In early 1901, English inventor Hubert Cecil Booth traveled to Empire Music Hall in London to witness a strange invention — a mechanical aspirator designed to blow pressurized air to clean rail cars. Booth later asked the demonstrator why the machine (invented by an American in St. Louis) didn't simply suck up the dust rather than blow it around. "He became heated," Booth later wrote, "remarking that sucking out dust was impossible." Unconvinced, Booth set about creating such a contraption, and later that same year he filed a patent for a vacuum machine he named the "Puffing Billy."
This machine wasn't quite as fancy as modern Dust Busters, Dirt Devils, Hoovers, or Dysons. Instead, the Puffing Billy was red, gasoline-powered, extremely loud, and big — really big. So big, in fact, that the machine needed to be pulled by horses when Booth's British Vacuum Cleaner Company made house calls. Once outside a residence, 82-foot-long hoses snaked from the machine through open windows. Because turn-of-the-century carpet cleaning wasn't cheap, Booth's customers were often members of British high society; one of his first jobs was to clean Westminster Abbey's carpet ahead of Edward VII's coronation in 1902. By 1906, Booth had created a more portable version of the Puffing Billy, and two years later, the Electric Suction Sweeper Company (later renamed Hoover) released the "Model O," the first commercially successful vacuum in the United States. House cleaning has sucked ever since.
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home