September 19 In Patent History

On this date, September 19, 1876, Melville Reuben Bissell (1843-1889) received U.S. patent No. 182,346 for “certain new and useful Improvements in Carpet-Sweepers”.

Bissell’s improvements were born of necessity; he and his wife Anna operated a crockery shop and manufactory in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Anna’s health had been deteriorating as a result of the dust from packing materials.

Anna thought it was terrific. So the two shop owners began making and selling them. They started small at first, with a few employees in an upstairs room. Together, the couple made sales calls to houseware stores near their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The Bissells were tenacious and they had a good product. Homemakers wanted them. Seven years after their humble beginning, the Bissells incorporated their business and built a modern, five-story factory.

A very early appearance of the product occurs in the 1914 Charlie Chaplin film Laughing Gas, where Chaplin uses it to clean the waiting room floor of a dentist.

Bissell’s carpet sweepers were probably the biggest invention in the cleaning industry since the invention of brooms by early man.

With a focus on quality, the Bissell company was well on its way to dominating a growing market for carpet sweepers. And then tragedy struck. After Melville Bissell passed away in 1889, his wife Anna took over the company as the first female CEO in American history. Bissell became the largest exclusive carpet sweeper manufacturer in the world in the early 1900s, and even the Queen of England requested that palace staff use Bissell sweepers.

You may recognize the name Bissell from the vacuum cleaner in your home, but Bissell sweepers are the predecessors of the fancy vacuums of today. When Melville Bissell patented a machine to clean the sawdust off of his carpets, the Bissell sweeper was born.

The Carpet Sweeper of Merit had wheels that spun on a ball bearing to allow for quiet and effective cleaning. When the wheels spun, brushes underneath the sweeper picked up dust and dirt that was stored in a container under the sweeper. When electric motors were added to sweepers at the turn of the century, vacuum cleaners replaced sweepers as common household items, but the Bissell sweeper would continue to be known as the most effective cleaning machine of its time.