The Vacuum Cleaner: A History That Sucks
Ehren Gerhard
Mrs. Anderson
English IV
March 28th, 2004
In our past, we have always demonstrated an insatiable quest for cleanliness. For example, as early as 2300 BC twig brooms were being used to tidy up peoples cave dwellings. (Inventors) In the early 20th century, the United States was enveloped with the rise of the industrial revolution. Surprisingly, one close to home detail was yet to be improved: home sanitation. Later, a revolutionary idea to suck in dirt and dust
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And so became the patent field and sales market. Door to door cleaning became prevalent with such inventors as Hubert Booth and John Thurman. In St. Louis, John Thurman started a horse drawn door-to-door vacuum service similar to Booth's. His vacuuming services were priced at $4 per visit in 1903. He invented his gasoline-powered vacuum cleaner in 1899 and some historians consider it the first. Thurman's machine was patented on October 3, 1899 On August 30th, 1901. (Dream) Hubert Booth received a British patent for a vacuum cleaner that took the form of a large, horse-drawn, petrol-driven unit. It was parked outside the building to be cleaned with long hoses fed through windows. As Booth demonstrated his vacuuming device in a restaurant in 1901, two inspired Americans introduced variations on the same theme. Corinne Dufour invented a device that sucked dust into a wet sponge. David E. Kenney’s huge machine was installed in the cellar and connected to a network of pipes leading to each room in the house.
This article contains Huxley's views on many controversial subjects and their relationship todirt. But the most prominent comparison was between the social classesand the level of hygiene associated with each one. Mr. Huxley goes on toillustrate this difference with a variety of metaphors. He talks abouthow this view changed throughout history, and how great people tried toinfluence social changewith implementation of their plans for widespreadequality in cleanliness.
Beginning in 1850, disease was underway again in Rio de Janeiro after being absent since 1686. In just three years, 6,500 people died of Yellow Fever. The fever disappeared for some time only to return again in the 1890’s where 14,944 died of the disease. Between 1850 and 1901, 56,000 people died of Yellow Fever alone. In response to all the diseases, the Central Board of Public Hygiene was created and they had to act fast in order to prevent any more deaths. The Central Board of Public Hygiene’s job was to lay plumbing underground that would be the underground sewage system. This reform was supposed to eliminate “waste” on the streets and to have cleaner water throughout the city. Instead, disease worsened as the years went on. Of course, like most issues, someone was to blame and those who were blamed were the servants that lived on the streets and worked in the houses. It was obvious that since they were living in the filth they were clearly spreading the disease and when they would work in the houses of their servants they would pass the disease down to the children and the rest of the household. This eventually led to the destruction of cortiços.
by Henry T. Sampson (1971), the toilet by T. Elkins (1897), the dryer by G.T. Sampson (1862), the elevator by Alexander Miles (1867), the fire extinguisher by T. Marshall (1872), the gas mask by Garrett Morgan (1914), the typewriter by Burridge and Marshman (1885), and the list goes on. Prejudice c...
Medical science had not yet discovered the importance of antiseptics in preventing infection. Water was contaminated and soldiers sometimes ate unripened or spoiled food. There weren’t always clean rags available to clean wounds. Because of frequent shortages of water, surgeons often went days without washing their hands or instruments. So now germs were passing from patient to patient.
“ The floor was half an inch deep with blood, in site of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling ot through holes; it must have made the floor slippery…” (Sinclair, 1906, l. 653). Sanitation was really lacking because you never know
Before the 19th Century, sewage disposal was virtually unknown until the first American cities were built around the 1700’s. Human waste was originally disposed of in the woods, but some wealthy Virginians built large houses and used chamber pots to "do their business" indoors, and the contents would be thrown into the back yard. Later, as towns developed, waste was tossed into the streets to decompose or be washed away in the rainstorms (Virginia Places, 2010). Privies or outhouses were also built in back yards and were commonly used to dispose of waste. Toilets, also known as “water closets,” were put into homes in the mid 19th Century in the United States. The water closet had indoor plumbing where piping was run through the roof, and a gravity ...
Sanitary conditions in the West were practically non-existent. In the cities, horse manure covered the streets. Housewives emptied garbage, dishwater, and chamber pots into the middle of the city streets where free-roaming pigs devoured the waste. The pigs left their urine and feces on the streets. It was not easy to wash clothes. Many people had clothes splattered with manure, mud, sweat, and tobacco juice. Privies, or necessary houses were often to close to the homes with a very noticeable odor on hot and/or windy days. If a family had a kitchen, all the members washed at the sink each day, without soap, rubbing the dirt off with a coarse towel. Eventually, many cold bedrooms had a basin, ewer (pitcher), cup, and cupboard chamber pot. Bed bugs and fleas covered many of the travelers’ beds. “Isaac Weld saw filthy beds swarming with bugs.” These insects followed the travelers, crawling on their clothes and skin.
The outbreak of foodborne diseases influenced the nation to become concerned of germs in the presence of their cooking. Scientists during the late 19th century insisted that the mothers’ cooking did not do an adequate job of killing the bacterial microbes that were, in turn, killing the community. This belief of the scientists spread throughout America and resulted in a majority of people purchasing their bread from factories instead of homemaking it. However, germ suspicion continued to occur and America began to inspect the bakeries to ensure that they met healthy standards. Upon inspection, many of the committee members on the New York State Factory Investigating Committee believed that the real problem was the cleanliness of immigrant workers. For instance, “The city health commissioner, Ernest Lederle, argue...
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines hand hygiene as, “a general term that applies to routine hand washing, antiseptic hand wash, antiseptic hand rub, or surgical hand antisepsis.” (Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2013) The idea of hand washing has been around for centuries. In the mid-1800’s Ignaz Semmelweis established that hospital-acquired diseases were transmitted via the hands of health care workers. After Semmelweis observed physicians and health care workers in the obstetric setting and studied mortality rates he recommended that hands be scrubbed in a chlorinated lime solution before coming in contact with every patient. Following the implementation of Semmelweis’s recommendation mortality rates associated with childbirth fell from seven percent to three percent. Although Semmelweis observation and recommendations were significant fellow physicians and colleagues did not adopt them. The 1980’s posed as a crucial time for health care in the sense of hand hygiene. This was when the first national hand hygiene guidelines were published in the 1980s. In 1995 and 1996, the CDC/Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) in the USA suggested that either antimicrobial soap or a waterless antiseptic agent be use...
This case paper is about Lucinda, a 20-year old single female, who suffers from the Cleaning/Contamination Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) condition since she was very young. She is characterized by intrusive thoughts, images, and/or impulses that cause distress (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors that are performed to neutralize these intrusions (Coles, Schofield & Pietrefesa, 2006), i.e. her repetitive cleaning and washing behaviors. Her anxiety became so excessive that it interfered with her daily life. She perceived that some undesirable object(s), in this case the germs, were still on the things that she will come in contact with, even after she had repeatedly washing and/or cleaning them. Her anxiety further degraded both her social and occupational functioning, which resulted in considerable impacts to herself, her friends and family. In additions, her anxiety also caused her not be able to function to her fullest potential academically and to socialize with her friends and family as much as she wanted to.
Cleanness in the Victorian era was one of the top priority of them right next to beauty, this was another thing the victorians were obsessed with, despite the cities being dirty and it was a constant battle. Washroom/Bathrooms were almost a necessity in the middle and especially the higher class. Heated- Baths that were heated by gas, quite dangerous by how they were designed, it was in a way if you were not careful it was possible to “Boil” yourself alive. Toilets were pretty dangerous too since they had a way of having a spontaneous combustion, because methane gas of the Sewer system causing too much pressure. It wasn’t til Thomas Crapper invented the ballcock in which prevent the methane gas from causing too much pressure and possibly seeping into the bathroom.
John Kay, an English weaver invented the flying shuttle, a product that could cut cotton twice as fast. When other inventors saw what Kay had made, they wanted to do the same. One problem still remained. Yarn was not being fed fast enough through the weaver, but in 1769, two new inventions solved the problem. The spinning jenny and the water-powered frame, both of which fed yarn through the flying shuttle faster. Cleaning the cotton was a boring and time consuming job, so in 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. The gin cleaned cotton up to 50 times faster than a human could.
In 1874 William Blackstone, a Bluffton, Indiana merchant and manufacturer of corn planters, built a birthday present for his wife. It was a machine that removed and washed away dirt from clothes. It consisted of a wooden tub in which there was a flat piece of wood containing six small wooden pegs. The inner mechanism looked something like a small milking stool. It was moved back and forth by means of a handle and an arrangement of gears. Dirty clothes were snagged on the wooden pegs an...
... (Demet Leblebici, 2012). “The indoor environment has the biggest effect on productivity in relation to job stress and job dissatisfaction”, says Leblebici, and “that the more satisfied workers are with their jobs the better the company is likely to perform in terms of subsequent profitability and particularly productivity”(Demet Leblebici, 2012). Lastly, Leblebici showed findings that “interaction was perceived to be the component to have the most positive effect on productivity, and distraction was perceived to have the most negative” (Demet Leblebici, 2012). The opposite of clean is dirty and dirt is a distraction in the workplace. According to Jennifer Benton, Sophie Harvey, and Simone Schnall, the authors of With a Clean Conscious, “cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments and can be driven by intuitive processes, rather than deliberate reasoning”.
Before the 1970s, when environmental regulation became commonplace in the United States, environmental health was not a main priority. Sanitation infrastructure was lackluster, high levels of air and water pollution was normal and disease outbreaks were common. These environmental health problems were not new and were not unique to the United States; they were present on a global scale. Cholera outbreaks in London, typhoid fever outbreaks in Chicago and New York were all a result of weak environmental laws. Rodent infestations in the fourteenth century riddled