Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (27 page)

Whereas H. Cecil Booth’s first commercial vacuum resembled a refrigerator, Hoover’s first portable home model looked like a bagpipe mated with a breadbox. Nonetheless, it embodied all the basic principles, and some of the accessories, of modern-day cleaners. By the 1920s, the names Hoover and Regina conjured up images of modern twentieth-century housecleaning.

The vacuum was a landmark homeware invention. Its salient feature was that for the first time in the history of housekeeping, dust was removed from the great dust-collectors—rugs, carpets, curtains, and upholstered cushions—while the items remained in place in the house. Previously, to prevent dust from resettling on furnishings, items were hauled outdoors, hung over lines and leaned against fences, and whipped. This annual ritual, spring cleaning, could often be a week-long chore that disrupted a family’s routine. With the arrival of the vacuum cleaner, every daily or weekly cleaning became in effect a spring cleaning.

Carpet Sweeper
. Before there were vacuum machines to suck dust from carpets, there was the mechanical carpet sweeper, which whisked away debris. In its heyday, the sweeper was considered a breakthrough, liberating homemakers from the shortcomings of its predecessor, the broom.

For millennia the only improvement in brooms was in the neatness of their tufted heads. Liberation from the broom came in the 1870s with the invention of the mechanical carpet sweeper
.

For millions of American housewives, broom liberation arrived in 1876, with the carpet sweeper invented by a husband and wife from Michigan. Anna and Melville Bissell operated a glassware shop in downtown Grand Rapids. Allergic to dust, they both suffered from the dust-laden straw in which glassware shipments were packed. Melville Bissell’s hobby was inventing mechanical gadgets, and he began to develop a sweeper with a rotary head and a box to collect dust.

Bissell was not the first to attempt to perfect a sweeper, for home or street. As far back as 1699, a British patent was issued to inventor Edmund Heming for “a new machine for sweeping the streets of London.” Consisting of a large circular brush connected to the revolving wheels of a horse-drawn cart, the contraption raised clouds of dust, which were exceeded in unpleasantness only by the clouds of protest from residents along the streets that the machine purportedly cleaned.

Smaller models had been attempted for the home but had not proved particularly popular. The Bissell carpet sweeper arrived at a point in medical history when dust and dirt had been labeled dangerous, if not deadly. Pasteur had recently posited his germ theory of illness, incriminating airborne dust as a carrier of bacteria. And Florence Nightingale was revolutionizing hospital hygiene, preaching that “air can be soiled just like water.” The medical atmosphere generated almost an obsession with personal and home hygiene. The Bissell sweeper caught on so widely in America and Europe that by 1890, people spoke of “Bisselling the carpet.” Queen Victoria ordered Bissells for Buckingham Palace, and Turkish sultans and Arabian sheiks Bisselled their Oriental rugs. But in the end, what the Bissell had done to the broom, the electric vacuum cleaner did to the Bissell and all its imitators.

Broom and Fuller Brush
.
Until the twentieth century, with the introduction of synthetic fibers, the brooms and brushes used in America and Europe differed only in neatness from those used by early man: a bundle of twigs, or the tuft from a corn plant, clipped and secured to a handle. One transformation to hit the broom industry in the early 1900s came knocking on doors in the form of the Fuller Brush man.

Alfred Carl Fuller arrived in the United States from Nova Scotia in 1903. His assets were seventy-five dollars and a Bible; his liabilities, a daydreaming mind and an irresponsible nature. Fired from three jobs back home, Fuller landed a position as ticket collector for Boston’s elevated railway but was dismissed when he took a train on a joyride and crashed it. Subsequently, he was fired as a stablehand for neglecting the horses, then discharged as a messenger for repeatedly losing packages. Fuller claimed that he had never liked the idea of working for other people, and in 1905 he began his own business, selling brushes door to door.

In a rented room in Hartford, Connecticut, he labored late into the night constructing wire and bristle brushes, ideal for cleaning the nooks and crannies of late-nineteenth-century homes. During the day, he peddled the brushes for fifty cents apiece. To his amazement, he turned out to be a gifted salesman, and by 1910 he employed a staff of twenty-five men to market his wares.

Then the buzz of the vacuum cleaner sounded the knell of the broom and all such whisking devices. The brush and broom industry attempted to fight back. In the July 1919 issue of
House Furnishing Review
, store buyers were informed that housewives had been brainwashed into believing that “sweeping is drudgery. What a misconception!” Then the copy boasted: “The medical profession, in numerous instances, advises women to take up housework, especially sweeping, to offset their ills. Sweeping,” it concluded, “is exercise of a highly beneficial nature.” And to offset the then-current association that a genteel woman uses a vacuum cleaner while only a harridan
clings to her broom, the industry adopted the slogan: “Sweep, and still be sweet.”

In the meantime, Fuller had begun expanding his line to include a wide artillery of household cleaning products. The versatility enabled the company to survive handsomely. When Alfred Fuller retired as president in 1943, annual sales topped ten million dollars, and the Fuller Brush man had become a familiar part of the American scene.

Clothes Iron: 4th Century
B.C
., Greece

Smooth, wrinkle-free clothing has been a symbol of refinement, cleanliness, and status for at least 2,400 years—although the desired effect was never easy to achieve. All early irons employed pressure; only some used heat to remove creases and impart pleats to washed garments.

The Greeks in the fourth century
B.C
. bore down on a “goffering iron,” a cylindrical heated bar, similar to a rolling pin, which was run over linen robes to produce pleats. Two centuries later, the Romans were pressing garments and creating pleats with a hand-held “mangle,” a flat metal mallet that literally hammered out wrinkles. With such devices, ironing was more than just a tedious, time-consuming chore; it was slaves’ work—and was done by slaves.

Even the warring tenth-century Vikings of Northern Europe prized wrinkle-free garments, often pleated. They employed an iron in the shape of an inverted mushroom, which was rocked back and forth on dampened fabric. Fashion historians claim that it was the difficulty in producing pleats that made them a clothing distinction between upper and lower classes. Peasants did not have the time to iron in rows of creases; pleats became an outward statement of owning slaves or servants.

By the fifteenth century, wealthier European homes had a “hot box” iron, with a compartment for heated coals or a single fired brick. Poorer families still used the “flat” iron, a piece of metal with a handle, which was periodically heated over a fire. The tremendous disadvantage of the flat iron was that the soot it collected from fireplace flames could be transferred to clothes.

Once gas lighting was introduced into homes in the nineteenth century, many inventors produced gas-heated irons, which tapped into a family’s gas line. But the frequency with which the irons leaked, exploded, and started home fires made wrinkled clothes preferable. The real boom in ironing came with the installation of electric lines into the home.

Electric Iron
. On June 6, 1882, New York inventor Henry W. Weely received the first United States patent for an electric iron. Although Weely’s concept of heat-resistant coils was imaginative, the iron itself was impractical. It heated up (slowly) only while plugged into its stand, and cooled down (quickly) once disconnected from the stand and in use. Most of the operator’s time was spent in reheating the iron. Even a better design could not have gotten around the problem that in the early 1880s only a few hundred American homes had electricity.

Ironing was exhausting when models weighted up to fifteen pounds. (Top to bottom) Detachable walnut handle and three iron heads so that two were heating atop a stove while one was in use; heater, placed above a burner, to hold four flatirons; hot box iron containing fired charcoals
.

With the burgeoning growth of power companies around the turn of the century, a wide array of electric irons competed for housewives’ attention. Although today it would seem hard to conceive of models weighing in excess of ten pounds as labor-saving devices (the heaviest tipped the iron-board at fifteen pounds), it was as such that electric irons were promoted by advertisers and greeted by homemakers.

Electric irons also suffered from a problem that undermined all electrical appliances in those years, with the sole exception of the light bulb. Home electricity had been conceived of almost exclusively in terms of powering incandescent lights. Consequently, as late as 1905, most power companies turned on their generators only at sunset, and they turned them off at
daybreak. Thus, a family wishing to benefit from such new conveniences as the electric toaster, the electric percolator, the electric clock, and the electric iron had to do so during the night. The purr of progress was silenced by the rising sun.

One electric utility man, Earl Richardson, set out to rectify the drawbacks of both home electricity and the electric iron, a device he was attempting to refine.

A meter reader for an Ontario, California, power company, Richardson polled homemakers on his weekly rounds. He learned that they would gladly switch to electric irons if the appliances were lighter and could be used during daylight hours. He persuaded several housewives to try his homemade lighter-weight irons, and he convinced his plant supervisors to experiment with generating electricity round-the-clock for one day, Tuesday, the day most of his customers claimed they ironed.

The supply-and-demand experiment paid off. As housewives ironed every Tuesday, consuming increasing amounts of electricity, the plant gradually extended the hours that its generators operated.

Homemakers, though, had one complaint about Earl Richardson’s trial irons: a nonuniform distribution of heat along the iron’s flat plate, with a “hot point.” In 1906, when Earl Richardson decided to manufacture irons, he already had the name for his product.

Steam Iron
. By the mid-1920s, American households were buying more than three million electric irons a year, at an average price of six dollars. Thus in 1926, when the first electric steam irons went on sale in New York City department stores for ten dollars, they were considered a nonessential appliance—despite the claim that their trickling moisture would prevent the scorching of clothes. Since conscientious ironing would also prevent scorching, and at a savings of four dollars, steam irons were not an immediate success. They caught on in the 1940s, when clothing manufacturers introduced a dizzying array of synthetic fabrics that, while stainproofed and permanently pressed, could melt like wax under a hot dry iron.

Within the housewares industry, the late 1940s marked the outbreak of what was called the “holy war.”

Whereas the first steam irons had only one hole, those that appeared in the ’40s had two, then four, then eight. Holes became a marketing ploy. If eight holes were good, reasoned Westinghouse, sixteen were surely twice as appealing. Proctor-Silex discreetly upped the ante to seventeen. Sunbeam escalated the battle with a thirty-six-hole steam iron. The holes, of course, got smaller and smaller. For a while, Westinghouse seemed to be pushing some upper limit of perforation technology with its sixty-five-hole iron. But Sears, determined to win the war, came out with a seventy-hole model. Then, without fanfare, the Presto debuted with eighty holes. Now it was impossible to scorch clothes with a steam iron, since they came off the
ironing board damp, if not wet. Like plants, clothes were being misted. And “misting” became the new marketing ploy.