Illustration by Jan A. Igoe
Every morning, my first mission of the day (once I’m thoroughly caffeinated) is to capture all the fur my dogs produced during their nightly shed-a-thon.
Piles of fluff just drift around my living room like malignant tumbleweeds, waiting to stick their magic appendages to the nearest baseboard. No matter how violently I vacuum, they’re back before I finish. Oppressed and overworked, vacuum cleaners usually die young in my house.
For a machine that’s been evolving for more than 100 years, you’d think vacuums would be a lot harder to kill.
A couple of centuries ago, if you were wealthy enough to afford a rug, there was only one way to clean it. You had to drag it outside, hang it over a fence and beat the dusty daylights out of it with a corn broom. If you were really well-off, you could pay somebody to beat it for you. In the late 1800s, vacuuming was a luxury enjoyed only by the wealthy.
At first, there were two schools of thought on how vacuums should operate. Several inventors attempted to banish dirt by blowing it away. (Between you and me, I’ve tried a leaf blower once or twice.) It took an innovative engineer to convince everybody that sucking dirt up was the best way to go.
Hubert Cecil Booth, founder of the British Vacuum Cleaner Company, went from designing suspension bridges to championing suction vacuums. His inaugural contraption was an enormous, noisy, stagecoach-type thing, which required a horse to drag it from mansion to mansion and a crew to operate it. Huge hoses were fed through windows to suck tons of dirt from famous places like Buckingham Palace, according to sciencemuseum.org. High society Brits would host vacuum parties with tea and scones to celebrate the occasion.
The next giant step for vacuumkind came in the early 1900s. James Murray Spangler, an inventor with asthma, was tired of sweeping dusty carpets, so he slapped the first portable electric vacuum cleaner together from spare parts. No horse required. Just a motor, fan and his wife’s pillowcase strapped to a broom handle. Then William Hoover got hold of it, and the rest is boring upright history. There were bagless and cordless vacs with HEPA filters, but no major innovations until robotic cleaners came along.
At last there was a breakthrough in dirt defense that doesn’t require pushing. I hesitated for years, but Prime Day finally enticed me to add a robotic vacuum to my arsenal. We call her Abigail. She was only half unboxed before my dogs identified her as an alien predator and attacked.
When you introduce unfamiliar dogs to each other, you should always do it on neutral ground with each dog on a leash. So I put Abigail on a leash, took her outside, and let them sniff. Since Abigail is round, there’s no way to tell her head from her tail, so the dogs weren’t quite sure where to focus their research. But once they determined she was not carnivorous, they allowed Abigail back inside.
If she lasts a couple of years, it will be a rare achievement for any vacuum in our home. The copious accumulation of dog hair seems to shorten their lifespan. I have high hopes for Abigail, although she is very dumb. She waits until 2 a.m. to beep that she’s stuck somewhere and needs an immediate rescue. Ten minutes later, she’s stuck again. But if she can cut down on the furry tumbleweeds, I’ll break out the tea and scones.
Jan A. Igoe has a collection of mops that will live longer than her vacuums. They tend to last when no one pushes them around. Next Prime Day, it’s on to a robotic mop! Say hello and share your cleaning tips at HumorMe@SCLiving.coop.