--- title: Google Doodle Honors British Engineer Hubert Cecil Booth description: Today's Google Doodle marks the 147th birthday of Hubert Cecil Booth, the brains behind one of the first powered vacuum cleaners canonical: https://time.com/5330077/google-doodle-hubert-cecil-booth-vacuum-cleaner/ author: Casey Quackenbush article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-07-04T03:18:35.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:43:54.405Z og:title: Google Doodle Honors British Engineer Hubert Cecil Booth og:description: Booth's vacuum cleaner fundamentally changed home cleaning og:url: https://time.com/5330077/google-doodle-hubert-cecil-booth-vacuum-cleaner/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt52e8653afe2eb34d/6989349e4ee26285cf31240d/screen-shot-2018-07-04-at-9-45-48-am.png?branch=production&width=1020&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1020 og:image:height: 574 og:image:alt: Google Doodle og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Doodle Honors British Engineer Hubert Cecil Booth twitter:description: Booth's vacuum cleaner fundamentally changed home cleaning twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt52e8653afe2eb34d/6989349e4ee26285cf31240d/screen-shot-2018-07-04-at-9-45-48-am.png?branch=production&width=1020&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Google Doodle Honors the Inventor of the First Powered Vacuum Cleaner Hubert Cecil Booth > Sponsored content. 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It curates the day's top headlines with TIME's reporting and analysis across politics, world affairs, business, health and culture. It is free to join at time.com/newsletters. #### How do I sign up for The Brief? The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Jul 4, 2018 3:18 AM UTC  Google Doodle celebrates British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth, inventor of the vacuum cleaner on July 4, 2018. Google Doodle celebrates British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth, inventor of the vacuum cleaner on July 4, 2018. Goodle by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Jul 4, 2018 3:18 AM UTC The trusty vacuum cleaner has long been a staple in any home storage closet. But a century ago, it was considered cutting edge technology. Wednesday’s [Google Doodle](https://www.google.com/doodles/hubert-cecil-booths-147th-birthday) celebrates the 147th birthday of Hubert Cecil Booth, the brains behind one of the the first powered vacuum cleaners — a product that fundamentally changed home cleaning. In 1901, cleaning machines blew air to push away debris. Booth was struck by the possibility of the inverse method: suction to remove the dirt. Inspired by a demonstration of a machine blowing dirt out of railway cars, the British engineer tested his new idea by putting his handkerchief to his mouth and sucking the air through it, to see how much dust he could remove. From there, he set out on his first design called the “Puffing Billy.” But operating the Puffing Billy was quite a spectacle, as it required experts (and horses) to pull the petrol-powered engine outside a home from where it would suck out the dirt from long hoses. In 1903, Booth launched the British Vacuum Cleaner Company and created a smaller electric-powered device. Despite noise complaints, the machine was embraced by the elite and even the British royal family. Booth’s device was even used to clean the carpets at Westminster Abbey ahead of Edward VII’s coronation.  The invention of the vacuum cleaner is generally credited to Hubert Cecil Booth. He built his first machine in 1901 and this one is very similar. It was made for Osborne House, a training college for naval officers on the Isle of Wight. Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images Booth set out on an engineering path early on. Born in 1871, the Gloucester-native entered the City and Guilds Institute in London in 1889 for a three-year course in civil engineering and mechanical engineering. Booth lent his mind to other engineering products too. He helped build bridges, designed engines for Royal Navy battleships, and Ferris wheels across Europe in England, France, and Austria. But his most enduring design would be a household cleaning device that, albeit is far smaller now, changed the way homes are maintained.  In 1901, Hubert Cecil Booth invented the first successful vacuum cleaner. His first machine, 'Puffing Billy', had a 5 hp piston pump driven by a petrol/gasoline engine or electric motor. Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images Wednesday’s animated Doodle depicts an operator cleaning a carpet using the Puffing Billy, with the engine housed in the company’s iconic red horse-drawn van parked outside. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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