The world’s oldest street sweeper

Ok, technically the world’s oldest street sweeper was a man, as the first street sweepers were men with a broom or a shovel walking behind a horse-drawn cart but let’s say the first mechanical street sweeper. For everyone alive they have been keeping our streets and various other surfaces clean for as long as we can remember. The mechanical street sweeper was invented as the answer to pollution and garbage piling up in the streets but how old it is may surprise you.

The Industrial Revolution in England was not a healthy place to live, particularly in Manchester. Manchester was had more textile mills than any other city in England and those mills produced huge amounts of pollutants into the air and onto the streets. Cotton exports from the United States were brought to Manchester by the shipload and the city became known as the “workshop of the world.” The mills and factories paid good wages attracting thousands of families to move to the city or even to England to escape poverty. Add in the world’s first passenger rail service to help move workers around the city it was not a healthy place to live. Because of the rapid growth of the city many homes were overcrowded and did not have running water so waste was dumped in the streets. The death rate was high but more people kept coming, lured by high wages. While nothing could be done about the pollution being emitted into the air there was something that could be done about the pollution in the streets.

Enter an inventor named Joseph Whitworth. He was well regarded in Manchester for his company which manufactured lathes and other machine tools. Probably because of the high quality of workmanship of his products he introduced the thou, or the thousandth of an inch, to manufacturing. He later invented a rifle with superior marksmanship capabilities (Queen Victoria opened the first meeting of the National Rifle Association in 1860 by firing one and scoring a bullseye at 400 yards!) and also a breech loading cannon. Both were rejected by the British government for use with the army but the rifle did end up as the standard arm of the French army. A few of the cannon saw service with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and are on display at the Eternal Light Peace Memorial at Gettysburg. They had a range that outclassed anything else the war saw but in the days before fire control they did not generate much advantage.

To help combat the huge amounts of trash in the streets Whitworth invented what he called “The Patent Street Sweeping Machine of Manchester” in 1843. The machine had a cylinder attached to 2 ½ foot wide brooms that were spun by a bicycle chain in what was called an “endless series of brooms”. It was pulled by a horse and the movement spun the wheels powering the cylinder catching the trash and soil in the brooms and thrown into a cart. What Whitworth invented worked and while Manchester remained an unhealthy city to live in at least the streets were cleaner. It was copied and improved upon in the United States before the decade was over.

Manchester is still today a working class city with some of the highest death and cancer rates in the United Kingdom. The city is has been notorious for poor health ever since the Industrial Revolution. One has to wonder how much worse it could have been had a street sweeper not been invented?

There have been many advances since Whitworth’s day and keeping our streets and parking lots is much easier and more convenient than in his day. If you live in the I-81 corridor from Chambersburg to Carlisle to Harrisburg or in Middletown or Hershey and need a surface cleaned give Michael B. Stoner Inc a call or visit our contact page. We have the equipment and experience to clean anything from a highway to an industrial site so whether you just want your lot cleaned after a special event or would like it cleaned on a regular schedule we can help!.