| By :
Mark Etinger
I've recently been getting into Boardwalk Empire, the new show on HBO. Truthfully, I originally just got into it as a replacement for my typical Sunday night television viewings of TrueBlood and Entourage, which have both ended for the year, but we're a couple of episodes in and I'm really enjoying it. The historical drama stars Steve Buscemi, an actor I've always enjoyed who usually find himself in the supporting-actor role. It tells the story of Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, a mobster during the times of Prohibition in Atlantic City. And in the first month the show has featured bootlegging, gambling, murders, prostitutes, torture, and deep government corruption. And yet after a recent episode, the most shocking thing this viewer found was a person using a major kitchen appliance called a vacuum. After all, I thought, the show takes place in the 1920s. And I just assumed that there was no way major kitchen appliances like the vacuum had been invented yet. How wrong I was. The first the world ever heard of the vacuum was when Ives McGaffey applied for a patent on June 8th, 1869... approximately forty years BEFORE the fictional character sin Boardwalk Empire were depicted using one. A few decades later Hubert Cecil Booth, a British engineer, created a vacuum cleaner that was so massive it could not even fit into a home. The major kitchen appliance was powered by petrol and had to be drawn by not one, but a series of horses. To work efficiently, employees would park the major kitchen appliance outside of the home and used long hoses that could be brought inside to clean the floors. In Boardwalk Empire, the vacuum that is depicted is much more similar to the ones we use today, though the foreign-ness of it is accurately depicted. The major kitchen appliance becomes the focus of a scene between a gangster who works for Steve Buscemi and the mother of his child; the man purchases the major kitchen appliance as a gift for his girl, but she refuses to use it because it scares their son (We can only wonder how the son would have reacted had the family used one of Hubert Cecil Booth's hose-drawn vacuums). After some time, the lady realizes the plusses of the major kitchen appliance far outweighs that of the minuses, and she is seen using it later on despite how much it very clearly bothers the young boy. (It is worth mentioning, an argument can be made that the lady starts using the major kitchen appliance as a way to stay connected to the boy's father, because she does not truly embrace it until after he leaves Atlantic City without offering her any explanation.)
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