58 Fun Facts About Vacuum Cleaners

In the children's TV series Teletubbies, what is the name of the vacuum cleaner that keeps the house tidy?

Noo-Noo, a vacuum cleaner with a mind of his own, tidies the Teletubbies' home. When he misbehaves and sucks up their tubby toast, they shout 'Naughty Noo-Noo' and give chase.

In which film comedy does the villains' ship turn into a giant maid and vacuum the air off a planet?

Spaceballs. In Mel Brooks's Star Wars send-up the villains' ship becomes 'Mega-Maid' and sucks up the planet Druidia's air, until the hero throws her vacuum cleaner into reverse.

What name did Ives McGaffey give the hand-cranked, fan-driven sweeping machine he patented in Chicago in 1869?

Whirlwind was Ives McGaffey's name for it, though the patent calls it only a 'sweeping machine'. Most of his stock is said to have burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and only two are known to survive.

Which British engineer built the horse-drawn 'Puffing Billy' suction cleaner in 1901?

Hubert Cecil Booth's petrol-driven pump was too big to take indoors, so it stood in the street while long hoses went in through the windows. A visit became a show, and householders held 'vacuum tea parties' around it.

The Puffing Billy's inventor designed which fairground attractions for London, Blackpool, Paris and Vienna?

Ferris wheels, including Vienna's famous Riesenrad, were his work as a young engineer in the 1890s. His noisy street-side vacuum cleaner later landed him in court for frightening horses.

The British Vacuum Cleaner Company cleaned Westminster Abbey's carpets before whose coronation in 1902?

Edward VII. The job led to a demonstration at Buckingham Palace, and the royal household became a customer after seeing how much dirt the machine drew out of its carpets.

How did the Puffing Billy's inventor test his idea?

Sucking through a handkerchief on a chair in a restaurant left dust clinging to the underside of the cloth, proof that a filter could trap dirt. The story goes that he came up choking.

During the First World War, a fleet of vacuum cleaners removed 26 tons of dust from which London landmark?

The Crystal Palace. Naval reservists billeted in the huge glass hall had been struck by spotted fever, so the machines spent weeks clearing the dust from its girders.

James Murray Spangler, whose 1907 electric suction sweeper became the first Hoover, worked as what?

A department store janitor. Spangler was asthmatic and blamed the dust his carpet sweeper stirred up each night, so he rigged an old fan motor to it to pull the dirt away.

What household item caught the dirt on James Spangler's 1907 prototype suction sweeper?

A pillowcase. It hung from a broom handle behind a fan, and the idea carried over: Hoover's first model, a year later, still caught its dirt in a cloth bag on the handle.

William Henry Hoover, who bought Spangler's patent in 1908, was a manufacturer of what?

Leather goods. Hoover set men to assembling the sweepers in a corner of his leather shop and kept Spangler on to run production, with his pay based on royalties.

Hoover's first vacuum, the 1908 Model O, sold for how much?

$60. For that the buyer got a 40-pound machine, heavier and clumsier than a carpet sweeper, so it had to be sold on the deep-down dirt that a sweeper left behind.

How was Spangler connected to the man who bought his vacuum patent?

The buyer's wife was his cousin. Susan Hoover tried one of the sweepers at home, liked it and told her husband William, who bought the patent in 1908.

Which slogan did Hoover's advertising agency coin in 1919?

It beats as it sweeps as it cleans. The line sold Hoover's edge over suction-only rivals: its cleaner shook the carpet to loosen trodden-in grit before sweeping it away.

Which 1930s Hoover model was a lightweight vacuum cleaner held in one hand?

Dustette. Hoover made it for decades, and the National Trust's housekeeping manual came to recommend it for vacuuming fragile textiles through a nylon screen.

What did Hoover's 1950s Constellation cleaner do instead of rolling on wheels?

Floated on its own exhaust air. Shaped like a planet for the space age, it hovered behind its user like a small hovercraft, though the very first model still needed a wheeled dolly.

Hoover's disastrous 1992 'free flights' offer in Britain ended with Hoover Europe sold to which Italian firm?

Candy. Two flights with any £100 purchase drew far more takers than Hoover had planned for; the fiasco cost about £48 million and its American parent sold the European arm in 1995.

Which vacuum brand's founder, David, sold its lightweight uprights to hotels first and starred in its TV commercials?

Oreck. Competitors said a cleaner that light could not last, so David Oreck took it to hotels first, reasoning that if quality hotels bought it, anyone would.

Which brand of vacuum cleaners shares its parent company with Ninja blenders and air fryers?

Shark. The company was called Euro-Pro until 2015, when it renamed itself SharkNinja because its two brands had become far better known than its own name.

Electrolux's name combines Elektromekaniska with Lux, a company that originally made what?

Kerosene lamps. Salesman Axel Wenner-Gren brought the lamp maker and Elektromekaniska together in 1912 to build cleaners modelled on an American machine, and in 1919 the two names were joined.

Fisker & Nielsen, which launched a vacuum cleaner in 1910 and later became Nilfisk, was founded in which country?

Denmark. Founder Fisker, an engineer, began in 1906 with an old lathe in a Copenhagen backyard, making small electric motors, before a former colleague, Nielsen, joined him.

How have Kirby vacuum cleaners traditionally been sold?

Door-to-door demonstrations. By 1956 Kirby had some 4,000 salespeople on doorsteps; the method stuck in the trade because buyers could watch a cleaner pull dirt from their own carpet.

Scott Fetzer, then the maker of Kirby vacuum cleaners, was bought in 1986 by which investor's conglomerate?

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett later called the deal the prototype of the kind of acquisition he liked; a rival bidder had circled two years earlier, and he left the managers in place.

James Dyson's cyclone cleaner did away with which part, after his own vacuum kept clogging and losing suction?

The dust bag. Dyson noticed that a bag's pores clog with fine dust long before it is full, choking the airflow, and set out to build a cleaner that needed no bag at all.

How many prototypes did James Dyson famously build before his cyclonic vacuum cleaner finally worked?

5,127. Dyson counts 5,126 of them as failures; while he tinkered, his wife Deirdre's art teaching helped keep the family afloat.

In which country did Dyson's bright pink G-Force cleaner go on sale after makers at home turned it down?

Japan. The G-Force sold there for about $2,000 as a status symbol and won a 1991 design prize; the licence income paid for Dyson to start making cleaners under his own name.

Where did Dyson get the idea for cyclonic dirt separation?

A sawmill. Dyson studied the giant cone that spun sawdust out of its air, then taped a cardboard copy to his own vacuum cleaner to see whether the trick would work in miniature.

Before vacuum cleaners, James Dyson designed a wheelbarrow that replaced the wheel with what?

A ball. Dyson said it coped better with soft ground than a narrow wheel, and in 2005 he reused the idea under an upright vacuum cleaner.

In 2000 a British court ruled that Hoover's Triple Vortex cleaner had done what?

Infringed a rival's patent. Makers had refused to license James Dyson's cyclone in the 1980s; once his own DC01 became Britain's top seller, Hoover launched a cyclone cleaner of its own and lost to him in court.

Which Wiltshire town is home to Dyson's main British research campus?

Malmesbury. Dyson built its cleaners in the town until 2002, when production moved overseas; the engineers stayed, and a second campus later opened on a former airfield nearby.

In 2019 Dyson moved its corporate headquarters from Britain to which country?

Singapore. The firm said it wanted to be nearer its Asian customers and factories, but critics cried hypocrisy: founder James Dyson had been one of Brexit's loudest business backers.

Which company's Trilobite, first shown on Tomorrow's World in the 1990s, became the first robot vacuum cleaner on sale?

Electrolux. Named after an extinct sea creature that scoured the ocean floor, the Trilobite steered by bouncing ultrasound off the furniture like a bat, and cost about £1,000.

The earliest Roomba prototype, built in 1989, was made mostly of what?

Lego bricks. Engineer Joe Jones built it for a contest among colleagues because, he said, he was basically a slob who wanted a robot to clean his apartment; the Roomba took 13 more years.

iRobot, maker of the Roomba, was founded in 1990 by three members of which university's AI lab?

MIT. The young firm, first called IS Robotics, couldn't afford to develop a vacuum cleaner alone, so the Roomba waited years for an outside backer and arrived 12 years after the founding.

Which company's planned takeover of iRobot collapsed in January 2024 under antitrust pressure?

Amazon. EU regulators feared it could squeeze rival robot vacuums on its own marketplace, and the two firms called the deal off rather than fight on.

Which sitcom features DJ Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner rigged to roll around playing music?

Parks and Recreation. Tom Haverford's creation met its end in one episode, only to return as the Ghost of DJ Roomba, haunting a colleague with Black Eyed Peas on a loop.

Neato Robotics' XV-11 robot vacuum, launched in 2010, mapped rooms using what technology?

A rotating laser range-finder. The spinning laser let it map each room and clean along an efficient route, where the Roombas of the day simply bounced around until the floor was covered.

The 1979 Black & Decker DustBuster grew out of a tool designed for which programme?

The Apollo Moon missions. NASA hired Black & Decker to build a cordless drill for taking core samples on the Moon, and the firm reused that battery know-how in cordless tools for the home.

Which institution acquired an original 1979 DustBuster in 1995?

The Smithsonian. The hand vac began as one head of a workshop tool kit; research found women kept borrowing it for kitchen spills, so Black & Decker relaunched it for the home.

Britain's smiling Henry vacuum cleaners are built by Numatic at Chard, in which county?

Somerset. The face was almost an accident: at a slow trade show in Lisbon someone doodled a smile on a cleaner on the stand, visitors flocked to it, and Numatic drew up a proper one.

What is the name of Henry the vacuum cleaner's pink counterpart?

Hetty. Short for Henrietta, she was launched in 2007 with women buyers in mind, which is why hers is the only face in the family drawn with long eyelashes.

Melville Bissell built his 1876 carpet sweeper to clear packing debris from which kind of shop he ran?

A crockery store. China arrived in crates whose packing worked its way into the carpet; after Melville died in 1889, his wife Anna ran the sweeper company for the next thirty years.

Which German maker of premium vacuum cleaners began in 1899 with butter churns and cream separators?

Miele. Its butter churns soon turned into wooden washing machines, and by the late 1920s the family firm was making vacuum cleaners and dishwashers too.

Which of these banned the sale of new vacuum cleaners above 900 watts in 2017?

The European Union. Makers had been raising wattage because shoppers took it for cleaning power, energy experts said; a first cap of 1,600 watts had come in 2014.

Which artist sealed brand-new vacuum cleaners in fluorescent-lit display cases for a series called The New?

Jeff Koons. He first showed them in 1980 in the window of New York's New Museum; sealed away, the store-bought machines are kept for ever from the dirt they were built to remove.

Which Queen video shows Freddie Mercury vacuuming in a wig, earrings and a miniskirt?

I Want to Break Free. The band dressed as women to send up the British soap Coronation Street; home audiences got the joke, but the video caused a stir in America, where the single stalled at 45.

The generic American term for a wet/dry drum vacuum comes from which brand name?

Shop-Vac. The Pennsylvania firm shut without warning in September 2020 after 67 years; a Chinese toolmaker bought it three months later and reopened the plant.

When a vacuum cleaner's fan thins the air inside, what actually pushes dirt up the hose?

Atmospheric pressure. Nothing in the cleaner pulls: the fan only makes a partial vacuum, and the higher-pressure air of the room rushes in through the nozzle, carrying the dirt with it.

The unit used to express a vacuum cleaner's useful output power is called what?

Airwatt. A motor's input watts show only how much electricity it burns; airwatts are worked out from airflow and suction, so they show the power that actually reaches the hose.

Rexair's Rainbow vacuum cleaners trap dirt in what, instead of a bag?

A basin of water. Dust that gets wet cannot float back into the room, which is the whole pitch; the catch is that the dirty water has to be emptied after every use.

Rather than sucking, John Thurman's 1890s 'pneumatic carpet renovator' cleaned carpets by doing what?

Blowing dust into a receptacle. Thurman is often credited with the first motorized vacuum cleaner, yet his machine blasted carpets with jets of compressed air and never sucked at all.

From 1926 the British Vacuum Cleaner Company sold its household cleaners under which mischievous brand name?

Goblin. It was a long way from the firm's first machines, horse-drawn engines that cleaned houses through hoses fed in at the windows; as BVC, the business later specialised in industrial vacuum systems.

HEPA filters, now fitted to many vacuum cleaners, were first developed in the 1940s for which secret wartime effort?

The Manhattan Project. Scientists building the atomic bomb needed to stop radioactive dust escaping into the air, and adapted the filter paper used in soldiers' gas masks.

In which Nintendo game does the hero suck up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner called the Poltergust 3000?

Luigi's Mansion. Mario's timid brother has to stun each ghost with his flashlight before the vacuum can reel it in, a trick that carried the 2001 GameCube launch game into a long-running series.

Kirby vacuum cleaners have been built for about a century in which Ohio city?

Cleveland. Local inventor Jim Kirby designed the cleaner for the machine shop of George Scott and Carl Fetzer, which was making it by 1922 and put his name on it in the 1930s.

Which German company makes both Kobold vacuum cleaners and the Thermomix kitchen machine?

Vorwerk. The first Kobold of 1929 was built around a gramophone motor, a part the firm needed a new use for once radio had killed its gramophone sales.

Before Dyson's DC01 went on sale in 1993, market research gave a thumbs-down to which feature?

The clear bin. Researchers and retailers said nobody would want to watch the dirt pile up, but Dyson kept it; buyers liked seeing what came out of their carpets, and other makers soon copied it.

Hoover's streamlined cleaners of the 1930s hid the motor under a hood made of which early plastic?

Bakelite. Designer Henry Dreyfuss was hired to make the Depression-era Hoover desirable, and gave it a smooth hood and a lighter body that looked like a streamlined locomotive.