A nod to the 100-year-old housekeeper

BEFORE vacuums were invented, America’s homemakers swept their carpets with brooms to keep them clean. Once a year, during spring cleaning, many moved their furniture in order to lift their rugs and lug them outdoors for a good beating in fresh air.

Then, from the mid-1880s through the early 1900s, quite a few would-be inventors pondered the idea of a machine that would suck up dust and dirt. Most of their efforts were impractical and unaffordable, including one gasoline-powered behemoth that weighed about 100 pounds. Another required two musclemen to operate it: one to work the bellows that provided suction, the other to push the contraption around the floor.

Ives McGaffey obtained the first U.S. patent for a vacuum, a nonelectric machine that contained a fan that had to be operated by hand. The device was not a success.

In 1907, however, an asthmatic Ohio department store janitor named James Murray Spangler thought his health was adversely affected by dust that whirled up from sweeping carpets. He took the motor from a fan, attached it to a soap box stapled to a broom handle and added a pillowcase to catch the dust.

After refining his invention, he won a patent and formed a company to produce and sell his machine.

Susan Hoover, a Spangler family friend, bought one. Her husband, William, saw the machine’s potential. In 1908 he bought the patent from Spangler and started the firm that still bears his name.

The Hoover Co. of North Canton, Ohio, produced and marketed the first Model O one hundred years ago. It was the first commercially successful electric vacuum cleaner that used a filter bag and cleaning attachments.

Some aficionados of vintage vacuums believe the design reached its zenith at mid-century, when the streamlined metal canister models looked like torpedoes, and the uprights had homey fabric bags that inflated to dirigible shapes. Although vacuums today may be lighter, more efficient and more frequently bag-less than the machines of old, they still sport a similar silhouette as those of a century ago.

Ann Haines, operations director of the Hoover Historical Center, in the Hoover family home in Ohio, says an original Model O on display there is popular with visitors, who still love to “turn it on, listen to the motor and watch the bag inflate.”

bettijane.levine@latimes.com