A Janitor With Asthma Invented the Upright Vacuum, Then Sold It to His Cousin's Husband

US889823 was granted to James Murray Spangler on June 2, 1908. The title is "Carpet Sweeper and Cleaner." It is the first practical portable electric vacuum cleaner, and it was built by a man who could not afford to be sick and could not afford to quit.

Spangler was about sixty years old, in Canton, Ohio, working as a night janitor at a department store. He had asthma. His job involved pushing a mechanical carpet sweeper — a device that beats dust out of a carpet and, in the process, throws an enormous amount of it into the air.

His coughing fits, by his own account, were caused by his own job.

The soap box and the pillowcase

Existing vacuum systems were not an option. Powered suction cleaning did exist in 1907, but in the form of enormous horse-drawn machines that parked outside a building and ran hoses through the windows, hired by the day. Nothing existed that one person could push.

Spangler built one from what he had: an electric fan motor to generate suction, a tin soap box as the body, a broom handle to push it, and a pillowcase tied on to catch the dust. He added a rotating brush at the front to loosen the carpet fibers ahead of the intake.

That combination — motorized suction, an agitating brush, and a removable collection bag, all in an upright unit driven by one person — is the upright vacuum cleaner. The architecture has not changed.

His asthma improved.

Selling it to Hoover

Spangler patented the machine and started a company to manufacture it, and immediately ran into the problem that has ended most of the stories in this archive: he had no capital.

Among the people he sold early machines to was his cousin, Susan Hoover. She was impressed enough with it that her husband, William Henry Hoover — who ran a leather goods business making horse harnesses and saddles, an industry that could see the automobile coming and knew it was doomed — bought a controlling interest in Spangler's patent in 1908.

Hoover retooled the harness factory, hired Spangler as superintendent, and began manufacturing.

The company built the market with a tactic that was novel at the time: a free ten-day home trial, advertised in national magazines, with the machine delivered by a local retailer who would take it back if the customer declined. It removed the risk from an expensive unfamiliar appliance, and it worked.

The names

Spangler continued to earn royalties and worked for the company until his death in 1915. He did reasonably well — better than many in this archive — but the company carried the other name.

In Britain the outcome went further still: hoover became a common verb. People hoover their carpets with vacuum cleaners made by other manufacturers entirely, using the name of the harness maker who bought the patent from the janitor who invented it.

See the original

The full text and figures of US889823 are on patents.us.