The motorized vacuum cleaner was invented by Hubert Cecil Booth of England in 1901.
That year he had attended “a demonstration of an American machine by its inventor” at the Empire Music Hall in London. The device blew dust off the chairs, and Booth observed that “… if the system could be reversed, and a filter inserted between the suction apparatus and the outside air, whereby the dust would be retained in a receptacle, the real solution of the hygienic removal of dust would be obtained.”
Booth created a large device driven by an internal combustion engine. Nicknamed the “Puffing Billy,” Booth’s first petrol-powered, horse-drawn vacuum cleaner relied upon air drawn by a piston pump through a cloth filter. It did not contain any brushes; all the cleaning was done by suction through long tubes with nozzles on the ends.
He followed this up with an electric-powered model, but both designs were extremely bulky, and had to be transported by horse and carriage. The term “vacuum cleaner” was first used by the company set up to market Booth’s invention in its first issued prospectus of 1901.
Booth initially did not attempt to sell his machine, but rather sold cleaning services. The vans of the British Vacuum Cleaner Company (BVCC) were bright red; uniformed operators would haul hose off the van and route it through the windows of a building to reach all the rooms inside.
Booth continued to refine 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, now BVC, lives on today as a unit of pneumatic tube system maker Quirepace Ltd.
Hubert Cecil Booth’s Vacuum Cleaning Service
Hubert Cecil Booth
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