Sweeping with a Vacuum Cleaner

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Thomas Pagonis calling from Huntsville, Alabama.

So the other day I was in my apartment and it’s mostly hardwood floor with carpet in the bedroom. That’s going to become important here in a second. My girlfriend, now fiance, looks at me and says, I’m going to do some sweeping. And I said, OK, thanks. You know, and I’m sitting there in the bedroom. And a few minutes later, she comes in and there’s this loud noise behind me. And I turn around and she’s vacuuming. And I think, well, that’s not really sweeping, vacuuming. So I asked her, what are you doing? And I thought you were going to clean my living room and sweep the dust away. And she goes, well, this is sweeping. And I said, well, no, it’s not. And she looked at me and with a straight face said, this is a sweeper and it sweeps. And I said, that is not a sweeper. It does not sweep. It’s a vacuum cleaner and it vacuums. So that was sort of the genesis of this question. So I’ve been teasing her for, I mean, this was a couple years ago. I’ve been teasing her for years about it. And I was in the midst of doing it one day, and I said, you know who can settle this? You know who can tell me more about this? Away with words. So that’s how we got here.

Thomas, remind us where each of you is from. So I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. And Rebecca, my fiance, is from Ohio, the Midwest, which I know they have all sorts of lingo there.

Okay. Okay. Well, this makes a whole lot of sense to me. I had a very similar experience back when I shared a home with somebody from Fort Wayne, Indiana, because she said, would you mind getting out the sweeper? And so I went to the closet, and all I saw was a vacuum cleaner. And so I said, I don’t see one. And she said, the sweeper is right there. So it’s not just you two. This actually is something of a regional thing. Some people call them sweepers and some people call them vacuum cleaners, which has to do with the history of this device. Because, you know, back in the 1870s or so, people used carpet sweepers. This was the non-electric device that, you know, had little rollers. Maybe you have it. Do you have that kind of device in your home?

No, it’s like what you would think of, like a plug-in-the-wall electric vacuum cleaner. So, Martha, you’re talking about the ones you might see in a restaurant where they’re quietly pushing them around so as not to disturb the patrons, right? To pick up the debris on the floor.

Right, exactly. They have wheels and brushes to pick up the dirt, but they can do it quietly, as Grant said. People were using those back in the late 1800s, but in the early 1900s, people started producing lots of versions of electric cleaners that used some kind of vacuum. And they went by lots of different names like domestic cyclone and that kind of thing. In 1907, there was a department store janitor in Canton, Ohio. His name was James Spangler, and he invented one of the first versions of this. I think it was the first portable electric vacuum cleaner, which he called the electric suction sweeper. That’s how he patented it, as the electric suction sweeper. And he eventually sold that patent to a guy named William Hoover, which might ring a bell because some people call those vacuum cleaners Hoovers. And so the terms sweeper and carpet sweeper stuck around and they were in advertisements. Some people called them vacuum sweepers. But the term sweeper for this suction device stuck around primarily in northern Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio primarily. And so that makes perfect sense. So how were you introduced to it in the newspapers and in the stores? That’s what your community came to know it as.

Okay. All right. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. Yeah, take care now. Okay, take care. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye.

As soon as you’re done running the sweeper or the vacuum and you can hear yourself, give us a call on the toll-free line, 877-929-9673. That’s toll-free, 24 hours a day in the United States and Canada.