Early Electric Vacuums
It was an American, Murray Spangler, who invented the format of today's upright electric vacuum cleaners. He suffered from asthma and this encouraged him to design a machine for collecting dust. This machine used an electric motor which drove a rotating brush which was then collected in a pillowcase. The machine was mounted on a broom handle. Hoover, then a struggling saddle manufacturer, employed Spangler. In 1908 Hoover acquired the manufacturing rights for Spanglers rudimentary design and refined it for mass production. Hoover found that more and more homes were now being equipped with electricity for electric lighting and began mass-marketing his new 'electric suction sweeper'. Exports to Britain started in 1919 and Hoover quickly became established as the market leader through intensive marketing and high-quality products.
Booth, the original inventor of the vacuum cleaner, introduced his own electric models under the name of BVC (British Vacuum Cleaner). After 1926 his domestic cleaners were sold under the brand name of 'Goblin'.
Early Upright ModelsEarly upright cleaners were heavy and utilitarian, and generally cleaned using suction only. Most had the motor mounted horizontally behind a cast alloy fan chamber and suction nozzle, mounted on 4 wheels, with a 'pitchfork' handle in either wood or steel tube. By the 30s, most uprights had a fingertip switch mounted in the handle. Some upright models included a rotating brush in the nozzle, powered by a rubber belt off the end of the motor.
Stick upright cleaners
In the 20s and 30s a popular model was the 'stick' upright. This was lighter and cheaper than the larger cleaners. The bag, fan chamber and motor were all mounted on the handle, with only the nozzle touching the floor. Stick uprights started to disappear from the UK market in the 1950s as standard uprights became more popular and affordable.
Just as the electric iron set a new standard in pressing laundry, so the electric vacuum cleaner became a desirable item simply because no other method was as efficient. Before the age of electricity, the average home would have had large areas of exposed hard floor, either wooden floorboards or quarry-tiles, and sometimes covered in linoleum. The only concessions to luxury were rugs or carpets small enough to be taken outside and beaten over the washing line with a cane carpet beater. An alternative method was to sprinkle a carpet with tea-leaves which, in theory, attracted dust and grit to the surface ready to be swept up. Carpet sweepers were the first mechanised cleaning machine in the home and, although a vast improvement for collecting surface dust from carpets, were useless on hard floors and unable to clean a carpet properly, not to mention above-floor surfaces. Hand-operated pump cleaners provided an alternative, although their success was attributed more to the increasingly gadget-conscious public, rather than any real improvement in efficiency. Despite this, some hand-operated suction cleaners were still available in the late-1930s.