About Hubert Cecil Booth
Hubert Cecil Booth
Hubert Cecil Booth (4 July 1871 – 14 January 1955) was an English engineer known for inventing one of the first powered vacuum cleaners. Significant advance Invented vacuum cleaner
He also designed Ferris wheels, suspension bridges and factories. Later he became Chairman and Managing Director of the British Vacuum Cleaner and Engineering Co. H.C. Booth was born in Gloucester, England on July 4th, 1871. His father was a lumber merchant Abraham Booth, and he had five brothers. He went to Gloucester College and Gloucester County School and learned under headmaster of the school Reverend H. Lloyd Brereton. When he was 18, he passed the entrance examination and entered Central Technical College, later known as the City & Guilds Engineering College, London. His professor there was William Cawthorne Unwin and Booth spent three years there studying civil engineering and mechanical engineering. When he finished college (as a second in his class), he found a job at the firm of Maudsley, Sons & Field, in a firm that was at that time already famous for its engineers. Between 1984 and 1898 he designed Ferris wheels for amusement parks in London, Blackpool, Paris, and Vienna that had diameters from 83m to 92m. In 1899, he designed steel factory in Belgium. A year later he opened a consulting practice in London.
Hubert Cecil Booth
Born 4 July 1871
Gloucester, England
Died 14 January 1955 (aged 83)
Croydon, England
Nationality English
Education City and Guilds Institute, London
Spouse(s) Charlotte Mary Pearce (m. 1903; d. 1948)
Parent(s)
Abraham Cecil Booth (father)
Engineering career
Discipline Civil engineer
Institutions Institution of Civil Engineers
Booth built a machine powered by an internal combustion engine. It used piston pump to draw air through flexible pipes and a filter made of cloth. It was a big machine, and it had to be drawn by horses. It stayed outside the building that it cleaned, and pipes were protruded through the windows to enter the rooms. People called it "Puffing Billy." His next vacuum cleaner was electric-powered, but it was still big to enter the buildings. In the next few decades, Booth founded British Vacuum Cleaner Company (BVCC) which offered cleaning services and whose Chairman and Managing Director he was. They had bright red vans which held vacuum cleaners (a term first invented by the company that marketed Booth’s machines) and operated by uniformed operators. AS big as they are these vacuum cleaners are predecessors of those that we use today and which work on the same principle.
Booth continued to do engineering work and from 1903 to 1940, he designed and constructed steel railway bridges, factories and other types of structural steel work. Between 1914 and 1918 he installed many vacuum-cleaning plants in high-explosive factories. During a spotted fever epidemic, he was engaged in cleaning of Crystal Palace at Sydenham for the Admiralty. Of course, vacuum cleaners were used for this job. After the war, he built suspension bridges in Burma, India, and South Africa, and bridges for railway companies in Britain.
Booth wife was one of the daughters of Francis Tring Pearce, director of the Priday, Metford and Company Limited. He died on January 14, 1955, in Croydon, England.
