Backtrack: Street sweepers

Around these parts the most common street sweeper is a guy with a broom. However, you might have noticed more of the little brushcarts that have been appearing recently.

Simply put, these vehicles have a sort of vacuum inside them, which connects to a pair of brushes. These little carts have proved immeasurably useful all over the world, where typically they can do the work of thirty men.

They have been around for a while though. In fact the first mechanised street sweeper was patented by a Joseph Whitworth of Manchester, England as far back as 1843.

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For a while there was something of a brush cart mania, with dozens of patents being filed in the late nineteenth century. Presumably people thought that if something wasn’t done about the piles of animal waste in the streets, chaos would ensue.

It is also safe to assume that the arrival of the ‘horseless carriage’ took the urgency away from doing what a man with a broom could do much more cheaply.

In fact it wasn’t until 1917 that somebody came up with the same basic principle that we use today. This patent, filed in Idaho by a Mr. Murphy was motorized, and research by a sanitation department suggested that one of these machines could replace a number of horse-drawn carts, saving the city US$2,716 – a lot of money in those days.

Apart from being self-propelled, the invention also included an elevator belt, so that the debris could be moved to the hopper more effectively.

The machine was designed to be narrow enough to drive along pavements and sidewalks, with the dust hopper enclosed, so whatever was sucked up didn’t go straight back into the atmosphere after the slightest breath of wind.

Ever more municipalities discovered that there was cost savings involved in using these peculiar vehicles, though the take-up must have been faster in some places than others – the author can’t remember having seen one until the 1990s.

Certainly, at about this time the city centres of the UK in particular began to revert to being for pedestrians only, and sweepers were everywhere all of a sudden.

This style of road sweeper set the pace for years to come. However, further innovation came with assorted sprays to dampen down the dust and clean the pavements.

More was to come though. Recently a German firm has taken the same concept and seriously increased the power of the vacuum, effectively inventing a truck-mounted ‘suction excavator’.

Useful for mopping up larger or toxic spills, the new machine has enough puff to be used to literally excavate holes in the ground, when used with a hose attachment.

Such a machine could be useful for digging trenches to get at utility pipes, where a conventional backhoe might slice through them.