NOTEWORTHY INVENTIONS:
Answer: Hoover.
QUIZ: VACUUM INVENTORS
IT'S A FACT • In the early days of vacuum cleaners, Hoover salesmen were required to make 15 sales calls each week. In 1922, there were 748 salesmen making a total of 549,780 sales calls that year. 31% of people pitched bought the product.
• In 1907 Murray Spangler was trying to make a living as an inventor. To make ends meet, he worked nights as a janitor in a department store in Canton, Ohio. Spangler’s asthma acted up every time he cleaned the store’s rugs with a broom because he was allergic to the dust. He had seen suction sweepers but they were awkward and often ineffective. He knew there had to be a better way.
CLEANING UP • Melville and Anna Bissell owned a crockery and china shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the late 1800s. Melville had allergies and Anna did her best to keep their store dust-free. But there was a lot of sawdust in the shop and it clung to the carpets on the floor. In frustration, Anna asked Melville if he couldn’t come up with an invention to keep their carpets cleaner. • In 1876, Melville Bissell patented the Bissell Carpet Sweeper. Although there were already carpet sweepers on the market, Bissell’s model was light and easy to use, it worked on uneven floors, and it picked up dirt without creating a cloud of dust. Bissell Carpet Sweepers proved to be so popular that by 1883 Melville and Anna had given up their crockery shop and gone into the carpet sweeper business full time. • When Melville died in 1889, Anna took over the business until her death in 1934 at the age of 87. Anna Bissell was one of America’s first female CEOs. The Bissell Company is still run by family members. Their carpet sweepers are most commonly found in places like restaurants where crumbs regularly need to be swept without disturbing diners.
• Using a tin soap box, an electric fan, a rotating brush, a pillow case, and a broom handle, he put together a contraption. He showed it to his cousin, Susan. She used it in her home and raved about it to her husband, who everyone called Boss. • Boss owned a leather goods manufacturing shop but he was so interested in the invention that he bought Spangler’s patent, hired him as a partner, and soon had six employees making suction sweepers in the corner of his shop. • Boss placed an ad in the "Saturday Evening Post" giving ten days free use of a Suction Sweeper to anyone who wrote with a request. Rather than simply mailing them a sweeper, he sent the customers to local stores that had agreed to become dealers. In short order he had a nationwide network of dealers as well as teams of salesmen who went door-to-door demonstrating the product, ensuring that the vacuum cleaners soon became a standard household item. • The vacuum company, named after Boss’s last name, is one of the top vacuum manufacturers in the world today. What company is it? (Answer at top of next column)
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King CROSSWORD
• The average carpet will harbor anywhere between three tablespoons and three cups of dust and dirt per square yard.
Weekly SUDOKU
IT'S A FACT • One kind of early day vacuum cleaner was powered by bellows that were connected to a rocking chair. The man would read the evening newspaper, smoking his pipe and rocking, while the wife did the vacuuming.
FACT