The Vacuum

(upbeat music) - Pink Panther us here, coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the tabby tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products, and discover custom playlists on Spotify, but just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with coach. Learn more at coach.com. Man, just ask like, where are the holes? - There's one here and turn it on like so. And vacuum, here, be roll. - All right. - Use that vacuum sound to be rolled there. - From curved and the vox media podcast network, this is nice try. I'm Avery Chafferman. - All right. (upbeat music) - I hate vacuum cleaning. I would honestly rather sweep. I don't like how loud vacuuming is. I don't like having to drag out the vacuum cleaner or clean it or disassemble it. And so when I heard that there was this kind of vacuum cleaner that gets built into the walls of a house as permanent as electrical wiring, it struck me as a very serious and expensive commitment to this one single household appliance. And I felt compelled to take the train to the end of the Metro North line into the dark heart of Central Connecticut to see one for myself. And there's piping that runs throughout the house down to a main canister where all the dirt collects. - And they ask you to introduce yourself? - I'm sure this is Brian Wasicki Central Vacuum Service here in Connecticut. - Brian repairs and installs central vacuums. It's like being a plumber who works with air instead of water. And I asked him to demonstrate the central vacuum that's in his house. - And this goes within the walls while the house is being constructed and it can be installed in existing houses too. - To use a central vacuum, you take this special long hose and you plug it into one of the holes in the wall that look almost like electrical outlets. - In a big house, you can have this thing 50 feet long, so obviously this small house, we only need a 30-foot hose to reach the whole place. - An engine sucks the dirt through the hose into the pipes in his walls and then down to a central canister in Brian's basement. Which he only has to empty a couple times a year. It's a machine you don't have to really schlep around and it can last a lifetime. And so for that reason, depending on the power of the engine and the size of the house, a central vacuum can cost around $2,000. And here I'm speaking entirely theoretically as someone who does not own a home, but I cannot imagine making this kind of investment in a vacuum cleaner. I don't need it to be surgically fused with my home forever, snaking through my walls, intermingled with my HVAC. If I could design my perfect vacuum, it would probably be a vacuum that I could rent when I needed it. Kind of how like one would hire an exterminator. And there were vacuums that used to work this way. - The deliverable vacuum cleaner was a startup company around the turn of the 20th century. - In her game-changing book, "More Work for Mother," historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan traces the history of household labor. And she mentions that in 1901 an English engineer invented a suction pump powered by a gas motor that was driven around by horseback and then eventually by automobile through the streets of London. A massive super steam pump vacuum cleaner. - They went around neighborhoods in a long tube, long flexible tube, and they'd get as close to your door as you could and vacuum your house. - You opened up your laptop. - The vacuum's here. - The vacuum's here, right? - You open your door or your window for this specialized hose to come in, attached to the vacuum waiting outside and the dirt gets whisked away before the vacuum rides off to your neighbor. And I really like this version of the vacuum. Not only because then I could avoid buying a vacuum and using it myself, but I also like the inside out nature of it. It's private chores being acknowledged in public because housework is work. It's just easier to see that when you bring it out of the house and into the open. And there have been all kinds of attempts to do that. - By 1869, there were also housewives deciding that they needed to take things into their own hands and do it another way. - Yale Professor Emerida Dolores Hayden who writes about design and gender and utopian experiments told me that in 1869, a group of about 20 women in Massachusetts created the Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society. In a building they leased near Harvard Square, this cooperative did each of their families' laundry and cooked their families' meals all together. - They would take the clean clothes and the cook food and deliver it back to their houses, to their husbands for cash. - Professor Hayden says that in their privileged way, the Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society was challenging America's entire economic model by questioning what sorts of labor is domestic. And therefore private and therefore valueless. And what can be done commercially and in public and therefore be considered valuable. - So the cash on delivery for the food and the laundry created a storm at that time. Why is it the women think that they should be doing this now? Why is it that they think that they deserve some kind of pay for housework? - The backlash was massive. This cooperative was charging money for work that was supposed to be given away for free. How immoral of these women to export and share the labor that was supposed to be isolated and personal and domestic. The cooperative lasted three years. The moral outcry, the cooperative inspired is this perfect snapshot of how ingrained American ideals about the private isolated home already were by the turn of the 20th century. And this ideal became harder and harder to deviate from because home appliances just got smaller. - What happened by the 1920s was that appliance manufacturers wanted to see if they could miniaturize commercial equipment and sell it to individual households. - After World War One, American manufacturing went through a great miniaturization. And it meant that eventually it would become standard for middle-class families to each acquire their own little washers and dryers. Their own little dishwashers, their own little vacuum cleaners, which they then had to learn to use on their own. And believe it or not, the vacuum cleaner was not intuitive to use. - Well, vacuum cleaners used to have wonderfully written instruction manuals. The Electrolux from the 1930s was 66 pages long. - This is Tom Gasco. - I'm a vacuum cleaner collector and the owner of over 500 vintage vacuum cleaners. - Is it true that you learned how to read from a vacuum manual? - Yes, my mother bought an Electrolux vacuum cleaner 18 days before I was born. She had to make payments on it. My father made $75 a month in 1962 and the vacuum cleaner was $250. - Which, by the way, it would be around $2,200 today. Kinda like the equivalent of a central vacuum. The payments were $8 a month. They gave my mother a plastic bank in the shape of the vacuum cleaner and it held quarters. - Tom says the idea was you'd drop a quarter into the vacuum bank whenever you used your Electrolux and then at the end of the month, you'd have $8. This Electrolux from Tom's childhood is still in Tom's vacuum collection. It still works. Truly, the vacuum was once more like a car. It was this luxury appliance you paid off and invested in and repaired. And you really had to read the manual and learn how to drive it. - It even taught you how to use your vacuum to spray wax on the floor, how to shampoo carpets. It talked about all the wonderful things, the attachments could do and the things that you could clean with them. - Talking to Tom, I realize I don't know how to use a vacuum at all. - The correct way of using a vacuum cleaner is a law start. - Really? - We wait until we see dirt and then we try to get it up as fast as we can and we certainly don't take the time to thoroughly vacuum the sofa or even the mattresses. - Vacuum your mattress? - Yes. What do you think dust mites are? They live in mattresses. That's why they tell you every eight years to get a new mattress because the mattress will almost double and wait from all the dead dust mites and skin cells. But that's only true if you don't clean it. - And the active vacuuming, whether it's your floor or mattress, whatever, it's like learning the correct way of brushing your teeth 'cause it's not just about the tool, it's about the direction and the timing of the motion. - A vacuum cleaner cleans its best when you pull it backwards. Vacuum one foot per second forward and six inches per second backwards. Otherwise, if you vacuum the same speed forward and backwards your carpet really won't be clean. You'll have just rushed to the vacuum and it wasn't designed to be rushed. Tom loves to vacuum. It's like a zen art for him and he even hosts an annual convention for fellow vacuum cleaner fish and addos to all get together and geek out. So I just assumed that Brian, the central vacuum repairman, would be one of these vacuum buffs. - So when did you start getting into vacuuming yourself? - I don't, I hate it. - What? "I don't like using the vacuum cleaner." - Why? - It's just too mundane to task. - But Brian enjoys fixing vacuums. And he told me why in this unexpectedly profound way. - All work is making order out of chaos. And that's what people enjoy. If I have a broken vacuum system, I make it work well. And then we have a result. And of course, that's the same thing that many people feel when they actually are using the equipment and dusting and washing the dishes. They have a mess and now they don't. And that's a good thing. I think that's a God thing. That's actually in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was foremost and void. It was actually a chaos. And God spoke, order into that. So I think that's where we actually get that desire from to turn chaos into order. - That is a whole new meaning of cleanliness, being a godliness. - Yes. - Everyone has their own definition of satisfying work. The kind of chaos that's rewarding to tame. Like, for example, I genuinely like to sweep and I like to wash dishes. A lot of people hate doing both those things. Others hate cooking. Some love planting, but hate weeding. And then there's vacuuming. The chaos that so many people find so undesirable that a robot was built to replace it. - You know, I do think we can take away the work that people find tedious and boring and have the robots doing that. - Helen Granger is one of the founders of the robotics company, Irobot, which in its early years made a particular robot for a job that no one wanted to do. We had robots deployed with the military, taking care of bombs. - But Irobot expanded from bomb disposal to the vacuum when they released the Roomba in 2002. It is arguably the first widely accepted household robot. - We felt like, oh my god, this can be the first real practical robot that the world has ever seen. - Colin Engel is another co-founder of Irobot and their current CEO. He says the Roomba is in 12 to 14% of American homes, but I don't think it's because it's a superior vacuum. - The hardware was important, but the good enough vacuuming was achieved, you know, five, seven years ago. - Just good enough vacuuming. I mean, yes, today you can buy pretty robust Roomba's for heavy carpets, but the device was not originally designed to be the world's best cleaning machine. It was designed as an ambassador for home robotics. Helen essentially said the Roomba was reverse engineered by price point. - You know, we needed to invent the technologies where we could put it out for a price that people could afford. We had selected $200. By the way, the price that you don't really have to negotiate with your significant other to go out and buy something, you could just go out and buy it. - That's the kind of price. - That was a hot-off in 2002. I think it's a little high at maybe 350 today or so. - The robot was designed around the upper limit of an impulse buy for Roomba's target demographic. So it had to be relatively affordable. It had to look cool. It had to be quiet. What it didn't have to be was the entire answer to household cleaning. After all, the Roomba is literally only the floor. - You still have to scrub the bathroom and clean the toilets and so forth. And we can look forward to a future when robots can take on more of those tasks as well. - Right now in 2021, an actual cleaning robot is still the realm of science fiction. Colin says with current technology would take a whole fleet of robots to do the work one human can. And it leads to the question of who that human should be and how much they should get paid. This is the question that has always lingered around discussions of the vacuum. Even the giant public vacuum that would come rumbling through the street. - And this big wagon was pulled by horses. - Vacuum collector Tom Gasco again. - And these huge long hoses were pulled in through the windows. - But some people might have been more excited about the vacuum's arrival than others. - There were glass viewing meters in the middle of the hoses and you would have a vacuuming party. All the rich people would sit and sip tea and they would look at these viewing windows in the middle of the hoses to see the dust being drawn out of the furniture and the carpeting by the servants who were using this device. - After the break, who uses the vacuum and how the machine and its operator have interwoven fates. - Paint pan through us here. Coaching Spotify are teaming up to bring music and salt together and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the tabby tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products and discover custom playlists on Spotify, but just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. (gentle music) - Vacuuming has become something that we all have to do or should do. And it's nothing most people don't really know how to do. And it's not like a lot of people don't want to do, which is why as long as vacuums have existed, some Americans have hired other people to push them. - As soon as a household can afford it and often even before it can, we have found other ways to have other people do housework. - The portable vacuum cleaner was invented in 1908. And at this time, according to historian Ruth Schwartz-Kallen, it was common for middle-class families to employ live-in servants. And just that word, servant is so dehumanizing and so is the work. - It was the worst possible work you could have. You were living in somebody else's home. You had one day off every two weeks. You had no privacy. It was just grim. - So obviously, as soon as they could find other jobs, people working as servants would get the hell out. - Factory work was regarded as preferable. - Higher status. - Professor Kallen writes that as factory work proliferated, people who might have otherwise taken service jobs, many of them immigrants, or part of the Great Migration from the Black South, worked in manufacturing. Some of them, manufacturing the very appliances that were supposed to replace servants. All those little personal dishwashers and washing machines and vacuum cleaners. - From 1920 to 1940, the number of servants declines as the number of appliances increases. Why? Because the whole idea was you can replace your servant with a washing machine. - As Professor Kallen tells it, suddenly all the middle-class housewives who'd come to rely on exploiting cheap household help, were supposed to be doing everything themselves. And they were pissed. They complained loudly about what they called the quote, unquote, servant problem, which was an actual and extremely gross turn of phrase that I encountered over and over again in literature and periodicals from the early 20th century. - This supposed servant problem was spun into such a crisis that in 1928, a group called the National Council on household employment brought together working servants, labor activists, efficiency experts, and even future-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to get to the bottom of it. And this council's main finding after much conversation and deliberation was that for the low wages wealthy families were willing to pay no one wanted to be a servant. Also, in a complete shock, people hated being called servants. The fact that employers didn't want to pay a living wage and then called it a servant problem, evidences an American attitude towards low wage work that persists now. Like, it reminds me exactly of the so-called worker shortage that is happening in this year of our Lord 2021 because employees of all stripes are leaving jobs that are exploitative and undervalued. According to the Economic Policy Institute, there were over 340,000 house cleaners working in private homes in America in 2019. This is a workforce that is hidden. - Think about the fact that you could go into any neighborhood or any apartment building and not know which ones are also workplaces. - This is Igen Poo, labor activist and director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. - The workplaces scattered and hidden behind closed doors and it allows us to accept some people getting paid poverty wages like never earning enough to make ends meet despite working incredibly hard. - Domestic workers are mostly women, mostly people of color. According to a 2020 EPI report, they are three times as likely to be living in poverty as other workers. Just one in five receives health insurance. And without benefits or paid leave, this workforce was left in dire straits during the pandemic. And all these problems are exacerbated by the very nature of working in the private sphere. - The further away from the home, the more it becomes a profession. and that is valued, recognized, and distinguished. - When you teach in a big school, you're a professor. When you teach in a home, you're a tutor. When you cook in a big restaurant, you're a chef. When you cook in a home, you're a cook. - So when you leave the home, it's almost like a whole new world (laughs) where you are seen as a full professional for doing the same work that is done inside the home. In the public sphere, it's called janitorial work and it involves powerful professional grade equipment, more durable and efficient than what gets sold for the home. So meanwhile, in the private sphere, professional house cleaners get stuck with amateur vacuums. - And they have a cornice one that you put it to charge by the battery last, nothing. - Thereanise Perez is a professional cleaner. She has her own private clients now, but she started out using an app that would assign her randomly with employers. - And then I just quit the app 'cause they was paying so little money and I was doing everything and I had to bring my own things to clean. Now I go to people's houses, they have in their house what they like. - But what her clients like is not what Varanise likes. Her ability to do her job is compromised by access to the tools in her workplaces, which is to say, the vacuums people buy now. And they think like a vacuum are the solution, like the key to open the universe, no. - As a person who has an expensive looking vacuum that more closely resembles an oversized vape pen, I can fully attest, I have no idea what I'm doing. - If you really want to spend money, you really read what this vacuum's doing to your house. - Different vacuums work better for different homes. It depends on how big the place is, how much carpeting there is, are there wood floors, how old is the architecture? Because that might impact some of the cracks in the floors. Do you have extensions for odd corners? And yet, a lot of modern vacuums are sold as one size fits all solutions. - It's like a scheme product. You're gonna say it's amazing for your acne, but it's not doing the work because we don't have the same type of scheme. So if you don't read, you're gonna buy the wrong thing. - Part of the problem says Varanise, is that a lot of her clients don't really understand the extent of the work that needs to be done? - There's people like they said Varanise, come to my house three hours. Do whatever you can do in three hours. I was like, okay, of course, in my mind, I have to live issues. I have to do the bathroom. I have to change your shit. - What about sweeping the baseboard or getting inside the windows? Like a full, deep clean is not happening in three hours. - Inside your fridge, inside your oven, that's time consuming. You have to pay me extra. - Extra in this case, being like an additional $15 per task. And it's not like there's a machine to help do it. Honestly, for Varanise, most of cleaning is a matter of organization and attention. Most of it does not involve the vacuum. But I don't know, like maybe it would. If Varanise had regular access to the kinds of vacuums that spray wax and clean your blinds and sealing fans, you know? Like the Electrolux Tom Gasco is so crazy about. He says the supposedly high performance home vacuums out now just can't compare. - Some very, very modern vacuums that are broken within the first two years that you can guess what kind they are. - Ram's bison. - The very heavily advertised, expensive vacuums, such as those that start with AD. - Are you scared to mention his name? - Well, I bought the very first Dyson ever made. I mean, not the first. It serial number is 46. - Wow. - I'll tell you what I said to him after I had it for three weeks. Because I bought it in England. I got to know him and he was a nice guy. He called me up about three weeks after I got home to ask me what I thought of the new machine. And I said, please put a bag in it. - We weren't able to verify this story with James Dyson himself, but the point is a lot of new vacuums, including the Dyson are bagless. So the dirt collects in a clear canister. A Dyson spokesperson told us that this is an improvement because a lot of vacuum bags are expensive and have plastic components so they can't be recycled. But Tom would argue that using bags makes the vacuum itself last longer. He says without a bag, ironically, a vacuum cleaner is hard to clean. Like you can't just take the bag out. You have to remember to wash the filter regularly and a pile up of dirt can compromise the machine itself. - He said they need to see the dirt spin. Because if they see it spin, then they will believe it is the best vacuum they ever used. It's a perfect parallel to the cleaning parties of your. So this design trick is not new. But Tom argues that even if a clear canister gives you a satisfying cleaning experience, a bagless vacuum doesn't tend to last as long because of its clogged deteriorating filter. Although ultimately this comparison might not even matter because big, hardy, upright vacuums, the kind Tom loves, they're just losing ground in the market and the totally unbiased perspective of iRobot CEO Colin Angle. - If you look at trends in the floor care industry, basically all of the growth is in handvacs and robots. The rest of the industry is your canisters and your uprights and they're all suffering a pretty challenging future. - I mean, those who will suffer a more challenging future are the professionals who use these tools if they don't get more support. - Because even if it is super powerful, even if it is built into the wall, even if clear canisters make the vacuum look impressive, even if Roomba's make robots culturally acceptable. For now, still, the vacuum runs on elbow grease. Someone has to hook it up and turn it on and operate it. And the problem, says Ajempu, is that we value innovations on the design of the vacuums more than the labor of the people using them. - Incentives for innovation are really about private sector interest driving innovation to increase efficiency, convenience and profit margins, right? And what we've never really designed for in innovation is equity or opportunity. And also quality of work for low-wage workers. - Innovation for the National Domestic Workers Alliance looks more like an app they developed called Aliyah. The app pulls contributions from clients, usually at least like $5 per cleaning, which the worker can then use to redeem insurance or paid time off or other benefits. - This is a profession and we can make these jobs good jobs and we can recognize that this work is skilled work. Even a domestic worker should be able to hire someone to assist with cleaning at times. - My bag hurts a lot, my lower bag. Let's destroy at the end of Saturday night. I cannot do anything. That's why I clean my house on Fridays. I clean it every Friday, deep cleaning. Very nice things about cleaning her home the way a lot of people think about going to the gym. She doesn't particularly love doing it, but she likes the result. She likes the feeling of safety in that quieted chaos. That is what she gives her clients. - You come back from work and your house if you just have to shower and some most of the people that they are going to clean, they don't cook. They order food just to enjoy that. So I think I put people in good mood. - Because that feeling of ordered chaos comes from effort and care. It can't just happen on its own. In other words, the work of cleaning does not happen in a vacuum. (upbeat music) - Next time on Nice Try. - So the idea that you can go do something else while your food cooks is actually really ancient. But the way it works for our modern society is that we aren't doing something to be slow and deliberate about it. - The labor-saving devices of the kitchen countertop from the slow cooker to the fast cooker. How technology has raised the standards for how much variety and excitement one can reasonably expect from a meal. But how much variety and excitement do we really even need? (upbeat music) - Nice Try is a collective effort from Megan Canadian, our senior producer, Diana Buds and Sarah Burke, our associate producers, fact-checking by Charlotte Silver. Lisa Pollock is our editorial consultant. Alex Higgins sound designed and engineered this episode, theme song by Greg Pliska with additional scoring by Greg, Alex, and me. Special thanks to curved editor Suck Jong-Hong. Our showrunner is Art Chung. Our executive producers are Nishat Kerwa and Kelsey Keith. This episode was written and performed by me, Avery Truffleman. Nice Try is a production of curved and the Vox Media podcast network. Find us wherever you listen. (upbeat music) - Pink Panther is here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style to kids. and they want you to be part of it. Learn more at coach.com.