Hoover v. Eureka

Many years ago, when War raged and Herbert Hoover fed the Belgians, Manhattan reporters found on the passenger list of an incoming steamer the name Herbert W. Hoover. They quivered. Here was the great relief-worker returning unexpectedly. He would give them an interview. A man came down the gangplank, a square-jawed man of port. They surrounded him; clamored questions. The man, nonplussed for but a moment, smiled:

"You think I'm Herbert C. Hoover. I'm not. He fills vacuums; I make them. I'm Herbert W. Hoover, of the Hoover Co. that makes the carpet cleaner."

President Herbert W. Hoover is sagacious. He it is who is credited with feeding a Boston girl and making her sleep, eat, exercise until the doctors at Tufts College knew just how much work she could do with a definite, measured amount of energy. Then he had her set to cleaning carpets with a broom, a carpet sweeper, a standard vacuum cleaner and a Hoover (combined carpet sweeper and vacuum cleaner). Tufts tests showed that the Hoover demanded least energy.

Last week Philadelphia newspapermen noted that President Hoover would go to Federal Court there. He has just filed suit against the Eureka Vacuum Cleaner Co. and the managers of the late Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition. He claims that they have done him out of the Grand Prize for carpet cleaning machines by "a serious error which has greatly prejudiced the Hoover Co."

Cleaning carpets by suction machinery is scarcely 20 years old. Before 1907 the housewife dragged a broom across the carpet nap or, when she could afford it, she bought a carpet sweeper. Bissel was the most popular make of sweeper. It had (and still has) a revolving brush that picked up lint, bread crumbs, hairpins, cigaret butts, needles, roaches, broom, straws, candy, germs. The matted filth made a capital nest for mice. But broom or sweeper cleaned only the surface of the carpet. To get the deeply imbedded dirt the careful housewife had to lift her carpets each spring, hang them on the clothesline in the back yard and then hope for a tramp to come along and whack the dirt out of the carpets. If no bummer appeared, she knew that she would be obliged to quarrel with her husband that evening before he would do the "dirty work." Therefore, she often beat the carpets herself and got her long hair, her eyes and her lungs filled with street filth tracked into her best parlor. Carpet beaters and carpet sweepers are still used where buggies exist.

In 1907 one Murray Spangler invented a machine which was a combination of a carpet sweeper and suction pump. A small electric motor created a vacuum that sucked the carpet up away from the floor and against a carpet sweeper brush. This brush, revolving, beat against the carpet and loosened the dirt, which the vacuum in turn pulled into a convenient sack. This was, and is, the Hoover. William H. Hoover and his three sons, (Herbert W., F. G., and D. P.) made it.

Another type of vacuum carpet cleaner moves across the floor, and sucks air laden with dirt from the carpet. This type does not beat the carpet. The Eureka is an excellent vacuum cleaner 01 this type.

The Hoovers, of course, consider their sweeper the best of all. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars finding out just where dirt accumulates in carpets and the best way of getting such dirt out of carpets. And they have their machine to get rid of that dirt. Many a judge of housework has approved the Hoover. Thousands have bought it. It had never been entered in a contest, before the Sesquicentennial Exposition, without gaining the best prize offered. These tests and exploits are described in a volume, Hoover--The Story of a Crusade.

So there was indignation in the Hoover plant at Canton, Ohio, when the Sesquicentennial Exposition managers gave the grand prize to the Eureka and the secondary gold medal to the Hoover. "There was knavery in the awarding," said Hoover men, and their lawyers brought suit, alleging that the Exposition managers unexpectedly changed the rules of their carpet cleaner contest, that they unexpectedly changed their jury of award, that an award of a gold medal to Eureka had been wrongly changed to the award of the grand prize. The Eureka Co. has done damage to the Hoover concern reads the bill of complaint, "by false advertisements and statements which have been widely circulated by the [Eureka] company in this and foreign countries to the effect that the [Hoover and Eureka] machines had been judged in competition by one or more fair, impartial and competent juries, with exhaustive tests and detailed examinations of the performance, construction and design of both machines, and that the machine [Eureka] had been found to be superior and had been awarded a grand prize by the Exhibition Association." The Hoover Co. wants the Federal Court to reverse the Exposition prizes.

The Eureka Co. has not yet had opportunity to present in court the excellencies of their cleaner, nor the Exposition managers to explain the confusion in making the awards.