Empire
Music Hall, and he said quote the machine consisted of
a box about a foot square, having a bag on
top to which compressed air at ninety pounds pressure was supplot.
The air was blown down in the carpet from two
(18:55):
opposite directions, as inventor trusted to the reflection for the
surface underneath the carpet to drive the dust and air
into the box. Booth didn't see how this would really
clean properly, since he suspected that a lot of the
dust would get blown out to the sides as those
two streams of compressed air met, and he asked the
(19:16):
inventor if the man had tried to find a way
to suck out dust rather than beat it out of
the fabric with air blasts. And apparently this query was
met with some bristle, Although we only have booth side
of the story, but according to his account quote, he
became heated remarking that sucking out dust was impossible, as
it had been tried over and over without success. He
then walked away. That quote and the one describing the
(19:39):
mechanism are from an article that Booth wrote in the
nineteen thirties, and he doesn't name John Thurman specifically in
that writing, but based on records, it appears that that
was who he was speaking with and who he consequently irritated.
Booth out a background and engineering, and it was a
pretty impressive one. At the time, he was working for
the firm Modsley, Sons and Field, which designed things like
(20:01):
ferris wheels and suspension bridges all over Europe. So Booth
put his engineering know how to work and he set
out to tackle this suction problem himself. Okay, uh, this
is gross. So just know if you are really picked out,
which specifically having lived through the last year and a half,
this might really really horrify you. Just know, maybe hop
(20:24):
ahead a little bit. Uh. In that same article from
Booth described a really unhygienic thing that he did to
test whether suction worked and how much suction was really
going to achieve cleanliness in the way that he thought
it could. So he wrote quote I thought over the
matter for a few days and tried to experiment by
(20:46):
sucking with my mouth against the back of a plush
seat in a restaurant in Victoria Street, with the result
that I was almost choked. I came to the conclusion
that I could construct a machine to work by suction. This,
to me, is so contrary to all of his smartness
in engineering. I'm like, wait, you just put your mouth
on public stuff. Yeah. I'm also like, did you not
(21:09):
have a plush surface in your own house? So at
least it would be your own dirt at that point. Anyway,
the result of his efforts was a contraption he dubbed
Puffing Billy, for which he received a patent in August
of nineteen o one. It was large, like Thurman's machine,
and it was pulled by horses. This trolley vacuum was
(21:31):
a bright red box that looked almost like a shed
on wheels, and the first iteration of puffing Billy had
a piston suction pump, but he later switched that to
a turbine fan, and Puffing Billy, which had been named
after a locomotive, apparently, quickly became a popular site around London.
It was colorful, and it was large, and for Booth
it was quite lucrative. Like Thurmon, he charged a fee
(21:54):
to visit customers homes and he had a team of
operators employed by his company, Boost British vacuum cleaner company,
and those operators would arrive on site, they would run
hoses into the windows for the customer, and then they
would start up the gasoline motor on the cart and
air was drawn through the hoses and filtered as it
reached that red cart. There was also a showmanship aspect
(22:16):
to all of this work, because the dirt that accumulated
was held in a glass walled receptacle that both the
client and passers by could see to know how effective
the process was. A little bit of advertising while you're
doing your job. This was a huge success, but Booth
was dogged by legal problems early on. Other inventors claimed
(22:36):
that Booth had taken their idea and he was able
to prove he had not, And some people also lodged
formal complaints about the trolleys themselves, saying that they were
a nuisance that clogged streets and scared the horses. I
mean it seems like it could, yeah, for sure. Uh
you know it's It was not a small contraption by anything,
(22:57):
like I said, a shed on wheels. But Boo was
able to weather those early problems and soon his customer
base actually included some very prestigious contracts. He was asked
to clean Westminster Abbey in nineteen o two in preparation
for the coronation of King Edward the seventh, and after
that he kind of became a favorite of the royal family.
Edward and his wife, Queen Alexandra actually purchased two puffing
(23:19):
billies for the two major homes of the royals, Windsor
Castle and Buckingham Palace. Hubert Booth was also able to
file a U S patents, and his brother Stone Booth
ran a second office of their business in Boston, Massachusetts.
During World War One, multiple puffing billies were used to
clean the Crystal Palace. We have talked about Paxton's Crystal
(23:40):
Palace on the show before. It was an immense structure
and during the war that fame structure was used as
a training facility for the Royal Navy, and when there
was a spotted fever outbreak, Booth and his billies were
called in and they cleaned a reported twenty six tons
of dust and debris from the building in a rafters
down full suite. Even though Booth had cracked the problem
(24:02):
of section this machine was enormous. There were buildings outfitted
with their own setups based on Booth's design in the
early twentieth century to create central vacuum systems, but those buildings,
whether they were homes or hotels, needed to have a
spare room that they could dedicate to housing the main
gasoline powered engine. And again this means there's a gas
(24:25):
powered engine inside your home, which is not great for
various reasons. Obviously, it was not something the average family
could really manage, even if they did have the money
for such a thing. In an advertising poster from about
nineteen o six, the British vacuum cleaner company was obviously
appealing to very wealthy clientele with an image of a
(24:45):
woman in a maid's uniform hugging and anthropomorphized vacuum sweeper
and with the caption friends. Ultimately, though puffing Billy was
outpaced by much smaller models. Your maids will love it
very clear message. As electricity became more ubiquitous in the
(25:06):
early twentieth century, electric vacuums were developed no longer gas powered,
thank goodness. And this is a period when a lot
of names that we associate with vacuum cleaners still today
started manufacturing vacuum cleaners, such as Electrolux and Kirby. Eventually,
of course, the vacuum cleaner became compact enough that it
could be put into a form that you could push
(25:27):
along the floor while standing upright, the way most folks
use them today. And we will tell you how we
got to that after we hear from some sponsors that
keep stuff you miss in history class going. In nineteen
o seven, the idea of a personal vacuum cleaning device
(25:50):
took a huge step forward. That was thanks to a
man who had both asthma and a job that involved
heavy duty cleaning, which is obviously not a great combination.
That man was James Murray Spangler. Spangler was sixty and
was working as a night janitor in a Canton, Ohio
department store. He got the idea to start tinkering around
(26:10):
with existing technologies for vacuum cleaners. He's famously said to
have combined a setine pillowcase, a broom, and an electric motor.
The way this story is often relayed. It kind of
sounds like he was just a random guy he was
trying to solve a personal problem. But really Spangler was
an inventor. He had invented a velocipede wagon, a hay tedder,
(26:33):
and a rake, as well as a grain harvester, and
he took the cleaning job to make ends meet and
put together the funds so that he could just keep
inventing things. He was supporting his invention habit with this
cleaning job. Yeah, and he was initially actually modifying abistle
carpet sweeper. He only attached a motor to it initially,
(26:54):
which made the work go faster, but he still had
problems with his asthma from the dust that it kicked up,
and after that he decided he needed a receptacle for
the dust. So then he built a machine from scratch
using a wooden soapbox, a motor from an electric fan,
and a section of broom handle that he had cut
down to size and made into a circular brush by
stapling goat hair onto it. And he used the aforementioned
(27:17):
pillowcase as the dust bag and attached a broom handle
to push it around. And proof of concept was established
at this point, so he soon made a second version
that had a metal drum instead of a wooden box,
and he refined the movement of the brush. Spangler's device
sucked up dirt and then it blew it into the
attached pillow case. And just in case you're wondering, satine
(27:37):
is a very tightly woven fabric, so it would have
pretty effectively contained most of the particles while also allowing
the air to slowly pass through it. This worked really well,
and it was compact enough and upright so that a
single person could manage it. You didn't need a whole
crew of people to come with a cart outside your house.
(28:00):
Now I'm kind of like, I don't know that sounds
fun too. You still can do that in some ways. Uh. Spangler,
buoyed by how well his project had turned out, applied
for a patent in the autumn of nine seven, and
then once he had that patent in hand, he quit
his janitor job and he opened his own company, Electric
Suction Sweeper. But while Spangler was clever and inventing things,
(28:21):
he did not have a head for business. He had
investors and ordered motors and set up a production space,
but he spent a lot more than his investors had committed,
so he took out a loan and then he used
his house as collateral. Yeah, these are basically like any
rules of business. He was like doing the opposite of
(28:41):
This was obviously not the wisest move, and Spangler was
soon in a position where he was not only going
to lose his business, he was going to lose his house.
But the day of sex Makina in this story came
in the form of his cousin who had one of
his early vacuum cleaners and loved it, and whose last
name you will recognize in relation to vacuum clean That
cousin was Susan Hoover. William Hoover was Susan's husband, and
(29:05):
when his story meets up with Spanglers, the Hoover company
was focused on leather goods, specifically horse accessories. It was
not exactly a booming business as automobiles were coming into
the picture, but William Hoover, unlike his wife's relative, did
actually have a head for business, so he bailed Spangler
out by purchasing the patent from him, and then Hoover
(29:27):
took a very methodical approach to developing a business model
around this invention, He and his son's reorganized Spangler's company
and assumed both its assets and its debts, and Spangler
remained with the company as a salaried employee, and he
also got royalties from sales, with Hoover helming a more
structured rollout. Under this new setup, the vacuum cleaner went
(29:50):
to market with an army of door to door salesman
ready to demonstrate the machines cleaning power and ease of use.
The Hoover Model OH went to market at a price
of sixty dollars. Attachment accessories were an extra package. An
ad was placed in the Saturday Evening Post offering free
(30:10):
and home demonstrations, and requests for home trials quickly outpaced
their production numbers. The Hoover Vacuum division stepped up to
the challenge. Engineers were hired to improve and refine the
design for better function, and after having to throttle their
advertising and pull it back a little bit to catch
up to interest, ads came back touting the long life
(30:32):
of the motors that they had developed and reminding consumers
that quote dust is full of disease. From there, the
home consumer market for vacuum cleaners was established, and soon
manufacturers were springing up everywhere, either attempting to patent their
own models or licensing the rights to manufacture other people
and companies designs. Here's perhaps the most surprising part of
(30:54):
the vacuum cleaner's life SPAM as a home use product,
it has not really changed very much in century. Uh.
They still all work and basically the same section principle.
But there have of course been some innovations, and we'll
talk about those, and one of the biggest was the
introduction of a vacuum that you could pick up in
one hand to deal with small messes. In seventy five,
(31:16):
Black and Decker applied for a patent for a cordless vacuum,
and this was a development that was many years in
the making. While Black and Decker had a reputation as
an innovator in the nineties and fifties, over time their
mass market appeal had led to a perception that they
were making things that were kind of like a budget
brand for the home user, only they got fewer and
(31:38):
fewer high end contracts. This then impacted their products for
the home market, though, because the innovation from those professional
contracts was driving the technology that would eventually end up
in consumer products. Yeah, that's still in most fields today.
Like how a lot of it works. It's kind of
like how people are like, why do we need oat couture,
(31:59):
and it's like those are developing designs that you'll see
on on racks in your local store in a couple
of years. Similarly, electronics and technology things are often developing
high end contracts for things that they will figure out
how to make at a more cost effective level for
a home consumer. And that's exactly what happened here because
in the early nineteen sixties, Black and Decker gained a
(32:22):
contract with NASA to develop cordless no torque tools that
would be safe for astronauts to use on missions. You
have probably seen photos from the Apollo fifteen mission of
David Scott drilling on the lunar surface, and that tool
that he's using was a drill specifically designed for the
mission by Black and Decker. A tool was also used
on the Apollo sixteen and Apollo seventeen missions. Through the
(32:45):
company's work with NASA, Black and Decker was able to
do enough research and development to start designing cordless products
for the consumer market that led to the company's cordless
vacuum patent. After the dust Buster was launched in nineteen eight,
and in a home appliance market that was being flooded
with competition, that handheld vacuum for dry messes just clicked
(33:08):
with consumers that outperformed all the projected sales numbers. We
had one at my house growing up. Because it did
so well, another pattern was quickly filed to protect the
product's design form. Now, of course, there are vacuums that
are much smaller for all kinds of specialized tasks like
cleaning keyboards and sewing machines. At the time, this was
(33:30):
pretty revolutionary. Oh. I remember literally this being like discussed
in my school and people being like, my mom is
getting a Dustbuster and it being this huge thing. Uh.
It was. It was the the acid washed genes of
the cleaning world at the time. In famously, James Dyson
(33:54):
introduced a bagless vacuum cleaner, one that pivoted on a
ball rather than having two small wheels on the back end.
He had already used the ball as pivot concept on
another invention, which he called the ball barrow. Yes, that
is a wheelbarrow with a ball where the wheel would
normally go, and it was while solving a problem with
the painting of his ball barrows that he got the
idea for the cyclonic separation that would be central to
(34:16):
the design of his new vacuum cleaner. The air filter
in his factory was getting clogged with powder particulate from
the finishing spray that was used on the ball barrows,
so he used a cyclone tower to separate out the
powder particles from the air and prevent that build up
on the filters. Cyclotic separation works like this. The air
is pumped through the top of a cylinder. It's conical
(34:39):
at the base, and as the air, which is moving
really quickly rotates through the cylinder, the particles in the
air are flung out to the outer wall of the
cylinder because they're heavier than the air is. As a consequence,
the air down at the base of the cylinder has
less particulate in it, so in a vacuum cleaner, when
it passes up through a central tube to the exhaust,
(35:01):
it can be filtered. That leaves less debris build up
on the filter than if you had just sucked up
the dust and dirt through a typical vacuum cleaner. The
build up around the sides of the cylinder can then
just be dumped into the trash. Yeah, this was huge
at the time. When James Dyson developed his vacuum cleaner
based on this idea, he actually had a really hard
(35:21):
time getting it to market. That gets into a whole
discussion of like why people did not want to adopt this,
that we're already making vacuum cleaners. The prevailing discussion being
around how that selling of vacuum bags was his own
whole moneymaker and nobody wanted to sidestep that. Uh. He
had patented it in ninety nine, but it actually took
(35:43):
more than a decade to get it perfected, and even
then no one in the industry was interested. Eventually he
had to introduce his g Force model through the Japanese market.
At that point it was a whopping eighteen hundred dollars.
But from that bumpy start, the Dyson vacuum cleaner line
has can tinued and flourished still without bags to present day,
with a range of models available. They're still kind of
(36:05):
expensive for a lot of folks. So the low end
is around three fifty dollars depending on where you shop,
but certainly far less than that initial price tag. I'm
just gonna say, credit card reward points is how I
bought myself. In two thousand two, the Roomba debut, and
that ushered in an era of vacuums that will bounce
(36:26):
around at home doing the little maintenance cleaning without a
lot of human involvement. The first room bo was a
thirteen point four inch diameter disc that was three and
a half inches high. Others almost immediately were on the
market by the end of two thousand three, and estimated
five hundred thousand robotic vacuum cleaners were sold worldwide. And
(36:47):
in the Friday episode, Holly is going to talk about
how their room but died in Neto Robotics created a
robotic vacuum cleaner that uses light our technology to scan
a room and then map out the most deficient pattern
for cleaning. And who knows what comes next, something else
very magical that we'll talk to you, We don't know.
(37:09):
This made me shockingly eager to vacuum because now I'm like, oh,
now I understand how this works, which is a miracle
in and of itself. Yeah, I it is really interesting
to me. I had not. I mean, it's obvious in
some ways, but I hadn't really thought about how much. Um,
you know, that availability of textiles really drove this, like
(37:30):
we gotta figure out to clean it's better. There was
one book that I read that said carpets are either
the hero of the story or the villain, depending on
your point of view. Because that's what made everybody suddenly
be like, how do we clean these? Yeah? I don't
want to pick it up and take it outside every time.
It just needs a little maintenance. Uh. And now almost never.
(37:51):
My first apartment was all hardwood floors and had I think,
like one small area rug next to the bed so
that when I got out of the bed at my
feet did not hit cold wooden floor. And I did
not have a vacuum of any sort the whole time
I was living there. I think I had like one
tiny handheld thing that I used for that little little
(38:12):
area rug. It was your inherited dustbuster. Probably it was not.
It was I got it for Christmas. I think it
had a cord, uh, and it had a little it
had a revolving brush that it was a little more
involved than a dustbuster was. And now there are rugs
that you could just throw in the wash and side
step needing to vacuum clean them. Have one of those
(38:33):
two us too, um, which is a whole other thing
that I can also talk about on the On Friday show.
Because I don't like carpeting in rugs, um. But I
do like this listener mail because it's about cooking. Uh.
This is from our listener Greg who writes, Hi, Tracy
and Holley. I enjoyed listening to your recent discussion of
(38:54):
ancient cookbooks. It reminded me of learning how to cook
from my grandmother. Seems there are things that transcend the
centuries when it comes to lack of detail in the instructions.
Before going off to college many years ago, I sat
down with my grandmother to document some old family recipes.
She is from the Old Country, having been born in Greece.
One of these recipes was for petstizzo, a Greek dish
(39:16):
similar to lasagna, which by the way, delicious. Among the
ingredients was a quart of milk, with her instructions to
take a quart of milk and pour it over the mixture,
followed by the baking. Making the dish for the first time,
it was a disaster. The taste was roughly correct, but
the consistency was more like a noodle soup. My roommates
were not impressed. It turns out quart of milk was
(39:38):
just a description of the container and was not intended
to convey any sort of measure of how much to
actually use. So grab the carton of milk and pour
in just enough to saturate the mixture is what she
actually intended. That corrected. The next attempt came out much better.
Future recipes were documented by me watching her actually making
the dish, stopping her as needed to measure what she
(40:00):
actually used. Keep up the great work, Greg, Boy, do
I know this story and grandmother's And it's funny because
I um I mentioned before, like my mom was not
into me being in the kitchen or any of us
kids because that was like her domain. But like you know,
in talking to her or my grandmother, there were never
any measures discussed. It was like, oh, you want to
(40:22):
put in some cheese there, and you'll do a little
bit of this, and it frustrated me to no end.
I'm like, we need accuracy and numbers or I'm never
going to figure this out. And now I do the
same horrible thing when people asked me how to make stuff,
I'm like, I don't know. I just I threw in
a little bit. I don't know it came out okay. Um,
I'm just trying to be better about it. Um. But
(40:46):
that's sometimes the fun, as you figured out. Also, you know,
sometimes those accidents can lead you to realizations that help
you develop new dishes. So it's all in good fun. Plus,
as I always say, which I learned from my father
in law. When he retired, he started cooking a lot,
and he said, sometimes I mess up, but I can
always eat the evidence, which is a great approach to
cooking unless it's abysmal. If you would like to share
(41:09):
your cook ae, disasters or triumphs with us, you can
do that by writing us at History podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as Missed in History And if you would like
to subscribe to the podcast and just haven't gotten to
that yet, it's super easy. You can do that on
the iHeart Radio app for pretty much anywhere else you
listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(41:34):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio, app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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