There has been a lot of debate about who invented vacuum cleaning. It will be easy to understand what people had in their homes and what did they use for cleaning in 19th century. In 1800s people used carpets and rugs on the floor to keep the dust away and prevent from getting inside the homes. The only way to rub off the dust was to hang the rug and whack it with a stick. This led to invention of rug beater which resembled a tennis racket.
One of the first known devices came in 1869 when Ives McGaffey came up with innovative solution to solve a problem of cleaning the carpet, taking out and beating the carpet was not always an innovative solution. He came up with an innovative solution which would clean the rug much more easier. He came up with rug cleaner and carpet sweeper which had rotating brush it a bellows system and provided suction. This was one of the first prototype of vacuum cleaner.Over the years not much have changed the way vacuum cleaners have operated or functioned.
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Hubert Cecil Booth, a British engineer received a British patent on August of 1901 which was bizzare in the form of a large, horse-drawn, petrol-driven unit which was parked outside the building to be cleaned with long hoses being fed through the windows. He demonstrated that in front of restaurant owners who more or less dissapointed with this approach.
John Thurman was the first person to invent motorized vacuum cleaner in 1899, which was just a few years before Hubert Booth of London came up with the first electric vacuum cleaner. Unfortunately, the first vacuum cleaner was so big that it was stored on the back of a trailer outside the house and a very long wire was run inside to do the cleaning. Melvin Bissell, who later became famous with the vacuum cleaning world also came up with a carpet cleaner that picked up dirt and deposited it in a pan behind the sweeper head
More and more inventors came up with new prototypes claiming to be the ultimate cleaning machine, the one which could be used in home without much fuss and be portable. In 1907 James Spangler who was a janitor in the Ohio store invented an electric vacuum cleaner which he later improved to include attachments such as cloth filter bag and attachments. He later came up with the first portable suction cleaner which proved to be extremely popular and bizarrely he sold the patent to William Hoover, the last name which is synonymous in a vacuum cleaning world. Nearly hundred years later, the vacuum cleaners are still clunky and noisy piece of hardware. They have been next-generation vacuum cleaners like Dyson and Roomba which were created by MIT scientists. These machines are starting to give us some idea about the future generations of vacuum cleaning. The future generation vacuum cleaners would be ideally automatic so that the room can be cleaned without supervision.
Vacuum cleaning may have come long way since it's first prototype but the basic design still remains in vacuum cleaners in millions of homes around the world thus leaving a great legacy of noisy clunky and efficient dust gathering machines behind.
History of Vacuum Cleaners ROOMBA
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