By Mark Jackson
“The commercial manufacture of the electric vacuum cleaner by William H. Hoover (1849-1932) in the early twentieth century had initially been driven by a desire to find a solution to dust-induced asthma. In 1907, irritated in the manner in which brushing rugs at work aggravated his asthma, James Murray Spangler (1848-1915) a janitor in a department store in Ohio, had devised and patented a suction machine (his “carpet sweeper and cleaner”) that he hoped would extract dust away from where he was working. Spangler interested first Hoover’s wife and then Hoover himself, who bought the patent, established his Electric Suction Sweeper Company, and began manufacturing and selling his first electric vacuum cleaner, Model O, initially in America in 1908 and subsequently across the world. A similar attempt to reduce allergies to straw dust also apparently motivated the production of vacuum cleaners by Bissell.”
(This is a passage from Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady, published in 2006 by Reaktion Books.)
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