Sucked in

Portland brags an impressive cultural life. It is one of America’s emancipated cities - politically and intellectually progressive.

Naturally, it has a Vacuum Cleaner Museum.

I was powerfully drawn to visit it, of course. Rachel, my friend and host, merrily whisked me off to its delights in her new blue Subaru.

Our menfolk chose not to join us. They repaired to the Science Museum.

But Stark’s have been selling vacuums in Portland for over 100 years, plenty of time to have collected examples of how the whole concept of vacuum cleaners has evolved.

So it’s not really as nutcase as it sounds.

It is quite serious history from both a social and an engineering point of view.

It really made me think about the lot of women a century ago when the first vacuums were being invented.

They would seem to have evolved from carpet sweepers. There are so lovely examples of quite handsome wooden carpet sweepers in the collection.

But those early electric vacuums, oh my, they were heavy. Great big iron things. It is hard to imagine women having the strength to manoeuvre them. Very fit servants must have done the housework in those houses which could afford the new-fangled things.

And the people of the past who did not have cars and a squillion labor-saving mod cons were probably a lot stronger. If not, shunting these ancient monsters around would have done the trick. Talk about work-out machines.

There are some funny stories in there. There was the Airways model which turned out to be the most unpopular vacuum in history. So heavy, inefficient and tough on carpets that it lasted only a couple of embarrassing years.

What was the thing with the broomstick with the long power cord? An attempt at an electric broom? That didn’t take off, either.

It is clear that men have been trying to invent the perfect vacuum cleaner throughout the years. There are so many models. I always hated barrel vacuums that you have to drag around. There are a lot of them there, a nightmare of them.

I note that some of the oldies also were ten-ton metal. Then there is to bag or not to bag in the uprights.

There amid the decades of new and improved models were a few which rang bells from my childhood - the round rolling ones of the 60s or 70s. I remember my mother being very proud of one of those. They were just the last thing in domestic chic.

For, indeed, vacuums came to represent the old family dream of the 50s and onwards. Every home had one. Most homes had housewives.

It is not surprising that the housewives turned to “mother’s little helper”.

Their drudgery was real.

One looks at all these machines and thinks of all those women, dressed in the garb of the day, some of it pretty heavy going in its own right.

It is suddenly really quite political.

It’s a history of toil, of women’s suppression.

And it is a history of failure.

Walk out in the contemporary showroom and what does one see?

Vacuum cleaners which look uncannily like the old museum models and making exactly the same promises of doing a better job and making the chore easier.

They still don’t have it right.

Here is the last word in new-fangled vacuums.