Bissell's Manual Carpet Sweeper

On display is a Bissell's Manual Carpet Sweeper for the early 20th century, manufactured by the Bissell Corporation, a company that is still in operation to this day, which you may own of many vacuum cleaners. A carpet sweeper is a mechanical device for the cleaning of carpets. They were popular before the introduction of the vacuum cleaner and have been largely superseded by them. A carpet sweeper typically consists of a small box. The base of the box has wheels and brushes, connected by a belt or gears or rollers. There is also a container for dirt, so when pushed along a floor, the rollers/wheels turn and force the brushes to rotate and sweep dirt and dust from the floor into the container. Carpet sweepers frequently have a height adjustment that enables them to work on different lengths of carpet, or bare floors. The sweeper usually has a long wooden handle so that it can be pushed without bending over.

The design of this Carpet Sweeper was patented by Melville R. Bissell, , and which the Bissell corporation is named after him, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1876. Bissell began selling carpet sweepers in 1883. New powered versions were designed at the beginning of the 21st century with rechargeable batteries and an electric motor to spin the rollers and brush. In addition, their legacy lives on in floor cleaning robots that have limited suction power and rely on sweeping to collect larger bits of debris from the floor.