Welcome to Vacuumland. I agree that's a cool looking vac and would be just right for cleaning vintage cars. You could even get an Electrolux floor & furniture air-driven polisher--the kind with the hammertone gray or hammertone blue finish--(or another brand that carried it) and polish your autos with polishing pads (check out eBay).
I wanted to let you know that there is a search engine on each Vacuumland forum's main page that will give you much information at your fingertips. I searched "Revelation" and found lots of good reading material and photos.
Here is one by hydralique that I thought you'd find interesting:
Many early canister vacs had no wheels, even expensive ones often had runners instead. The concept was that you'd place the vac near where you wanted to clean and then use the hose to clean that area, after which you'd move the vac to the next spot.
The Compact wasn't originally designed for residential use but rather to allow for quick cleaning of the new big airliners that began to be produced in large numbers after WWII. Interstate Engineering was part of Howard Hughes' empire and the early vacs were made in El Segundo, right south of LAX and in the heart of the SoCal aerospace industry. For aircraft use two wheels were plenty as the vacs got carried about the cabin as crews cleaned during layovers.
By the late '50s more canisters had wheels so Compact dropped the front skids in favor of a single front wheel with the C-5 introduced about '60. Because Compacts were sold like Kirbys by door to door salesmen, Interstate was careful about any sales by vac shops - these were the machines branded "Revelation" and are rare. Most Revelations are C-3 models, I've never seen a C-4 Revelation. What's odder is that the C-5 was already out with the single front wheel: I have a 24th anniversary C-5. My assumption is that this Revelation must have been a way to use up some old C-4 castings left over once the C-5 came out. It's probably really rare. The C-5 itself only lasted a couple of years before the 4 wheel C-6 came out; that was made for many years.
