Street Sanitation

Keeping our streets clean has long been a priority of our local leaders. At first it was just a man and a broom picking up litter and unclogging drains. This was a necessary but smelly job as running water was rare and people tended to dump their waste in the streets. It was necessary to keep the drains clear as no one wanted that smell and this method worked well as cities were small and much of the population was in the countryside. That changed with the Industrial Revolution.

Manchester, England became one of the most industrialized cities in the world. It was home to the largest textile industries in the world which created a lot of trash in the streets making it a very unhealthy place to live and work. Enter The Patent Street Sweeping Machine of Manchester, an invention by Joseph Whitworth in 1843. A horse pulled a device that would pick up trash using what Whitworth called “Endless Brooms” from the street and deposit it in a carrier that could be emptied and reused. It did not take long for a machine like this to arrive in the United States. Six years later C.S. Bishop patented his street sweeping machine, a rotating disc of wire bristles.

An African-American man, Charles Brooks, invented the first self-propelled machine in 1896 and by 1911 John Murphy had a motor driven model that was the first unit produced by the Elgin Sweeper Company (which is still the industry leader today) and the first unit was sold to the city of Boise, Idaho in 1913. The unit saved the city $2,716.77 that year (about $60,000 today).

Street sweepers can be found today in nearly every town and country in the United States and across the world. Their goals are to clean the city streets of not only trash but also grime and pollution that is left behind by the cars and trucks using it. Sweeping can occur anywhere from weekly to monthly typically. Street sweeping is seen as essential today, not only in maintaining an aesthetic quality but also preventing pollutants from getting into stormwater runoff.

Sweeping can be expensive as it takes time to sweep a street meaning urban areas are prioritized. That is where Michael B. Stoner Inc can come into the picture. We have the equipment to clean anything from a street or private driveway to a highway to a parking lot or an industrial site. We have the equipment and the experience to clean just about any surface that would need cleaning so chances are we can handle yours. If your business is located along the I-81 corridor in southern Pennsylvania in Chambersburg, Carlisle, Mechanicsburg or Harrisburg as well as the Hershey and Middletown areas and needs its surface cleaned give us a call or visit our contact page.