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A vacuum cleaner (in colloquial British English also hoover) is a device that uses an air pump to create a partial vacuum to suck up dust and dirt, usually from floors. more...

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Most homes with carpeted floors in developed countries possess a vacuum cleaner for cleaning. The dirt is collected by a filtering system or a cyclone for later disposal.

History of the Vacuum Cleaner

Ives W. McGaffey

The first manually-powered cleaner using vacuum principles was the \"Whirlwind\", invented in Chicago in 1868 by Ives W. McGaffey. The machine was lightweight and compact, but was difficult to operate because of the need to turn a hand crank at the same time as pushing it across the floor. McGaffey obtained a patent for his device on June 5, 1869, and enlisted the help of The American Carpet Cleaning Co. of Boston to market it to the public. It was sold for $25, a high price in those days. It is hard to determine how successful the Whirlwind was, as most of them were sold in Chicago and Boston, and it is likely that many were lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Only two are known to have survived, one of which can be found in the Hoover Historical Center.

McGaffey was but one of many 19th-century inventors in the United States and Europe who devised manual vacuum cleaners. The first patent for an electrically driven \"carpet sweeper and dust gatherer\" was granted to Corinne Dufour of Savannah, Georgia in December 1900.

H. Cecil Booth

The first powered cleaner employing a vacuum was patented and produced by Hubert Cecil Booth in 1901. He noticed a device used in trains that blew dust off the chairs, and thought it would be much more useful to have one that sucked dust. He tested the idea by laying a handkerchief on the seat of a dinner chair, putting his mouth to the handkerchief, and then trying to suck up as much dust as he could onto the handkerchief. Upon seeing the dust and dirt collected on the underside of the handkerchief he realized the idea could work. Booth created a large device, known as Puffing Billy, driven first by an oil engine, and later by an electric motor. It was drawn by horses and parked outside the building to be cleaned.

Booth started the British Vacuum Cleaner Company and refined his invention over the next several decades. Though his \"Goblin\" model lost out to competition from Hoover in the household vacuum market, his company successfully turned its focus to the industrial market, building ever-larger models for factories and warehouses. Booth's company lives on today as a unit of pneumatic tube system maker Quirepace Ltd.

Walter Griffiths

In 1905 \"Griffith's Improved Vacuum Apparatus for Removing Dust from Carpets\" was another manually operated cleaner, patented by Walter Griffiths Manufacturer, Birmingham, England. It was portable, easy to store, and powered by \"any one person (such as the ordinary domestic servant)\", who would have the task of compressing a bellows-like contraption to suck up dust through a removable, flexible pipe, to which a variety of shaped nozzles could be attached. This was arguably the first domestic vacuum-cleaning device to resemble the modern vacuum cleaner.

Read more at Wikipedia.org