History

The vacuum cleaner is the appliance that frightens the cat, is chased by the dog, and, perhaps, gives a home the most immediate appearance of being clean. Imagining a home without a vacuum cleaner is next to impossible; yet, like many time-and effort-saving devices, its widespread use is less than a century old.
History
There were no mechanical devices for cleaning rugs or carpeting until the 1840s. Before then, carpet cleaning was the duty of housemaids for the well-to-do and the women of the family for everyone else. Most rugs were made of rags that were woven together or braided in long ropes that were then stitched together as floor coverings. Carpets were woven of finer materials. Rugs and small carpets were taken outside several times a year, hung on heavy clothes-lines, and beaten with fan-shaped beaters to drive out the dust. Larger carpets were left in place and brushed; curtains were also cleaned by beating and brushing.
When carpets and rugs were cleaned, the furniture and many ornaments that characterized the fussy Victorian style had to be moved: a time-consuming and inefficient process. Even worse, the beaten-or brushed-out dust quickly resettled on the floors and furniture. This, of course, did nothing to sanitize the house.
Relief from this arduous task was still a long time coming. The vacuum cleaner had three significant ancestors, the first of which was the street-sweeping machine. Public streets collected much of the waste from private homes and were filthy. Joseph Whitworth, an enterprising English gentleman of the 1840s, mounted large coarse-bristled brushes onto a rotating drum inside a horse-drawn van. The turning brushes picked up street dirt and deposited it in the van. The home carpet sweeper was invented in 1858 by H. H. Herrick, but its complexity and inefficiency limited its success.