For thousands of years, humans have been faced with the daunting chore of cleaning their carpets.

Archaeologists have found rug remnants in Egyptian and Mesopotamian tombs dating back over 4,000 years. And when Marco Polo passed through Central Asia in 1271 on his way to China, the Italian explorer commented on the quality of the local rugs and carpets. In Europe and the United States, carpets weren’t widely used until the 19th century, when machine-woven rugs first became affordable.

Cleaning a carpet could be thankless job. By the mid-1800s, brooms were used for everyday rug cleaning, but trying to remove coal dust and tramped-in dirt with a broom was an exercise in futility. To really clean a rug, it needed to be carried outside, hung from a line and beaten aggressively with a long-handled wicker paddle called a carpet beater. Home economist Catharine Beecher wrote in 1841 about another deep-cleaning method: “In cleaning carpets, use damp tea leaves, or wet Indian meal, throwing it about and rubbing it over with a broom.”

The first major breakthrough in carpet-cleaning technology was the mechanical sweeper, which debuted in the late 1850s. Similar devices are still around today. They didn’t require a motor, but worked by manually rolling a rotating brush across the carpet, which swept the loosened dirt into a receptacle.

American entrepreneur Melville Bissell patented his Bissell sweeper in 1876. Melville’s wife, Anna, was instrumental in making the Bissell sweeper a household name. She created a successful marketing campaign promising women that the newfangled sweeper would end the drudgery and exhaustion of cleaning carpets.

The Bissell sweeper dominated the carpet-cleaning market through the turn of the 20th century. When Melville died unexpectedly in 1889, Anna became the first female CEO in American history and oversaw the production of 1,000 sweepers a day at Bissell factories in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

As the story goes, the first vacuum cleaner was invented on a dare.

In 1901, the British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth attended a London demonstration of an American-made carpet cleaning device called a “mechanical aspirator.” The machine, powered by a gasoline motor, generated a powerful stream of compressed air that attempted to blow debris out of carpet fibers and into an attached bag.

According to Booth, the air-blowing method was less than practical.

“I asked the inventor why he did not suck out the dust,” wrote Booth in a 1934 article for the Newcomen Society. “The inventor became heated, remarked that sucking out dust was impossible and that it had been tried over and over again without success; he then walked away.”

Booth, who had just started his own engineering consulting company, accepted the challenge. He set out to design a suction pump powerful enough to suck the dust and dirt out of carpets. He tested his theory by placing a cloth filter over his mouth and trying to suck the dust off furniture upholstery. Booth nearly choked, but his theory was sound.

On August 30, 1901, Booth patented the world’s first vacuum cleaner. Nicknamed the “Puffing Billy,” the massive machine was mounted on a horse-drawn wagon painted red to resemble a 19th-century firetruck. To demonstrate his new invention, Booth parked the Puffing Billy on a busy London street, extended its long hoses inside a large shop, and cranked on the loud gasoline engine.

Onlookers marveled at the sheer quantity of dust and debris that piled up inside the glass-walled receptacle. “[T]his was really astonishing,” wrote Booth. “[T]wo machines on one occasion took half a ton of dust out of the carpets of one of the large shops in the West End one night.”

In preparation for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, Booth used the Puffing Billy to clean the blue “Coronation carpet” underneath the throne at Westminster Abbey. After that high-profile gig, Booth’s invention was in great demand with wealthy British households and heads of state in France, Russia and Turkey.

Following the success of Booth’s horse-drawn vacuum, rich families in London and New York installed their own gas-powered vacuum pumps inside their homes to be operated by the “help.” But the first truly portable vacuum cleaner was invented by a 60-year-old janitor in Canton, Ohio.

James Spangler was a tinkerer and amateur inventor who had filed a few patents, but had never come up with a “winning idea,” says Megan Pellegrino, director of the Hoover Historical Center in Canton. Every night, Spangler was tasked with cleaning an entire department store with the tools of his day: a mop and a broom. The airborne dust aggravated his asthma, so Spangler set out to find a better way.

One of Spangler’s key innovations was to combine a suction pump with the rotating brush from a mechanical sweeper. And most importantly, he used electricity instead of a noisy gasoline motor. In 1907, Spangler cobbled together a prototype portable electric vacuum cleaner using a ceiling fan motor and a pillowcase for a bag.

Spangler patented his invention in 1907 and started the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. But his dream of becoming a vacuum magnate was sidelined by financial troubles. With the bank threatening to take his house, Spangler needed investors to keep the fledgling company afloat. And that’s when William “Boss” Hoover entered the picture.

“Boss” Hoover grew up on a farm in North Canton, Ohio, and started a successful leather goods business in the 1870s. The Hoover Company specialized in saddles for horses, and business was booming until Henry Ford came out with the first affordable motor vehicles.

“That was a problem for Hoover because most of their products were for horses,” says Pellegrino. “It was really luck and happenstance how they transitioned into vacuums.”

Hoover’s wife, Susan, was James Spangler’s cousin and an early adopter of his portable electric vacuum. When Spangler fell into debt, Hoover bought the Electric Suction Sweeper Company and kept Spangler on as production supervisor. In 1908, the company released its Model O (not zero), a 40-pound electric vacuum cleaner with a wooden handle and a bag that still looked a lot like a pillowcase.

“It was an immediate success, which is a little surprising because only 10 percent of American households had electricity,” says Pellegrino, “and it was a really expensive product.”

With attachments, the Hoover Model O retailed for $75, which is more than $2,500 today.

In the 1930s, “Boss” Hoover’s son Herbert W. Hoover (no relation to the president) took over the company. In 1934, Hoover hired the pioneering industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss to come up with a new streamlined look for its vacuum line.

Dreyfuss had already overhauled the design of telephones, refrigerators and washing machines, giving them smoother lines and more intuitive controls. Dreyfuss’s Hoover Model 150, released in 1936, was the first lightweight, modern-looking vacuum made with an early type of plastic called Bakelite. It quickly became the industry standard.