I think the Dustbuster was one of those products that seemed to suddenly appear and then before long everybody knew exactly what it was. No dragging out the big vacuum, no cord and no bag — just grab it off the wall, suck up the crumbs and put it back.
This commercial is from 1980, right near the beginning of the Dustbuster craze, but I never realized how interesting the story behind it was.
Black & Decker introduced the Dustbuster in 1979, and there really is a NASA connection — just not quite the story that “NASA invented the Dustbuster.” Black & Decker was already making cordless tools before Apollo, but its work developing a battery-powered drill for NASA helped the company improve motor efficiency and cordless technology. That lunar drill was actually used on the Moon beginning with Apollo 15 in 1971.
The Dustbuster itself almost came from a failure. Black & Decker had sold a cordless multi-tool system that included a little vacuum attachment called the Spot Vac. The overall product didn’t do particularly well, but the vacuum gave the company another idea.
Designer Carroll Gantz completely rethought it. He gave the Dustbuster that distinctive shape based partly on a dustpan, changed Black & Decker’s familiar tool colors to an almond beige that wouldn’t look out of place in the kitchen, and created the wall-mounted charger — the “home base” featured in this commercial.
Black & Decker originally projected sales in the tens of thousands. Instead, more than a million were sold, and by 1985 about 10 million Dustbusters had been sold. Competitors rushed out their own versions and Black & Decker wound up fighting patent battles over the design.
And maybe the biggest sign of its success is that “Dustbuster” became the word many of us used for almost any little handheld vacuum, whether Black & Decker made it or not.
All that history just to clean up a few crumbs!
Did your family have an original Dustbuster hanging on the wall?
