Snorting Billy sucked the business out of the dust. A cyclone of special significance There is no limit to perfection or how the vacuum cleaner was improved
Modern household units bear a very distant resemblance to that first specimen, which received the name “Puffing Billy.” The date of birth of one of the most popular household appliances in the modern world is known precisely: August 30, 1901. On this day, a native of the English county of Gloucestershire, Herbert Cecil Booth, received a patent for the first vacuum cleaner in history. Recently, an exhibition in the British capital was dedicated to this event.
Fans of the vacuum cleaner were preparing for the event for good reason and managed to amaze even seasoned Britons. The Dyson company presented to its compatriots the latest fruit of scientific and technical thought - a robot vacuum cleaner. It is equipped with 70 sensors, three on-board computers and weighs just over 90 kilograms. The device is capable of operating without human intervention, has good intelligence and moves without touching objects, people or pets. In addition, the miracle vacuum cleaner stores in its electronic memory the entire area to be cleaned and never passes through the same place twice. 350 people worked on its creation over the course of four years.
And now a little history. The owner of the patent for the invention of the world's first vacuum cleaner, as already mentioned, was the Englishman Herbert Cecil Booth. In those days, train cars were cleaned in a rather unique way - with the help of machines that created a strong stream of air. The dust stood in a column and partially settled in the old place. Booth decided to act on the contrary - not to blow out the dust, but to suck it in. The very first attempt to clearly demonstrate my idea almost ended in failure. Booth placed a clean handkerchief on the surface of the chair, put his mouth to the material and sucked in as much air as he could. And he almost choked. Having come to his senses, he discovered back side a ring-shaped layer of dust on the scarf. Thus, the era of cleaning rooms using dirt suction began.
The creator of the new unit became famous overnight. He was invited to demonstrations in the most different places. The most ambitious was the “operation” to clean up the Crystal Palace in London, built several decades earlier. 15 vacuum cleaners worked there for a whole month and collected a total of... 26 tons of dust. One of Booth's first commercial commissions was from Westminster Abbey in London, where cleaning was required before the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. The monarch was so pleased with the result that he ordered a vacuum cleaner to be purchased for himself and installed in Buckingham Palace.
The first apparatus, called Puffing Billy, was so bulky that it was transported from place to place in a horse-drawn cart. Only 4 people could cope with such a “monster”. A couple of years later, thanks to the efforts of the owners of the Chapman and Skinner company from San Francisco, the first electric vacuum cleaner was born. And a modest cleaner in an Ohio store, James Murray Spangler, had the idea to give it a vertical position and an external dust collector. Many people mistakenly believe that this prototype of a modern vacuum cleaner is the fruit of the genius of William Henry Hoover. After all, now in the West, vacuum cleaners are most often called not “vacuum cleaners”, but “hoovers”. Alas, the founder of a world-famous company only acquired a patent for the invention from Murray, who was his wife’s cousin. He did not have the money to put the business on a grand scale. And Hoover found both the means and the business sense to create an entire industrial empire and ensure America's absolute world dominance in the Puffing Billy market until the 1990s.
For almost the entire last century, Americans dominated the vacuum cleaner market. A turning point in the competition occurred in 1983, when the Englishman James Dyson introduced a bagless dual-action vacuum cleaner. To develop a model that copes equally well with dust and wet spots, he needed to build 5 thousand prototypes. It took 15 long years. But the result was stunning. In 1996, Dyson products took first place in the list of best-selling vacuum cleaners in the UK, and by May 2001, the British company pushed the Americans to second place in the world.
This was at the beginning of the 20th century. At the London Music Hall, for the amusement of the public, a newly invented machine was demonstrated that blew clouds of dust out of an old carpet. People in the front row started coughing, and one of the spectators went backstage during the break and advised them not to blow out the dust, but rather to suck it in.
How? - they were surprised there.
- And like this! - He knelt down and sucked in lungfuls of dust from the carpet.
This is how the model of a modern vacuum cleaner was reproduced for the first time, the inventor of which is rightfully considered to be music hall spectator Hubert Cecil Booth.
"Snorting Billy"
According to other sources, the English engineer Hubert Cecil Booth was forced to cough heavily by clouds of dust rising around a car that was being cleaned with a jet of compressed air. And allegedly then he decided to invent a machine that would suck dust into a special dust collector. The first working model was completed by him in 1901. The vacuum cleaner, called “Snorting Billy,” ran on gasoline, was equipped with a five-horsepower vacuum pump, and was not large enough to fit into all interiors. Therefore, it was parked at the curb, and the carpets were taken outside for cleaning.
The device was transported through the streets on a horse-drawn carriage by a team of four people, and a 30 m long hose was brought into the premises through the windows. Booth's machine gained widespread recognition after it was used to clear plague barracks in the London docks. Booth's first VIP client was the royal court: it was necessary to vacuum the huge blue carpet of Westminster Abbey before the coronation of Edward VII. After this, the British royal couple gladly demonstrated the technical innovation to the guests of their palace - Kaiser Wilhelm, heir to the Russian throne Nicholas. The Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid was delighted and ordered the same car for his palace in Constantinople.
And before that...
It is interesting that before Booth’s phenomenal discovery there had already been several attempts to invent a vacuum cleaner, but all of them were powered by hand. Among those who first proposed the idea of a vacuum cleaner, historians name the name of the American Daniel Hess, who in 1860 received a patent for a mechanical device with rotating brushes, equipped with bellows to create an air flow. Interestingly, Hess’s device did not have a dust bag, but two water chambers for dust sedimentation.
The next step was the Whirlwind machine, invented by Yves McCaffey from Chicago in 1869 and whose layout is very similar to the modern “tower” type vacuum cleaner, which is still popular in America to this day. The air was driven by a belt-driven fan from a handle at the top of the device, which had to be turned by hand. Unfortunately, the inventor’s attempts to adapt an electric motor to his device were unsuccessful. While Booth's dust collector worked perfectly on automatic.
Around the same time, Russian magazines began to advertise: the picture showed a large covered wagon drawn by a pair of horses. Through the open door of the van, a bulky mechanism is visible: metal cylinders, gears, a flywheel. Flexible hoses stretch from it to the balcony of a two-story house. They are held by two brave mustaches looking out from the balcony door.
The readers' imagination was captivated by the text:
“We clean quickly and reliably!
We won’t leave a single speck of dust!”
Both in Russia and in London, the miracle of engineering was very popular. However, at that time in the British capital there were many more horses than vacuum cleaners, and the horses were very frightened by the sight and roar of the Snorting Billys, so the chief police officer of London banned their use on the street.
Home option
American Murray Spangler worked as a cleaner at William Hoover's leather goods factory and suffered from dust allergies. Having read in the newspapers about the triumphant success of Booth's car, he set out to create an electric version of it. In 1907, he built an unprepossessing device, the rod of which was a mop stick, and a pillowcase was used as a dust collector. But the device worked! The inventor began selling his vacuum cleaners, and Hoover’s wife already liked one of the first samples. He immediately realized that the new device had a great future, and bought a patent from Spangler for its production. Thus, the W.H. Hoover Company was born in 1908, ushering in the era of compact home vacuum cleaners. The first example of such a vacuum cleaner came off the assembly line in 1908. And it was called the “Tin Model”. The manufacturer claimed: the vacuum cleaner not only perfectly removes dust from the floor and from crevices, but “can also be used to quickly dry hair.”
Compared to other “vacuum sweepers”, the “Tin Model” was a model of compactness - engineers managed to bring its weight to 20 kg. Competitors' products at that time weighed more than 50 kg. Funded the development of the form of a classic American vacuum cleaner - a brush, a bag and a motor between them, mounted on one handle - William Hoover. Hence the name of the manufacturer.
The Europeans also did not stay away from the vacuum cleaner race. In 1910, while on business in Vienna, the future founder of Electrolux, Axel Wenner-Gren, became interested in an outlandish American device displayed in a store window. The device was called "Santo". It had a motor and a pump and weighed about 20 kg. and cost 500 SEK. It was a vacuum cleaner, which, however, could not be called a household one. Young Axel said: “If I could make it easier and cheaper, I would sell it to every house in the world.”
Axel worked for two years in the European branch of the Santo company and in the USA, where he studied new methods of selling goods for Europe. He returned to Sweden with a dream that was born in front of a display case with an overseas vacuum cleaner. Wenner-Gren organized a team of engineers who began to develop the first household vacuum cleaner, which was released in 1912. It was called “Lux 1”.
The air pump in it was replaced with a fan, thanks to which the weight of the household appliance was immediately reduced to 14 kg. However, the Model V, which appeared in 1921, brought worldwide fame to the company. A metal cylinder moving on wheels, connected to a suction brush by a flexible hose and equipped with replaceable nozzles, was copied by all manufacturers of household appliances almost until the end of the 20th century.
The 1920s passed for the company under the slogan “Every home is an Electrolux home.”
Using the skills acquired in the USA, Axel Wenner-Gren began to use direct sales of vacuum cleaners. A huge number of machines in the form of vacuum cleaners drove around first in Sweden and then throughout Europe, demonstrating the technical merits of the vacuum cleaner. This action brought success to the company. Bulletins, sales competitions between sellers, training courses... Everything was done to instill in people's minds the need to purchase convenient household appliances.
With the opening of the Hoover plant in Great Britain in 1932, the passion for the newfangled dust collector quickly spread among progressively-minded, successful gentlemen. Naturally, it was not they themselves, but the servants, armed with a vacuum cleaner, who tidied up the mansions and family castles, where ancient carpets and tapestries had been collecting dust for centuries, much faster.
The amazing popularity of vacuum cleaners in the 20s and 30s was based on the confidence of housewives that they got rid of germs along with dust. Here's what a commentator for Electrician magazine wrote about this in 1926: “The universal idea of the vacuum cleaner is more than just cleaning rooms. The housewife, along with the vacuum cleaner, adopts a new standard of health for her family.”
Firestarter?
Work on improving the vacuum cleaner was suspended for ten years due to World War II. And public opinion polls conducted in the late forties showed that consumer enthusiasm for mechanical cleaners had diminished. Shortcomings were identified that determined the direction of engineering and design searches for the coming decades. The vacuum cleaner made too much noise while cleaning: it was impossible to talk to a person at a distance of a meter. It was not light and mobile enough. The suction power ranged from very strong (cleaning brushes stuck tightly to surfaces) to too weak (only large particles, such as sand, were effectively collected). But the main thing is the disadvantages of filtration - the exhaust air returned fine dust into the room through the exhaust of the vacuum cleaner.
The increase in allergic diseases and the identification of dangerous allergens in house dust that were not susceptible to the most advanced filters of traditional vacuum cleaners have become a serious reason for the environmental aspect of vacuum cleaning to come to the fore. This, in fact, gave impetus to the invention of built-in vacuum cleaners in 1957 by the American company Beam Industries (they were also called centralized dust removal systems). An original and at the same time simple solution to long-standing problems was proposed. The power unit became stationary (it was installed in a utility room and was connected by a system of air ducts to pneumatic sockets in the walls or floors), the exhaust was vented to the street, and cleaning was carried out using only a hose. Result? All collected dust was completely removed from the room. The plastic dust collector could be emptied of debris 3-4 times a year; with a cleaning hose with a length of 4.6 to 10.7 m, you can effectively vacuum clean both in a standard apartment and in a multi-storey cottage.
But time made a choice in favor of compactness and this model remained the property of the 50s. The 60s were marked by the appearance of washing vacuum cleaners. The family of vacuum cleaners expanded, acquiring new varieties: small manual ones for cleaning car interiors and giants capable of collecting dust from the streets, models with a cyclonic principle of dust separation, and those in which dust settled in a container of water. Dust bags were improved, clever attachments were invented, suction power increased, and noise decreased. At the same time, the vacuum cleaner became indispensable: by the mid-80s in developed countries, 97% of families acquired mobile cleaners.
But the most impressive step in the evolution of the vacuum cleaner was its complete
automation, however, is inevitable in the electronic age. In 1997, on the BBC channel, viewers were shown a prototype of a robotic vacuum cleaner, which was created by the Electrolux company. Several years passed, and “Trilobite” was born - a robot capable of independently walking around a room, finding Charger and do not forget about your main duty - collecting dust.
Modern portable vacuum cleaners resemble amazing robotic machines from science fiction novels. They can move without human assistance, tactfully avoiding furniture and people, spraying pleasant aromas throughout rooms and sucking in saprophytic mites. But this is still not enough for us and, adapting to our needs, day after day these irreplaceable cleaning assistants continue to improve.
An Ordinary Story - Vacuum Cleaner:
Today, appliance manufacturers around the world must raise a toast to Hubert Cecil Booth.
Exactly 100 years ago, this man proved that dust should not be brushed, washed or blown away, but sucked up: on August 30, 1901, the English engineer Booth patented a vacuum cleaner. Hubert decided to go into business and in the same year founded a company for the development and production of vacuum cleaners, The British Vacuum Cleaner Company.
Dust-sos
The founder of the vacuum cleaner industry, Mr. Booth, was born in 1871 (thus, the inventor also celebrates his 130th birthday this year) in the small English town of Gloucester. He was the sixth son of Abraham Booth, a lumber importer. At 18, Hubert Cecil Booth moved to London to study engineering at Guilds College. Before inventing the vacuum cleaner, Booth helped design the Royal Navy's battleships.
On a significant day, Hubert Cecil Booth decided to visit the London Music Hall. At that time, not only were dancers waving their legs, but also a miracle was demonstrated to the audience for fun modern technology: A newly invented machine was blowing clouds of dust out of the old carpet.
According to the main vacuum cleaner legend, one of the audience coughed, and Hubert, driven by better feelings, went backstage during the intermission and declared that the dust should not be blown away, but sucked up. And after the words of the vacuum cleaner genius were questioned, he knelt down and, using his own nose, demonstrated the principle of operation of the device.
However, there are other versions. According to one of them, Booth did not suck up anything at the Music Hall. He came up with this only a few days later, sitting with friends in a restaurant on Victoria Street. Historiographers claim that Booth thoughtfully placed his handkerchief on the seat of one of the plush chairs and resolutely inhaled lungs full of dust.
Other vacuum cleaner researchers believe that the bright idea came to Booth after he coughed heavily while watching the process of cleaning a car with a jet of compressed air. Thus, all that can be said for certain is that Hubert Cecil Booth actually coughed.
An elephant was led through the streets
Working on his invention, in October 1900, Booth teamed up with colleagues D., also inventors D. Spark and Valer (some sources attribute the fame of the invention of the paper clip to the latter). Thus, a tripartite alliance was created to implement a project to create shops and workshops for the repair and reconstruction of vacuum cleaners.
Booth's very first vacuum cleaner, thanks to its "good" ergonomic characteristics, was called "Snorting Billy". It ran on gasoline and was equipped with a five-horsepower vacuum pump. The whole car barely fit on the cart, which was pulled by a horse. Snorting Billy was not allowed into the interiors. It was parked at the curb, and the carpets meant for cleaning were taken out onto the street.
They say that the miracle of engineering was wildly popular in London. Only the horses were dissatisfied. They were very frightened by the “melodic” sounds produced by “Snorting Billy” while working, and this caused them to break the rules traffic.
Royal Purge
At first, after its “release,” the miracle machine was ordered to be delivered to people’s homes for entertainment. Guests were invited to look at the innovation and watched as the carefully accumulated dust disappeared from the carpets. They say that to make the “attraction” more spectacular, Booth even made one of the vacuum cleaner hoses transparent. For clarity.
However, Booth's vacuum cleaner reached its peak of popularity in 1902, when he had the honor of cleaning the blue carpet of Westminster Abbey before the coronation of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Historians claim that the crowned heads were so shocked by the action of the huge machine that they also wanted to clean out Buckingham Palace and Windsor Cathedral in this way.
And during the war, Booth eased the suffering of the royal volunteers who were suffocating in the dust of the Crystal Palase, which had been converted into a hospital. Archival sources seriously claim that in 4 weeks of operation, 15 vacuum cleaners “pumped out” 26 tons (!!!) of “crystal” dust.
Vacuum cleaner man
Hubert Cecil Booth continued to work in the vacuum cleaner field. Subsequently, he released a home vacuum cleaner under the Goblin brand, and remained in the chair of the head of the British Vacuum Cleaner Co until 1952.
However, it was not Booth who was destined to skim the most delicious cream from this invention. Perhaps the Englishman was more of a theorist than a practitioner. The implementation worked much better for other people. At the very beginning of the 20th century, the American Murray Spangler created a more compact vacuum cleaner, but was also unable to take advantage of the fruits of his ingenuity. William Henry Hoover did it for him. A smart businessman bought Spangler's idea and made millions from it. Hoover’s reward for his entrepreneurial spirit was the fact that now in some dictionaries his name D Hoover D is translated as “vacuum cleaner.”
"Mop Bucket"
Gradually, vacuum cleaners began to shrink. Humanity owes the appearance of home vacuum cleaners to the Americans. The first overseas dust was sucked in by the brainchild of the Geier company in 1905. Several other companies quickly began producing vacuum cleaners. Good design was not considered a competitive advantage at the time. For example, the 1908 W.H. The Hoover Company was made from tin cans and was therefore known as the "Tin Model". The “tin” looked like an inverted black galvanized bucket with a wooden mop handle “attached” to it for some reason. The manufacturer proudly informed consumers that “the vacuum cleaner is not only excellent at removing dust from floors and cracks, but can also be used to quickly dry hair.”
At that time, the “Tin Model” served as a model of compactness: it weighed only 20 kg, unlike its heavy competitors weighing more than 50 kg.
Also in 1908, a patent was issued in Germany for a vacuum cleaner that could operate without electricity. The main source of its action was supposed to be a man sitting in a special rocking chair and, by rocking the latter, making the machine work. At this time, the housewife had to clean the dust from the Persian carpet in front of the fireplace with a bell. However, this silent device was never built: most likely, it had no chance to withstand an electric, although noisy, but fast-acting vacuum cleaner. In 1912, the founder of Electrolux, Swede Axel Wenner-Gren, created his first household vacuum cleaner. However, the classic Model V, which appeared in 1921, brought worldwide fame to the Swedes. A metal cylinder moving on wheels, connected to a suction brush by a flexible hose and equipped with replaceable nozzles, has been copied by all world manufacturers of household appliances for 80 years.
One of the first vacuum cleaners created under the patent of Hubert Booth
Cleaning team at the beginning of the last century
1. An electric vacuum cleaner was patented by British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth (1871−1955). Having noticed a device used on trains to blow dust off seats, he reasoned that it would be much more practical to suck up the dust.
2. The viability of the idea was tested using a handkerchief. Booth placed it on the seat of the chair and tried to suck in as much dust as possible with his mouth. When he discovered that dust had collected on the bottom of the scarf, he knew the idea was working.
3. The era of modern “vacuum cleaning” was opened by the Puffing Billy device, driven first by an internal combustion engine and then by an electric motor. The equipment, designed by Hubert Booth, was so bulky that it was transported by horses and placed outside the building, which had to be vacuumed. The hose was stretched out the window, its length reached 30 meters.
4. The inventor of the vacuum cleaner has received more than one complaint for the loud noise his creation made. Hubert Cecil Booth was once fined for spooking horses with a vacuum cleaner. And one day, after cleaning the mint, the police detained the inventor, accusing him of stealing gold: Booth forgot to throw out the dust, and a large amount of gold dust accumulated in his vacuum cleaner.
5. Among the clients of the British Vacuum Cleaner Company, founded by the inventor, was Queen Victoria herself, as well as the British Admiralty: by clearing dust from the barracks of British sailors, Booth’s company put an end to the plague epidemic.
How the invention of the vacuum cleaner was similar to the invention of the wheel, why the first vacuum cleaners were prohibited from being used on the streets of London, where it was first invented and what asthma has to do with it, we tell in the “History of Science” section.
They say that this happened at the very beginning of the twentieth century, during a performance at the London Music Hall, where the audience was shown a device for mechanical carpet cleaning. The bell of the “cleaner” was pointed at the old carpet, and he used compressed air to blow clouds of dust out of the carpet, in such quantities that people in the front rows began to cough. One of the coughers quietly muttered “Eureka-kha-kha-kha!” and during the break he headed backstage. There he told the demonstrators of the “miracle of technology” that the dust should not be blown out, but blown in.
Like this? - they asked him.
And like this! - the viewer knelt down in front of the carpet and inhaled lungs full of dust, causing him to cough again. A breath of dust turned out to be life-giving: it was with it that the era of vacuum cleaners began in the twentieth century.
True, the incident in the music hall is just one version of the birth of the vacuum cleaner. According to other versions, this happened when our viewer watched the cleaning of dust with compressed air from either a car or seats in a railway carriage. Yes, in fact, this is not important, but the only important thing is that the viewer turned out to be Hubert Cecil Booth, an engineer by profession, an inventor by nature. He was inspired by the idea and soon built the first machine in Europe to suck out accumulated dust from carpets and any surfaces in general.
This event took place in 1901. The car, however, turned out to be bulky and clumsy, in addition, it roared like a hundred Formula 1 cars, so at first Booth was not selling his machine (he called it Puffing Billy), but a service: he drove him on horseback to the client’s house, through the window He supplied a 30-meter-long hose from it and began cleaning with a terrible roar, which scared away pets and greatly angered the neighbors. And because the dust collector scared away horses, London's chief police officer banned its use on the street. Subsequently, Booth replaced his Billy's gasoline engine with an electric one. This did not change the roaring situation very much, and it was time to think about a homemade version of Puffing Billy.
There is a slight oddity in this whole story. It comes down to the fact that the vacuum cleaner was first invented not in Europe, but in the USA. Four decades before the British Billy, in 1860 to be exact, the American Daniel Hess patented a device with rotating brushes equipped with bellows to create an air flow. The idea was completely absurd, so Daniel Hess did not move beyond the patent.
One of the early models of handheld vacuum cleaners
Wikimedia Commons
In 1869, the Whirlwind machine, invented by Eve McGuffey, appeared in Chicago. This vacuum cleaner was reminiscent of modern tower-type units, which are very common today in the United States. The main drawback was that it had neither a gasoline nor an electric motor; instead, there was a crank that had to be turned. This was, of course, a very serious obstacle, but with all the well-known American enterprise, it could easily be circumvented: if a person does not like to turn the handle, you can do what Booth did and sell not a vacuum cleaner, but a service, sending two employees, one of whom would turn the handle, and the second would vacuum. None of this happened, the Whirlwind was a weak success, and even thirty years later, when McGuffey finally managed to equip his vacuum cleaner with an electric motor, little had changed, the device was still too heavy and inconvenient and never made it outside of Chicago.
In general, the history of the appearance of vacuum cleaners is in many ways similar to the history of the appearance of the wheel. Firstly, once it appeared, like the wheel, it never changed its main ingredients: a vacuum pump and a dust collection system (for a wheel this is a rim with spokes or just a flat disk and a hole for the axle). The second common feature is that in both cases the idea appeared much earlier than its implementation. And in both cases, this was due to the fact that the necessary technologies were not initially available. According to a number of historians, the wheel appeared quite late in the life of mankind due to problems with sawing out a disk and drilling a hole in it, since the necessary tools for this simply were not available.
For a vacuum cleaner, these problems were hidden in its initial bulkiness and inconvenience of use. True, if the problems of the wheel were solved for centuries (or even millennia), then in the case of the vacuum cleaner, the time lag between the idea and its implementation was only forty years. This is understandable; such problems, for all their fundamental similarity, were very different in scale, and vacuum cleaner developers did not need to make technological revolutions; a slight improvement in technology was enough.
Cecil Booth, although, as it turns out, was not, as it turns out, the first inventor of the vacuum cleaner, he is still rightfully considered the founder of this wonderful device, if only because his clumsy and loud Puffing Billy gave impetus to the emergence of competitors and the rapid development of vacuum cleaner manufacturing. The idea of a miracle horse-drawn machine spread throughout Europe, reached America and finally awakened its famous entrepreneurial spirit.
All it took was a little nudge, and that nudge turned out to be a dust allergy suffered by Murray Spangler, a janitor at William Hoover's tannery. He, having read about Booth’s dust collector in a newspaper, saw in it a way to overcome his asthma and in 1907 he made his own vacuum cleaner from improvised means: an electric motor, a mop stick and a pillowcase as a dust collector.
Since the device worked quite effectively, Spangler began making it for sale, and gave one of the copies to his owner’s wife. She was delighted with the miracle mop and told her husband about it. Hoover quickly realized that the new device had a great future, and without hesitation, in 1908 he bought a patent for its production. He quickly created a new company, the W.H. Hoover Company, and that same year the first copy of his vacuum cleaner, called the “Tin Edition,” went on sale. From then until the mid-nineties, his company was the main vacuum cleaner leader in the United States. She continues to prosper now, focusing mainly on caring for floor coverings.
The news of the success of Hoover's brainchild ricocheted across Europe, ultimately giving birth to the European vacuum cleaner leader, the Electrolux company. The history of this company is, in fact, the story of the rise to fame of a dropout boy from the Swedish outback, Axel Werner-Gren. In 1910, traveling salesman Wenner-Gren, while on business in Vienna, saw an American Santo vacuum cleaner in a store window. The vacuum cleaner was considered a home cleaner, but it was too heavy and expensive for a home cleaner: weighing 20 kg, it cost 500 Swedish kronor. The miracle of dust collection technology captivated him, and he said to himself: “If I could make this easier and cheaper, I would sell it to every home in the world.”
Public domain
And he did it. After working in the US and the European branch of the Santo company, he returned to Sweden, where he eventually began working with the Lux company. In 1912, the joint brainchild of Lux and Axel Gren's team of engineers was released - the first European household vacuum cleaner, Lux 1. The air pump was replaced with a fan, which reduced the weight of the new vacuum cleaner to 14 kg. Then there was the worldwide triumph with the Model V vacuum cleaner, the transformation of the Lux company into Electrolux, its unprecedented long-term leadership in the global vacuum cleaner market. Today, the whole world knows the company’s huge list of household appliances, of which vacuum cleaners are only one of many lines.
Russia and the early USSR did not have their own production of vacuum cleaners. The first mention of a purely Soviet vacuum cleaner appeared in 1938. It was called EPR, operated from a 110-volt DC network, and aesthetics appearance it had as much to say as the title. It did not last long; after 1939, there were no reports of EPR at all. It is unknown what happened to it (either the Gulag finished off with it, or there were no buyers), but officially the history of Soviet vacuum cleaners begins in 1952.
It cannot be said that the Soviet Union no longer produced its own vacuum cleaners, but at least the vast majority of them were modified casts from Western models. This, for example, was the “Dnepr” - one of the first pre-war Soviet vacuum cleaners. Its design completely repeats the design of one of the first Electroluxes. The football-shaped Saturn vacuum cleaner is not much different in appearance from the American Hoover Conctellation model, produced in the mid-fifties and early sixties of the last century. And there are enough such examples.
Wheels, which were initially conceived for purely transport purposes, eventually found many other uses - from clock wheels and water mills to Ferris wheels. The same thing happened with vacuum cleaners. In the Soviet Union, few people knew about backpack vacuum cleaners, with which street cleaners clean the streets, or about vacuum cleaners built into the house - both air purifiers and fans. In today's Russia, washing vacuum cleaners and vacuum cleaners with an aqua filter have become very popular. The range of vacuum cleaners and steam cleaners is also quite wide. Cleaning with their help is the most environmentally friendly, since it does not use detergents; steam does all the “dirty” work for them.
