October 3 - First Motor Powered Vacuum Cleaner

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On this day, in 1899, John S Thurman received United States Patent #634,042 for his pneumatic carpet renovator, the world’s first motor powered vacuum cleaner. Brooms have been used to clean household floors for centuries. On bare wooden or stone floors, they do a pretty good job removing dust and debris, all dependent on how much elbow grease the user cares to put into their work. As small area rugs came into use in homes, they added another layer of housework. Rugs tend to trap dirt within their fibers making brooms inadequate for cleaning them. Furniture had to be moved, rugs taken outside to be beaten, bare floors swept clean and the whole room put back together again. Cleaning floors became a time consuming process that, understandably, didn’t get done as often in spite of the fact that leaving all that dirt and grime untouched for months began to affect the health of the people who had to live in it. The problem got worse as rugs got bigger and turned into carpets, sometimes covering most of a room’s floor space with a single piece. Removing carpets for cleaning became a task too unwieldy to undertake even once a year much less as often as it was necessary to actually be considered clean. What was a woman to do? And yes, in the mid-1800s, you could bet that this was not a problem that most men spent any time thinking about. Although there were apparently a few who saw the potential of an untapped market.

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In 1860, Daniel Hess of West Union, Iowa invented a contraption he dubbed a carpet sweeper. It had a rotating brush for sweeping dust into a receptacle and a bellows that created a little bit of suction to help pull dirt out of the carpet and into the brush. Unfortunately, it was also a fairly large machine, still requiring the movement of furniture, and it needed a certain amount of heft to push it around and make it work. It did not spark joy in the hearts of homemakers. Nine years later, Ives W. McGaffey of Chicago, Illinois began marketing a carpet sweeper that involved a belt driven system powered by a hand crank. It was also large, unwieldy and, because someone had to be constantly cranking the thing, difficult to use. Ives did actually sell a number of his “Whirlwind” machines though, enough to convince Melville R. Bissell of Grand Rapids, Michigan to get into the game with a similar model (you might recognize that the name Bissell is still a player in the industry today).

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That’s pretty much how things stood for three more decades, although several small improvements did come along during those years. The size of carpet sweepers shrunk a bit. A French inventor came up with a two bellow system that improved suction but then required two people to operate the thing (improved cleaning at twice the man hours just isn’t a great marketing campaign). It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that someone finally married an autonomous engine with carpet cleaning technology. It just wasn’t in a way that would be familiar to any of us today.

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The first difference we would notice in John Thurman’s invention is the kind of motor he used. Granted, it was the only kind available to him when he began tinkering in 1898, but using an internal combustion engine on a product that would be used primarily indoors might be considered a recipe for disaster. Good thing John’s carpet renovator was much too big to fit through the door of any turn of the century homes. His large, gas powered contraption ironically sat on a horse drawn wagon and was shuttled from customer to customer the old fashioned way. Once he arrived at a house and had collected his cleaning fee (which was $4 in 1904 or about $115 today), modern vacuum users would notice the second major difference between what we use and John’s machine. Instead of sucking dust up into a canister, the carpet renovator blew air out of its hose, theoretically pushing dust into a receptacle. Essentially it was a giant leaf blower that instead of putting all your fall debris in your neighbor’s yard, it created clouds of dust throughout your house, all while making a terrific racket out in the street. Apparently the carpet renovator worked well enough that John got several years of business out of it, but his invention was doomed to be a mostly forgotten footnote in the history of domestic housework.

In 1901, a British engineer, Hubert Cecil Booth designed a cleaner similar to John’s in that it had an internal combustion engine and was housed on a horse drawn carriage, but he reversed the air flow and sucked dust into his machine. Hubert is also credited with coining the term vacuum cleaner. An American then developed a steam powered vacuum that could be installed in a building and have hoses reaching every room (it had to be stationary as it was huge and weighed over 4,000 pounds; that sort of bulk couldn’t be pulled around by anything short of a locomotive). The Brits returned with the next innovation in 1905 when Walter Griffiths came up with a cleaner closer to something we would recognize: it was portable, storable and could be easily used by one person. It even came with a flexible hose and a variety of nozzle attachments. With the invention of electric motors, many of the names consumers recognize today soon got into the cleaning game with designs of their own, including Kirby, Hoover and Electrolux.

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Vacuum cleaners remained a status symbol of rich households until after World War II. As the American middle class exploded, vacuums became a must have accessory and the vast majority of homes have one today. They come in all kinds of shapes, colors and price points but still only work as well and as often as the person using it. And even though John’s first motor powered vacuum has long since disappeared from the world’s consciousness, you can still get people to come to your house, hook a cleaning system up to the internal combustion engine on their van and do your carpets for you. Although with prices starting at $45 a room, it’s going to cost you a bit more than John’s fee of $4 per house (and you’re still going to have to put up with a racket outside).

Also on this day, in Disney history: The Mickey Mouse Club