History of the vacuum cleaner 101
After the introduction of carpets into homes and businesses, the next logical step was something to help us keep them clean. This “something” was the vacuum cleaner. It may surprise many to learn that the vacuum cleaner was first produced in the mid-19th century. In fact, the original vacuum cleaner was invented before the American Civil War. In 1860, the US patent office granted a patent to a man named Daniel Hess for his “carpet sweeper.” This was the first device of its kind to use suction to clean carpets. While this was a welcome alternative to the burden of manually sweeping carpets to clean them, it was in fact a very crude design that would need a lot of improvement to become practical.
In the years that followed, there were a few other designs, but the first real success story comes some 20 years later. It was then that Melville Bissell invented his push version of the vacuum cleaner for his wife. The Bissell name remains strong to this day. Melville’s device was so popular that he started Bissell as a company and then his wife ran it and she became one of the most successful business women of her day. Bissell’s design was an improvement and it was successful, but it still wasn’t exactly what you’d think compared to what we use in our homes today. But it was pretty impressive for the 1870s.
Over the next several years there were several attempts to make a better vacuum cleaning device, but it was James Spangler in 1907 who finally invented a device that resembles the models we use in our homes today. It was portable, used suction, had a bag for dust and debris that was vacuumed up (made out of a pillowcase), and had a rotating brush to help loosen and lift dirt from the carpet.
Unfortunately for James, he was a janitor by trade and not a businessman. He did not have the resources to continue with his invention and decided to sell it to his cousin Hoover, who became very rich thanks to the invention. Hoover remains strong in the vacuum cleaning business and remains one of the most recognizable names in vacuuming to this day. We can also thank James for helping to invent the disposable bags we use today, as well as the upright model of vacuum cleaner.
Today there are so many different designs and so much technology involved that vacuum cleaners have literally become modern marvels. There are even models that use robotics to clean your carpets and models that float over your carpet and clean. We take a lot of things for granted these days, as they’ve been around for as long as we’ve lived, but it’s always interesting to learn a little about the origins of some of the things we use every day. And if you have carpet, a vacuum cleaner is one of those things.