Published on Aug. 9, 2023, 8:04 p.m.

In the quiet corners of every home, a silent, microscopic war is being waged. The adversaries are relentless: legions of dust m…

Published on July 17, 2025, 10:25 a.m.

For decades, it was a persistent, shimmering dream, a staple of World’s Fair exhibits and science fiction fantasies: the automa…

Published on July 25, 2024, 11:40 a.m.

Do you remember the sound? That deafening roar that announced the start of a weekend cleaning ritual, a sound that sent pets sc…

Published on Sept. 1, 2023, 3:33 p.m.

In the quiet sanctuary of our homes, an unseen war is constantly being waged. It is a battle fought on a microscopic scale agai…

Published on July 27, 2024, 3:05 p.m.

There is a ghost in the modern machine. It emerges not with a clatter or a bang, but with a soft whir in the quiet of the after…

Published on July 20, 2024, 3:14 p.m.

There is a ghost in every machine, and in the family car, it’s made of dust. It’s a fine, grey sediment of memories—the sand fr…

Published on July 19, 2024, 1:57 p.m.

In the 17th century, a Dutch draper named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek peered through a microscope of his own design and discovered …

Published on July 25, 2024, 9:04 a.m.

Take a moment and watch the sun stream through your window. In that golden shaft of light, a silent, swirling ballet unfolds. T…

Published on Aug. 29, 2023, 11:33 p.m.

Picture London, 1901. A massive, scarlet-painted machine, powered by a sputtering petrol engine, rumbles to a halt outside a we…

Published on Aug. 29, 2023, 11:42 p.m.

There is a moment, in the quiet of an afternoon, when a single sunbeam cuts through the stillness of a room. It is a beautiful,…

Published on Sept. 21, 2024, 5:40 p.m.

There is a quiet battle being fought in every home. It’s not against the visible clutter or the occasional spill, but against a…

Published on Sept. 23, 2024, 5:59 a.m.

A little over a century ago, the act of vacuuming was a public spectacle. The earliest "dedusting pumps" were colossal, horse-d…

Published on March 2, 2024, 1:57 p.m.

In the early 20th century, in the wake of global pandemics and a newfound scientific understanding of germs, the concept of hou…

Published on March 2, 2024, 1:40 p.m.

There is a sound many of us have forgotten, the percussive *thwack* of a rug beater against a heavy carpet slung over a clothes…

Published on July 25, 2024, 4:41 a.m.

It began with a curious observation in 1901. At a London train station, American engineer Hubert Cecil Booth watched a machine …

Published on Aug. 25, 2023, 12:12 p.m.

You might remember it. The sheer heft of the old vacuum, the cacophony it unleashed, and the eternal, Sisyphean struggle with i…

Published on July 25, 2024, 5:09 a.m.

Picture this: It’s 1909 in Detroit. The air hums with the nascent energy of the automobile age, but inside the home, the daily …

Published on Aug. 10, 2023, 8:12 p.m.

## The Invisible War in Your Living Room *How a new generation of vacuums, armed with atomic-age tech and clever physics, is…

Published on Dec. 14, 2024, 1 p.m.

There’s a collective memory, perhaps filed away in the black-and-white photographs of our grandparents' homes, of the vacuum cl…

Published on Jan. 27, 2025, 2:39 p.m.

It’s 1901 in London. A crowd gathers, a mixture of curious and terrified, to witness a spectacle. A monstrous, scarlet-painted …