He applied for a patent and, after raising money from early investors (including the department store owners), he quit his janitorial job to open the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. The suction sweeper worked well on Zollinger’s vast carpets and Spangler’s asthma improved. Spangler’s initial prototype, which used an electronic motor to power a fan and rotating brush inside a soapbox, sucked up dirt and dust and deposited it in an attached dust bag (the pillowcase). “Spangler’s invention was special,” Gantz tells OZY, “because it was powered by electricity, and because it was smaller, lighter (due to a smaller motor) and easier to operate than its competitors.”įortunately, Spangler’s small but very satisfied set of early adopters included Mrs. Thereafter the race to develop a smaller, more versatile vacuum cleaner was afoot, but, as Carroll Gantz, a former head of industrial design at Hoover, chronicles in The Vacuum Cleaner: A History, no one before Murray Spangler had succeeded in creating an effective portable vacuum cleaner that could be used in non-industrial settings. By the turn of the century, Booth’s industrial “vacuum cleaner,” a bulky, gas-powered machine that required horses to transport it, would suck up the dust at establishments across London, including Buckingham Palace and the Crystal Palace. The film of dust that collected on the other side of the cloth affirmed Booth’s intuition that sucking, not blowing, was the way forward. Most of these early “carpet sweepers” dislodged dust by using compressed air to blow it off surfaces and into a receptacle - that is, until an English engineer named Hubert Cecil Booth put his mouth to an old handkerchief over a London couch and … inhaled. For centuries, the broom had been the domestic cleaning implement of choice, but in the late 19th century, a series of inventors started circling around a device to replace the tiring, time-consuming tool.
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