How Accurate is this Article on "How the Vacuum Cleaner Began"???

[unimatic1140]

Hi everyone, I'm experimenting on Automatic Ephemera with free to download, text based ephemera documents and articles.

I've just posted an article that was written in 1957 that gives the history of the Vacuum Cleaner. I found it to have some very interesting points that I've never heard before. You can read the article here. For those who are interested in reading this and might like to comment, please let me know what you think of it and how accurate you think this is. I've read a lot of stuff in my day about the history of washing machines and some are spot on, others are way way off.

These new free articles and documents will be scanned and sent through a OCR system to convert the scan image into actual text. Now OCR technology (optical character recognition) has come a long way in the past decade, but it is not perfect so you still might see a few mistakes in the text that I didn't catch. But it's a great way to permanently share public domain documents.

From now on when you see any ephemera document on Automatic Ephemera where it's index bar is highlighted in pink, these are the new live documents (see image below). I created a reader so you can read the them on line. Since these are completely free, they will be ad supported, but nothing too intrusive.

I am also experimenting with social media commenting in these articles, so at the bottom you can post comments if you wish right on the article page if you have a Facebook account.

Thanks everybody, more history to be saved and shared coming soon!

http://www.automatice.org

 

[electrolux137]

Interesting article, but it's odd that there's not a single mention of Electrolux.

 

[unimatic1140]

I thought the exact same thing about Electrolux Charles. The start of the piece states that it was "recalled by a group of industry veterans". I wonder if the authors simply didn't get to talk to a Electrolux rep at that time? Interesting tid-bits about the history of some vacuum brands in it for sure but I always question when I read things like this. I would like to think it is accurate and some of it sounds very viable, but you know how we think.

 

[dysonman1]

Not a mention of Rexair either. You would think that putting water into a bagless vacuum cleaner that never loses suction, in 1937, would be noteworthy. I also find it interesting how they brag about the 'discovery' of 'filter paper' in 1940 by Ed Yonkers, yet the 2 layers of cellulose used in a Filter Queen filter cone was nothing compared to the 14 layers of cellulose used by Air-Way since 1920.

 

[unimatic1140]

Thank you for your input Tom

Yup I figured it was full of big holes of missing information and who knows what kind of relationships this magazine had with certain brands. I'd be curious to know as Electrical Merchandising was one of the the major publications in the appliance and electrics field during that time so it was widely read in the industry.