Cyberspace Vacuum Cleaner Museum — Westinghouse

Westinghouse Tank Cleaner 1952

This “Flash Gordon” style tank series is perhaps the most visually incredible of them all. The cleaner is truly right out of a ’50s science fiction movie! I Love Lucy fans may recognize this as the machine that Lucille Ball tried to sell in the “Handy Dandy Vacuum Cleaner” episode, where she uttered one of her memorable lines after a day of unsuccessfully trying to unload the cleaner: “They just reported the death of another salesman!”

Speaking of Lucille Ball, she had an advertising contract with the Hoover company at one point. There were several episodes of I Love Lucy where she vacuumed using a Hoover. In one show, she had a lot of on-stage “business” involving a Hoover upright (Model 62) — making a great to-do about getting out the attachment caddy and placing it in a prominent spot upstage, with the large “Hoover” letters in full view; and using the attachments to dust her living-room furniture while cooking up another plot with Ethel Mertz. Maybe the first example of “product-placement” ?!



Regina Electrolux Airway
Hoover Scott & Fetzer / Kirby Eureka
Sears-Kenmore Universal Westinghouse
Miscellaneous Exhibits Entranceway Museum Foyer


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