It always used to happen right in the middle of a good stickball game. We would really be going at it, a tough game, and low and behold, the street cleaner would come plodding down the street. We always cleared away a good amount of space, just in case they would kick up a little debris and send it shooting like a bullet. I’m not sure they actually did.
Anyway, we would watch the thing amble along. We knew it would get to the end of the street and turn around, only to come back and finish the other side. A double interruption. I’d always say, “Why can’t they come around at supper time?” Then. “I don’t think they’re doing much of anything, anyway.” Dumb kid.
As it turns out, street cleaners had been wiping up streets long before we came along. And they truly are scrubbing away. I can attest to this, after living in a city where horse carriages frequented our streets. A good street cleaner would whisk those urine smells right away.
These days, I don’t think so much about them, but I noticed that the first street cleaning machine was used on this date, December 15, 1854, in Philadelphia.
They didn’t start in the United States, though. It came around with the Industrial Revolution in the 1840s. Back then, Manchester, England, had become known as one of the most developed industrial cities. It was the home of one of the largest textile industries in the world. They had the first passenger rail service.
So, they were making a lot of bad dirt in their city. And all of this progress made it one of the unhealthiest places to live because of the amounts of trash that piled up on the streets.
It seems that when there is a problem to be solved, the thinkers get to thinking. In this case, it was a man named Joseph Whitworth. He invented the first street cleaner in 1843 and called it “The Patent Street Sweeping Machine of Manchester.”
In the United States, the first street sweeping machine was invented and patented in 1849 by C.S. Bishop. I suppose that is the one that finally made its way to regular duty in Philadelphia. These early sweepers were horse-drawn.
Of course, as time wore on, and so did technology, they became motorized, and today’s street sweepers look much different than the early versions. It’s a big industry. I couldn’t find the total number of street sweepers in the United States. Still, currently, the Department of Sanitation in NYC has approximately 450 traditional street sweepers in use across the five boroughs, including 27 hybrid-electric units. So, there’s a whole big bunch in the U.S.
By looking at them, they may not seem too effective. Yet, they are. Among other things, there is a little vacuum system that takes the particles, sucks them in, and stores them in a debris bin inside the unit. The early versions had a conveyor belt to do this work.
In some countries, though, they still use human street sweepers. We saw teams of these guys while visiting Amsterdam, working in tandem, like a machine themselves, as they’d move through an area.
I can only wish we had street cleaners on a different level. A little machine that would come along and clean up things like misinformation. Or perhaps they could suck up the debris of hate groups. Maybe clean up those Christmas cards where families are posing with their AK-47s and such. Just to put the trash where it belongs.
Tonight I shall dream of teams of little tiny street sweepers, rolling along….
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Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“If something bad smells in the basement, it will eventually make its way to the attic.”
― Anthony Liccione
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“I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do.”
― Jana Stanfield
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Sweep it clean. Streets and more.
