ents serve to
concentrate the flow of air as it enters the vacuum.
Since suction depends on the size and shape of the
passage, different attachments are better suited to
At the most basic level, this is all there is to a vacuum
cleaner. Since the electric vacuum's invention a century ago,
many innovative thinkers have expanded and modified this idea
to create different sorts of vacuum systems. In the next
section, we'll look at some of the more popular types of
vacuum cleaners that have popped up over the years.
All Shapes and Sizes
In the last couple of
sections, we looked at the most typical types of vacuum
cleaners: the upright and canister designs, both
of which collect dirt in a porous bag. For most of the history
of vacuum cleaners, these have been the most popular designs,
but there are many other ways to configure the suction system.
Photo courtesy Charles Lester
A Fairfax S-1 dating from the 1950s: The
Fairfax combined functionality with aesthetic
The first vacuum cleaners, dating from the mid 1800s, used
hand-operated bellows to create suction. These came in
all shapes and sizes, and were of minimal help in daily
cleaning. The first electric vacuum cleaners showed up in the
early 1900s, and were an immediate success (though for many
decades they were sold only as a luxury item).
One very popular vacuum-cleaner design from this era is all
but extinct today. This design, the central vacuum
system, turns your whole house into a cleaner. A motorized
fan in the basement or outside the house creates suction
through a series of interconnected pipes in the walls.
To use the cleaner, you turn on the fan motor and attach a
hose to any of the various pipe outlets throughout the house.
The dirt is sucked into the pipes and deposited in a large
canister, which you only empty a few times a year.
For heavy-duty cleaning jobs, a lot of people use
wet/dry vacuum cleaners, models that can pick up
liquids as well as solids. Liquid material would soak paper or
cloth filters, so these cleaners need a different sort of
collection system. The basic design is simple: On its way
through the cleaner, the air stream passes through a wider
area, which is positioned over a bucket. When it
reaches this larger area, the air stream slows down,
for the same reason that the air speeds up when flowing
through a narrow attachment. This drop in speed effectively
loosens the air's grip, so the liquid droplets and heavier
dirt particles can fall out of the air stream and into the
bucket. After you're done vacuuming, you simply dump out
whatever has collected in this bucket.
One type of wet-dry vacuum is the steam
cleaner. These vacuums dispense cleaning fluid onto the
carpet, massage it in, and then suck up the fluid along
One of the newest vacuum-cleaner variations is the
so-called "cyclone vacuum." This machine, developed in the
1980s by James Dyson, doesn't have a traditional bag or filter
system. Instead, it sends the air stream through one or more
cylinders, along a high-speed spiral path. This
motion works something like a clothes
dryer, a roller
coaster or a merry-go-round. As the air stream shoots
around in a spiral, all of the dirt particles experience a
powerful centrifugal force: They are whipped outward,
away from the air stream. In this way, the dirt is extracted
from the air without using any sort of filter. It simply
collects at the bottom of the cylinder.
The double cylinder dirt container in a
Hoover cyclone-type vacuum cleaner. As the air stream
spins around the edge of the cylinders, dirt is whipped
out so it collects at the
The cyclone system is a marked improvement on traditional
vacuum cleaners -- there are no bags to replace and the
suction doesn't decrease as you suck up more dirt. In the
future, we are sure to see more improvements on the basic
vacuum-cleaner design, with new suction mechanisms and
collection systems. But the basic idea, using a moving air
stream to pick up dirt and debris, is most likely here to stay
for some time.
For more information, check out the links on the next page.
Lots More Information!
More Great