July 9, 2021 • 15 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about the localization of copycat companies in the cleaning industry, and Holly shares how her robotic vacuum met its untimely end. The legacy of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg is also discussed in terms of his status as an outlier across various communities.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy. We talked about
vacuum cleaners this week. We sure did. I ended up
(00:22):
really enjoying researching this way more than I would have anticipated,
because I'll confess I'm a pretty mediocre housekeeper. Yeah, same,
I'm like a C C minus a tipping. But then
every once in a while I get a bee in
my bonnet and I go crazy and just clean like
the Dickens, and then I forget about it again for
a while. Um. One thing that I thought was really
(00:44):
interesting was how, um, any time there was a move
forward in vacuum cleaner or any kind of cleaning technology,
it was that thing where everybody tries to run to
where the lightning just struck so they can get some
of their own. And like some of that was localized
in such a way that kind of cracked me up.
(01:05):
Like we talked about the bustles, and they were from
Grand Rapids, Michigan. Shout out to my relatives there. Um,
but Grand Rapids kind of for a while became this
really hyper competitive market after their success where suddenly there
were six new companies trying to make basically the same
kind of product in that one place, which to me
is always kind of fascinating. I'm like, is it just
(01:27):
because they were local and it spread to them really
quickly and they wanted to replicate it and thought that
was a good business model to try to compete with
the person that invented this new version or I don't know,
not a business person so well. And it's one of
those things when where when there are lots of different
(01:48):
companies that are working on the product, that competition can
you know, lead to refinements or efficiencies or whatever that like,
that's all a thing, But then there are also cases
where it's like, this is fifteen different knockoffs of the
same one thing and they're all in one town. I
(02:09):
guess in terms of like your labor force, if someone
didn't like working for one company, is probably easy to
find another job, so that's a benefit, But it does
seem strange to me how quickly the exact same products
started being made in very close proximity. One other thing
I wanted to mention that I thought was really interesting
and it didn't really uh, I mean, I just the
(02:30):
episode was plenty long, and I didn't want to go
deeply into it, but that Crystal Palace cleaning was big
news for a couple of reasons. Right We mentioned that
there had been some spotted fever issues with the Royal
Navy training that was going on there and how that
really helped it a lot spotted fever being caused by ticks,
(02:52):
of course, but this was like a huge boon to
the idea of vacuum cleaning in general because people realized
with you know, pretty a pretty good example right before
them at a large scale, of how much cleanliness improved
hygiene and health. Like they really were like their health
(03:13):
benefits to doing this. Of course we should all start
getting our homes vacuum cleaned, which was of course again
a huge boon to Booths business because then he was like, no,
I can help keep you healthier in addition to just
keeping everything looking pretty um, and that kind of became
a huge between that and Royal endorsements vacuum cleaners. It's
(03:37):
all kind of a tangle too, because there's a part
of like, yes, there's actual hygiene stuff involved, but then
there's also like the the unrealistic standard of what a
person's home should look like and who is in charge
of doing that. Yes, yeah, I'm like I said, I'm
a mediocre housekeeper. My very best friend is the whole
(04:00):
her opposite of me. I swear hospitals could go to
her for training on how to keep something clean because
even when her son was very tiny, she just trained
him to clean. And so even though our house was
mostly white, there are no stories of like and then
we had to replace everything in the living room like
it was never I don't know how she does it,
(04:20):
but I don't when I'm on vacation with her in places,
she just points to places and it's like, I wish
I could dust that, like she just loves it. If
you're saying I don't have that reaction to anything, I'm
more like my house is haunted house them we got
a haunt image and thing, so I don't have to dust.
That's ambiance, but just a very different approach to the
(04:41):
whole thing. Uh. And I promised I would tell you
how our Ruba died um. This was an early model
rumba um and it is a story of our recently
departed cat, Mr burns Um And it is such a
fun story about him and is so exemplary of his
general behavior. The it's fun to share. So. Mr Burns
(05:02):
was one of those cats who was freakishly smart and
freakishly stupid at the same time, Like he could figure
out mechanical things, but in ways that were dangerous to him.
Like I've told people before about how he learned how
to turn the burners on on the stove and like
that's not smart. Um so um. We had a rumba
that we had gotten. I think we got it as
(05:25):
a refurbished We didn't get it brand new because we
probably couldn't have afforded it at the time. And you
know when you used to start the old school room
as I haven't had a newer one. I have a
different brand of a little robotic cleaner now that we
didn't use for a long time because of Mr Burns.
But when you first started it, it would make this
little mini song of going doo doo doo doo before
the motor started up and it started moving. And we
(05:47):
woke up in the night one night to hearing that
sound come from another room and it was like boo boo,
boo boop, and the button for the rumor was right
on top, and what had happened was Mr Burns had
gotten on top of the room. But I don't know
to sit I can't imagine he actually meant to turn
it on. He wanted to go for a ride. As
I sat up in bed, I literally watched what looks
(06:08):
like a cat driving a vacuum down the hallway past
our doorway, and I was like, what is going on here?
And the problem was I believe that to have been
an accident initially, but it gave him a taste for
mobility freedom because after that he always wanted to turn
the room but on and ride it around. And Mr Burns,
(06:29):
particularly as he aged, was a soft, big cat. He
was not skinny. He put on a lot of weight,
and so he actually burned out the motor so it
could no longer move. It would still go in reverse.
So I think he actually burned out the gears and
was still go in reverse, which would be fine, except
it wouldn't do suction in reverse. So he just made
(06:50):
himself a reverse car for a little while before we
got rid of our our beloved room. But that was
named Count Floyd and then it was gone canting. So
if you have a cat, I know of other people
whose cats have turned on their their floor vacuums, their
robotic vacuums, and just you know, as long as they
don't get quite so pudgy as Mr Burns', probably fine.
(07:13):
But he exceeded that that vehicle's weight limits destroyed it.
Um hm uh yeah, so that's my funny story of
how our ruba was destroyed. No, that is no um
you know, shade to Rumba or their manufacture at all.
It is not made to carry a cat around. No
(07:34):
one was like, I would like an eighteen pound cat
to be able to drive this around the house for
fun and leisure. No one says when they're developing a
floor vacuum. But that's that's what happened. Um. So if
you have funny stories similar, please share them because I
love them. That's history podcasts at I heart radio dot com.
(07:55):
One of our episodes this week was on our turo
Alfonso Schomberg, who, as I've said in the episode someone,
I'm embarrassed that I only became curious about in this
very recent moment, having just found a random mention of
his name and another article. I find him fascinating. I'm
(08:18):
enormously grateful for all of the work he did to
put this collection together. He was not at all the
only person who was collecting books, specifically books by and
about black people. That he made an enormous collection that
continues to make an enormous contribution to the world. UM.
The one thing that we didn't get into into the
(08:42):
podcast that is kind of, you know, an oversight on
his part, But something I don't really feel like I
can criticize him a ton for is that his focus
was mostly on men. Most of the work he collected
was by men. Most of the people he associated with
in his life and work were men. UM. It's one
of those things where it's like, I I wish he
(09:05):
had had some more gender equity and what he was doing,
but also given the period that he was in, in
the society that he was associating with, its unsurprising, right,
he would have been even more of an outlier had
that been the case, for sure. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, I'm
also I'm it's one of those things where this is
(09:27):
a hundred percent speculation, but I I wonder if one
of the reasons that he fell from view in a
lot of ways after his death, UM was because the
communities that he was part of here in the US,
UM didn't quite embrace him like he was. He was
(09:48):
seen with some suspicion within the Black community because of
his Puerto Rican heritage, and then he was also seen
with some suspicion in the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities
because it was a black heritage, and so as the
his communities were intentionally documenting and resurfacing figures from their
own pasts, neither quite claimed him in that way. Right, Yeah,
(10:15):
I mean that makes all of the logical sense in
the world. Right. I can easily see someone going, I
don't know if this person fits in with what we're doing,
and moving on and then not revisiting his his work
or his legacy. Yeah, It's it's hard to say, having
not you know, personally grown up in Puerto Rico and
having only been there once, whether he is more well
(10:39):
known as like a more household name there. He does
have streets and squares and things named after him in
the Caribbean, um more so than in the United States
until more recently, when more things have have been named
for him, and he has become slightly more recognized more
recently outside of the content of the Schaumberg Center, which
(11:01):
again as an enormous and important resource. It does. It
always fascinates me when people are very, very willing to
embrace the beneficial work of someone while simultaneously criticizing their
very identity that led them to do that work. Yeah,
(11:21):
it's a little like, oh oh yeah. A lot of
the people that have written about Schaumberg have talked about how,
you know, he like many many people who grew up
in the Caribbean when he did, and people in the
United States when there was just not as much widely
(11:42):
available education unless you were white, Like a lot of
people were self taught. But also a lot of the
people that were in the academy that he was in
all had degrees, and he was really able to just
like hold his own in that community in a lot
of ways, also sometimes being criticized and dismissed for uh,
(12:05):
for not having that academic background. People have noted that
like he was he was really good at collecting, he
didn't have the academic background that would lead to like
analysis of the things that he collected. Um which in
my mind it was it's like, Okay, find that somebody
(12:26):
else's work. In that case, like he was doing all
this work of finding all of these uh these published
works in some cases by first tracking down the name
of the person who's worked he could go find um
because you know that a lot of the a lot
of the people that he was trying to find publications
by were not people whose names had become widely circulated
(12:48):
in any way. UM. We also touched on it, but
did not go into a lot of detail that, like,
the reason he was able to build this huge collection
on the salary of the job that he had was
that the people were not charging a lot of money
for most of this work. So I found noted in
a couple of places that like he bought um, he
bought two volumes of Phillis sweet Lew's poems for something
(13:11):
like twenty or thirty cents, and like that. The fact
that that that was the amount of value that the
book dealers were putting on this work is why he
was able to get it all and preserve it all
and sell it all to the New York Public Library. Yeah,
that's always an interesting thing. I um, I know, I've
said on the show before. I used to work for
(13:31):
university library and and worked in acquisitions, so I did
always marvel at things and their value and what determined
their value, And I can only imagine, I mean, that
was in the late nineties and early two thousand's, so
I can only imagine in the early part of the
twentieth century how much more cockamami some of it seemed,
(13:53):
and especially when informed by racism, kind of driving the
bus of devaluation for sure. So yeah, I I am
tremendously glad that the Schaumberg Center exists today. I'm glad
he did so much foundational work that allowed it to exist.
Maybe when, when, when I'm more into traveling, because you know,
(14:14):
we're both fully vaccinated, I still haven't gone anywhere aside
from in my own community yet. Maybe at some point
I can make a trip to New York and actually
go there in person, um pending it's also being open
to the public, which I have not checked on at
this point yet. But uh yeah, very grateful that I
(14:36):
got the chance to work on this episode. We hope
if you are heading into your weekend that it is
a marvelous time and that if you have time off,
that you enjoy it completely and you find ways to
recharge and just take time for yourself. If you have
to work this weekend, and it's not your weekend in
that sense. We hope that whatever you have to do
is as smooth as possible, and that everyone is nice
(14:56):
to you, and that you come out of it unscathed.
We will be here tomorrow with the classic and then
next week with new episodes. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
(15:17):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy. We talked about
vacuum cleaners this week. We sure did. I ended up
(00:22):
really enjoying researching this way more than I would have anticipated,
because I'll confess I'm a pretty mediocre housekeeper. Yeah, same,
I'm like a C C minus a tipping. But then
every once in a while I get a bee in
my bonnet and I go crazy and just clean like
the Dickens, and then I forget about it again for
a while. Um. One thing that I thought was really
(00:44):
interesting was how, um, any time there was a move
forward in vacuum cleaner or any kind of cleaning technology,
it was that thing where everybody tries to run to
where the lightning just struck so they can get some
of their own. And like some of that was localized
in such a way that kind of cracked me up.
(01:05):
Like we talked about the bustles, and they were from
Grand Rapids, Michigan. Shout out to my relatives there. Um,
but Grand Rapids kind of for a while became this
really hyper competitive market after their success where suddenly there
were six new companies trying to make basically the same
kind of product in that one place, which to me
is always kind of fascinating. I'm like, is it just
(01:27):
because they were local and it spread to them really
quickly and they wanted to replicate it and thought that
was a good business model to try to compete with
the person that invented this new version or I don't know,
not a business person so well. And it's one of
those things when where when there are lots of different
(01:48):
companies that are working on the product, that competition can
you know, lead to refinements or efficiencies or whatever that like,
that's all a thing, But then there are also cases
where it's like, this is fifteen different knockoffs of the
same one thing and they're all in one town. I
(02:09):
guess in terms of like your labor force, if someone
didn't like working for one company, is probably easy to
find another job, so that's a benefit, But it does
seem strange to me how quickly the exact same products
started being made in very close proximity. One other thing
I wanted to mention that I thought was really interesting
and it didn't really uh, I mean, I just the
(02:30):
episode was plenty long, and I didn't want to go
deeply into it, but that Crystal Palace cleaning was big
news for a couple of reasons. Right We mentioned that
there had been some spotted fever issues with the Royal
Navy training that was going on there and how that
really helped it a lot spotted fever being caused by ticks,
(02:52):
of course, but this was like a huge boon to
the idea of vacuum cleaning in general because people realized
with you know, pretty a pretty good example right before
them at a large scale, of how much cleanliness improved
hygiene and health. Like they really were like their health
(03:13):
benefits to doing this. Of course we should all start
getting our homes vacuum cleaned, which was of course again
a huge boon to Booths business because then he was like, no,
I can help keep you healthier in addition to just
keeping everything looking pretty um, and that kind of became
a huge between that and Royal endorsements vacuum cleaners. It's
(03:37):
all kind of a tangle too, because there's a part
of like, yes, there's actual hygiene stuff involved, but then
there's also like the the unrealistic standard of what a
person's home should look like and who is in charge
of doing that. Yes, yeah, I'm like I said, I'm
a mediocre housekeeper. My very best friend is the whole
(04:00):
her opposite of me. I swear hospitals could go to
her for training on how to keep something clean because
even when her son was very tiny, she just trained
him to clean. And so even though our house was
mostly white, there are no stories of like and then
we had to replace everything in the living room like
it was never I don't know how she does it,
(04:20):
but I don't when I'm on vacation with her in places,
she just points to places and it's like, I wish
I could dust that, like she just loves it. If
you're saying I don't have that reaction to anything, I'm
more like my house is haunted house them we got
a haunt image and thing, so I don't have to dust.
That's ambiance, but just a very different approach to the
(04:41):
whole thing. Uh. And I promised I would tell you
how our Ruba died um. This was an early model
rumba um and it is a story of our recently
departed cat, Mr burns Um And it is such a
fun story about him and is so exemplary of his
general behavior. The it's fun to share. So. Mr Burns
(05:02):
was one of those cats who was freakishly smart and
freakishly stupid at the same time, Like he could figure
out mechanical things, but in ways that were dangerous to him.
Like I've told people before about how he learned how
to turn the burners on on the stove and like
that's not smart. Um so um. We had a rumba
that we had gotten. I think we got it as
(05:25):
a refurbished We didn't get it brand new because we
probably couldn't have afforded it at the time. And you
know when you used to start the old school room
as I haven't had a newer one. I have a
different brand of a little robotic cleaner now that we
didn't use for a long time because of Mr Burns.
But when you first started it, it would make this
little mini song of going doo doo doo doo before
the motor started up and it started moving. And we
(05:47):
woke up in the night one night to hearing that
sound come from another room and it was like boo boo,
boo boop, and the button for the rumor was right
on top, and what had happened was Mr Burns had
gotten on top of the room. But I don't know
to sit I can't imagine he actually meant to turn
it on. He wanted to go for a ride. As
I sat up in bed, I literally watched what looks
(06:08):
like a cat driving a vacuum down the hallway past
our doorway, and I was like, what is going on here?
And the problem was I believe that to have been
an accident initially, but it gave him a taste for
mobility freedom because after that he always wanted to turn
the room but on and ride it around. And Mr Burns,
(06:29):
particularly as he aged, was a soft, big cat. He
was not skinny. He put on a lot of weight,
and so he actually burned out the motor so it
could no longer move. It would still go in reverse.
So I think he actually burned out the gears and
was still go in reverse, which would be fine, except
it wouldn't do suction in reverse. So he just made
(06:50):
himself a reverse car for a little while before we
got rid of our our beloved room. But that was
named Count Floyd and then it was gone canting. So
if you have a cat, I know of other people
whose cats have turned on their their floor vacuums, their
robotic vacuums, and just you know, as long as they
don't get quite so pudgy as Mr Burns', probably fine.
(07:13):
But he exceeded that that vehicle's weight limits destroyed it.
Um hm uh yeah, so that's my funny story of
how our ruba was destroyed. No, that is no um
you know, shade to Rumba or their manufacture at all.
It is not made to carry a cat around. No
(07:34):
one was like, I would like an eighteen pound cat
to be able to drive this around the house for
fun and leisure. No one says when they're developing a
floor vacuum. But that's that's what happened. Um. So if
you have funny stories similar, please share them because I
love them. That's history podcasts at I heart radio dot com.
(07:55):
One of our episodes this week was on our turo
Alfonso Schomberg, who, as I've said in the episode someone,
I'm embarrassed that I only became curious about in this
very recent moment, having just found a random mention of
his name and another article. I find him fascinating. I'm
(08:18):
enormously grateful for all of the work he did to
put this collection together. He was not at all the
only person who was collecting books, specifically books by and
about black people. That he made an enormous collection that
continues to make an enormous contribution to the world. UM.
The one thing that we didn't get into into the
(08:42):
podcast that is kind of, you know, an oversight on
his part, But something I don't really feel like I
can criticize him a ton for is that his focus
was mostly on men. Most of the work he collected
was by men. Most of the people he associated with
in his life and work were men. UM. It's one
of those things where it's like, I I wish he
(09:05):
had had some more gender equity and what he was doing,
but also given the period that he was in, in
the society that he was associating with, its unsurprising, right,
he would have been even more of an outlier had
that been the case, for sure. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, I'm
also I'm it's one of those things where this is
(09:27):
a hundred percent speculation, but I I wonder if one
of the reasons that he fell from view in a
lot of ways after his death, UM was because the
communities that he was part of here in the US,
UM didn't quite embrace him like he was. He was
(09:48):
seen with some suspicion within the Black community because of
his Puerto Rican heritage, and then he was also seen
with some suspicion in the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities
because it was a black heritage, and so as the
his communities were intentionally documenting and resurfacing figures from their
own pasts, neither quite claimed him in that way. Right, Yeah,
(10:15):
I mean that makes all of the logical sense in
the world. Right. I can easily see someone going, I
don't know if this person fits in with what we're doing,
and moving on and then not revisiting his his work
or his legacy. Yeah, It's it's hard to say, having
not you know, personally grown up in Puerto Rico and
having only been there once, whether he is more well
(10:39):
known as like a more household name there. He does
have streets and squares and things named after him in
the Caribbean, um more so than in the United States
until more recently, when more things have have been named
for him, and he has become slightly more recognized more
recently outside of the content of the Schaumberg Center, which
(11:01):
again as an enormous and important resource. It does. It
always fascinates me when people are very, very willing to
embrace the beneficial work of someone while simultaneously criticizing their
very identity that led them to do that work. Yeah,
(11:21):
it's a little like, oh oh yeah. A lot of
the people that have written about Schaumberg have talked about how,
you know, he like many many people who grew up
in the Caribbean when he did, and people in the
United States when there was just not as much widely
(11:42):
available education unless you were white, Like a lot of
people were self taught. But also a lot of the
people that were in the academy that he was in
all had degrees, and he was really able to just
like hold his own in that community in a lot
of ways, also sometimes being criticized and dismissed for uh,
(12:05):
for not having that academic background. People have noted that
like he was he was really good at collecting, he
didn't have the academic background that would lead to like
analysis of the things that he collected. Um which in
my mind it was it's like, Okay, find that somebody
(12:26):
else's work. In that case, like he was doing all
this work of finding all of these uh these published
works in some cases by first tracking down the name
of the person who's worked he could go find um
because you know that a lot of the a lot
of the people that he was trying to find publications
by were not people whose names had become widely circulated
(12:48):
in any way. UM. We also touched on it, but
did not go into a lot of detail that, like,
the reason he was able to build this huge collection
on the salary of the job that he had was
that the people were not charging a lot of money
for most of this work. So I found noted in
a couple of places that like he bought um, he
bought two volumes of Phillis sweet Lew's poems for something
(13:11):
like twenty or thirty cents, and like that. The fact
that that that was the amount of value that the
book dealers were putting on this work is why he
was able to get it all and preserve it all
and sell it all to the New York Public Library. Yeah,
that's always an interesting thing. I um, I know, I've
said on the show before. I used to work for
(13:31):
university library and and worked in acquisitions, so I did
always marvel at things and their value and what determined
their value, And I can only imagine, I mean, that
was in the late nineties and early two thousand's, so
I can only imagine in the early part of the
twentieth century how much more cockamami some of it seemed,
(13:53):
and especially when informed by racism, kind of driving the
bus of devaluation for sure. So yeah, I I am
tremendously glad that the Schaumberg Center exists today. I'm glad
he did so much foundational work that allowed it to exist.
Maybe when, when, when I'm more into traveling, because you know,
(14:14):
we're both fully vaccinated, I still haven't gone anywhere aside
from in my own community yet. Maybe at some point
I can make a trip to New York and actually
go there in person, um pending it's also being open
to the public, which I have not checked on at
this point yet. But uh yeah, very grateful that I
(14:36):
got the chance to work on this episode. We hope
if you are heading into your weekend that it is
a marvelous time and that if you have time off,
that you enjoy it completely and you find ways to
recharge and just take time for yourself. If you have
to work this weekend, and it's not your weekend in
that sense. We hope that whatever you have to do
is as smooth as possible, and that everyone is nice
(14:56):
to you, and that you come out of it unscathed.
We will be here tomorrow with the classic and then
next week with new episodes. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
(15:17):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.