As the first country to industrialize, and with some of the largest cities in Europe, Britain had a problem with city hygiene since the middle of the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of people coexisted in environments where sewers and indoor plumbing were still a novelty, and garbage disposal not yet centralized. Joseph Whitworth, who lived in that environment, found it as noxious as everyone else, but came up with a relatively simple device to help clear it up a little – a cylinder with bristles attached to it, spun around by means of a bicycle chain.

On this day, December 15, in 1854, a version of Whitworth’s street sweeping machine was put into operation in Philadelphia, clearing away the large obstacles on the major thoroughfares.

John Murphy of Elgin, Illinois, invented the first mechanized street sweeper, with a conveyor belt taking dirt from the broom to the receptacle. The Elgin Sweeper company took two years to develop a working model, and field tested it on the streets of Boise, Idaho. The machine performed well, and the city calculated substantial savings from using Elgin machines over horse-drawn sweepers. These were still far from the refined machines in use today, which can pick up not only large particles of dirt, but also microscopic dust specks that contain many of the pollution chemicals.