Yep, you read the title right. Apparently the vacuum cleaner came out before electricity!
Well maybe not before, more like around the same time, but back then vacuum cleaners didn't use any electricity, but instead relied on energy produced manually by the human body, much like manual lawn mowers, to produce suction. Hence their name, manual vacuum cleaner.
Manual vacuum cleaners first appeared around the second half of the 19th century and were slowly replaced by electric vacuum cleaners after 1910.
They used various means to create suction by either a pumping action, bellows, a piston being pushed up and down a tube, or with a fan driven by the wheels. Having said that, most models required two people to generate enough sucking force. There were however less efficient models that one person was enough.
The baby daisy was one of the first manual vacuum cleaners that appeared sometime in 1890 in France. Here's a quick video I found explaining and showing how it worked:
And here's another manual vacuum cleaner from 1911. Damn, it just looks so tiring and...idiotic, lmao
I am just so glad these things belong to the past. And by "I", I mean my wife lol 😆
Anyways, here's a link to wikipedia if you'd like to educate yourself further on this totally useless subject.
By the way, while writing this post I came across this video showcasing an electric vacuum cleaner from 1923:
I swear to God, this is the sexiest sound I have ever heard coming from an electric device!
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