Melville Reuben Bissell
American entrepreneur (1843–1889)
Melville Reuben Bissell (September 25, 1843 – March 15, 1889) was an American entrepreneur who invented improvements on the modern carpet sweeper. The Bissell corporation is named after him.
Life and career
Bissell was born in Hartwick, New York, and grew up in Berlin, Wisconsin. As a young adult, he opened a grocery store in 1862 with his father, Alpheus, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, selling it in 1869 and opening a crockery and glassware store in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1870. He made money manufacturing crockery and investing in real estate.
In 1876, after using a Welcome carpet sweeper, Bissell began to study how to design a better sweeper, with more reliable mechanisms. Bissell patented a sweeper with a central brush, rubber wheels, and other improvements. He later bought out the Welcome Carpet Sweeper Company.
A fire in 1884 destroyed his first factory, and Bissell had only $14,000 insurance coverage on a $100,000 loss. But with the value of his patents he was soon able to obtain the needed resources to rebuild.
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This entry incorporates text from “Melville Reuben Bissell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.