Domestic Suction: The Noisy Invention of the Motorized Vacuum

Before the turn of the 20th century, cleaning a home involved aggressively beating carpets and sweeping floors, a process that merely relocated thick clouds of dust from the ground into the air. In 1901, an engineer named Hubert Cecil Booth observed a crude machine blowing air to clean train seats. He realized that the exact opposite-a massive, motorized suction engine-was the true solution to the...