James Murray Spangler’s cough was getting worse. For a few years, the 48-year-old former salesman, hobbyist inventor and father of three had been working as a janitor at Zollinger’s Department Store in Canton, Ohio, to help make ends meet. It was an unpleasant, menial job for a creative tinkerer used to toying with farm equipment and velocipedes, and Spangler suspected that the ocean of dusty carpet he had to sweep at the store was the reason his asthma was becoming almost intolerable.

So, in 1907, Spangler took matters into his own hands, and with an electric fan, a soapbox, a broom handle and one of his wife’s pillowcases, the janitor happened upon a solution to his medical, and financial, condition. Spangler’s “suction sweeper” — the precursor to the modern domestic vacuum cleaner — would revolutionize how Americans cleaned their homes, and kick start what is nearly a $15 billion industry today.

Read the article “How One Janitor Cleaned the World” on ozy.com.