History of the Vacuum Cleaner

It's no surprise if you've never heard of Ives McGaffey, who lived in Chicago in 1869 and like to tinker in his basement -- but there ought to be a holiday named after him. Why, you might ask? Because he was the genius who invented the first carpet sweeping machine. It was a wood and canvas device that was hand-operated, but it sucked up dirt like nobody's business. Still sounds like a lot of work, right? Consider the alternative -- hauling your carpets outside once a month or so, hanging them on the wash-line, and beating the heck out of them with a tool that looked like an oversized eggbeater. Sure, it was a great way of acting out all your frustrations, but it was dusty work and rarely got the carpet entirely clean. McGaffey's rug cleaner was a step in the right direction, but it would be a long time before the robotic Roomba floor vac -- the veritable pinnacle of modern floor-cleaning technology -- would make its debut.

Door-to-door, floor to floor

John Thurman invented the first motorized vacuum sweeper in 1899. It ran on gasoline, and Thurman operated a door-to-door service in St. Louis whereby he took the horse-drawn vacuum cleaner to the customer's house, fed hoses in through the windows and doors, and conducted a thorough cleaning for just $4.00. Interestingly, a Brit was doing the same by 1901. In 1907, a janitor named James Spangler got tired of the cough his hand-operated carpet sweeper gave him, so he cobbled together an electric sweeper from a fan motor, broomstick, soapbox, and pillow case -- and voila, the first modern proto-vac. After making improvements and forming his own company, Spangler went to work for his cousin's husband, whose name was William Hoover, and they set about making more improvements. It wasn't long before a Hoover vacuum cleaner, or one of its competitors, was in almost every house in America.

Enter... Roomba

In 2002, an upstart robotics company that had heretofore been quietly building military robots, one iRobot by name, decided it was high time that the world enjoyed some of those housecleaning robots the futurists had been promising us for the past 50 years. Their offering was the Roomba, a quiet, flattened disk-shaped intelligent robot that did nothing but vacuum, and did that very well. Roomba turned out to be the first practical household robot, and it wasn't long before consumer reports on Roomba, on the Internet and elsewhere, were singing its praises. Roomba does everything that an upright or traditional floor vacuum can do, just as powerfully, and does it more cheaply than some: the base model retails for about $150. It even performs better than most vacs, because it can fit into almost any space, goes under furniture with ease, avoids obstacles and drop-offs like a champ, has no problem cleaning along the edges of walls and on just about any surface, and -- incredibly -- it does everything all by itself. It even plugs itself back in when it's done. If you're not convinced the Roomba's the best thing since McGaffey, don't take our word for it: check out a Roomba review or two.

Published with permission (FCDMInc)