Vacuum cleaner, early 20th century. Cleaner or housewife using an electric vacuum cleaner to remove dust and debris from a carpet. The first manual vacuum cleaners were invented in the USA in the 1860s, but electrically powered ones were not developed until around the period 1899 to 1901. The US vacuum cleaner industry was established in the period from 1903 to 1913, when several patents were filed. This photograph is from the Bain News Service, one of the USA's earliest news picture libraries, with photographs dating from the 1890s to the 1930s.