When I hear Hoover, I think of two things. First the vacuum cleaner. Then the dam. Seldom does #31, Herbert, come to mind.
But my initial thought always goes to the sweeper. One would think that the Hoover vacuum cleaner was invented by someone named Hoover. But that simply isn’t so. The man behind the idea was an inventor named James Spangler. He created the first portable electric vacuum cleaner in 1907.
Good Jimmy Spangler was working as a janitor working at the Zollinger Department Store in Canton, Ohio. That is also home of the Football Hall of Fame, which, unlike the vacuum cleaner, does not suck.
Anyway, that is where James, or Jim, or Jimmy, had the idea for a portable electric vacuum cleaner. I suppose a janitor has a lot of sweeping to do.
Not only that, the standard “vacuum cleaners” at the time were big things. So big, they were pulled by horses and only used to sweep things up in the great outdoors.
So James decided to come up with his own version of a vacuum cleaner.
He already had invented a thing or two. In 1897, he patented a grain harvester. Then, in 1893, he acquired another patent for a hay rake.
As far as the vacuum went, he started toying with an old fan motor. He put that fan on a soap box and stapled the whole thing to a broom handle. Finally, he fashioned a sweeper bag from an old pillowcase. Of course, he had some tweaking to do, but the whole thing came together, and he received a patent for it in 1908.
He decided to market this “suction sweeper” on his own. He called his business the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. But, he couldn’t find any investors. But then, he showed his new sweeper to his cousin, a man named William Hoover.
William Hoover made and sold saddles and harnesses and such. Horse accessories. But, he was having financial troubles of his own because those pesky cars were starting to replace horses on a regular basis. Hoover had been looking for a business opportunity. And just then, he heard about Jim’s vacuum cleaner.
Hoover was impressed when he witnessed this new-fangled cleaner. He purchased James Spangler’s business and his patents. He became the president of the Electric Suction Sweeper Company and renamed it the Hoover Company.
Things were slow to start for Hoover. But he had an idea to offer customers free trials. He hired a number of door-to-door salesmen who went right into the homes of housewives, who were beating their rugs with tennis rackets. He showed them the miracle with a flip of the switch, and sales began to boom. Before long, everyone had a Hoover.
Obviously, there were lots of improvements over the years. And good James Spangler stayed on with the Hoover Company as the superintendent. He worked diligently for years. It was a family thing, as his wife, son, and daughter all worked for the Hoover company too.
But here is the part that really sucks. Spangler died in January 1914, the night before he was scheduled to take his first vacation.
I, for one, am thankful for James and William, as I use a vacuum cleaner every day. I have a thing about clean floors, and so, I sweep.
Holy Hoovers. We learned, at our Catholic grade school, that “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” I’m thinking it is the only chance I have.
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“Everybody wants to save the earth; no one wants to help mom do the dishes.”
— P.J. O’Rourke
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“Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
― George Bernard Shaw
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Oh. This really sucks.
