Many years ago, when War raged and Herbert Hoover fed the Belgians, Manhattan reporters found on the passenger list of an incoming steamer the name Herbert W. Hoover. They quivered. Here was the great relief-worker returning unexpectedly. He would give them an interview. A man came down the gangplank, a square-jawed man of port. They surrounded him; clamored questions. The man, nonplussed for but a moment, smiled:
"You think I'm Herbert C. Hoover. I'm not. He fills vacuums; I make them. I'm Herbert W. Hoover, of the Hoover Co. that makes the carpet cleaner."
President Herbert W. Hoover is sagacious. He it is who is credited with feeding a Boston girl and making her sleep, eat, exercise until the doctors at Tufts College knew just how much work she could do with a definite, measured amount of energy. Then he had her set to cleaning carpets with a broom, a carpet sweeper, a standard vacuum cleaner and a Hoover (combined carpet sweeper and vacuum cleaner). Tufts tests showed that the Hoover demanded least energy.
Last week Philadelphia newspapermen noted that President Hoover would go to Federal Court there. He has just filed suit against the Eureka Vacuum Cleaner Co. and the managers of the late Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition. He claims that they have done him out of the Grand Prize for carpet cleaning machines by "a serious error which has greatly prejudiced the Hoover Co."
Cleaning carpets by suction machinery is scarcely 20 years old. Before 1907 the housewife dragged a broom across the carpet nap or, when she could afford it, she bought a carpet sweeper. Bissel was the most popular make of sweeper. It had (and still has) a revolving brush that picked up lint, bread crumbs, hairpins, cigaret butts, needles, roaches, broom, straws, candy, germs. The matted filth made a capital nest for mice. But broom or sweeper cleaned only the surface of the carpet. To get the deeply imbedded dirt the careful housewife had to lift her carpets each spring, hang them on the clothesline in the back yard and then hope for a tramp to come along and whack the dirt out of the carpets. If no bummer appeared, she knew that she would be obliged to quarrel with her husband that evening before he would do the "dirty work." Therefore, she often beat the carpets herself and got her long hair, her eyes and her lungs filled with street filth tracked into her best parlor. Carpet beaters and carpet sweepers are still used where buggies exist.
In 1907 one Murray Spangler invented a machine which was a combination of a carpet sweeper and suction pump. A small electric motor created a vacuum that sucked the carpet up away from the floor and against a carpet sweeper brush. This brush, revolving, beat against the carpet and loosened the dirt, which the vacuum in turn pulled into a convenient sack. This was, and is, the Hoover. William H. Hoover and his three sons, (Herbert W., F. G., and D. P.) made it.
Another type of vacuum carpet cleaner moves across the floor, and sucks air laden with dirt from the carpet. This type does not beat the carpet. The Eureka is an excellent vacuum cleaner 01 this type.