Hubert
Cecil Booth

But in 1901 he turned his skill to carpet cleaning after witnessing the demonstration of a new machine at London’s Empire Music Hall.
He realised that the machine on display had a fatal flaw. It was designed to blow out air in the hope of raising the dust from the carpet and into the collecting bag. The inventor told him that the method Booth suggested instead—sucking up the dirt through a filter—was impossible.
  Challenge accepted, Booth set off on a mission to produce a machine that would suck the dust instead of blowing it.
After allegedly near-fatal tests—in which he choked after putting a handkerchief 'filter' over his mouth and sucking up dust from the arm of a chair—Booth formed the British Vacuum Cleaner Company and launched his new device. This was the huge beast of a machine seen doing the rounds of wealthy Londoners' homes at the start of the 20th century. Channelling a red and gold fire engine aesthetic, according to journalist and author Jane Furnival, the distinctive horse-drawn vacuum cleaner and its liveried operators arrived at your house, immediately advertising to the neighbourhood that you were holding a 'vacuum tea party'.

A visit wasn’t cheap—the cost was the same as the annual wages of a 'tweeny', a junior domestic maid. To conduct the miraculous cleaning, long hoses were fed through windows, the petrol-powered motor (and later electric engine) was started and air was drawn by suction from the hose and nozzles through a filter.
After a flurry of disapproval and a string of court cases, both against the disruption the machine caused on the streets (including frightening horses) and from a series of disgruntled inventors, Booth finally convinced judge and jury that his powerful machine was the only vacuum cleaner at the time that actually worked. 
Cleaning everywhere from Buckingham Palace to the Royal Mint and Crystal Palace—where 26 tons of dust were removed from the girders during a First World War outbreak of spotted fever—its credentials were soon established as a reliable cleaning machine. 
Vacuum cleaners were purchased by Russia's Tzar Nicholas II, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, the House of Commons and the popular Dickens & Jones department store in London. 
Despite the drama and theatre of Booth’s machine, the basic technology and the suction principle was the same as in most vacuum cleaners today.
Vacuum cleaners soon got smaller, more portable and—most importantly—cheaper.
For wealthier households, the annual evacuation so servants could complete their spring cleaning became a thing of the past. Rich homeowners purchased the new vacuum cleaners, eager to be seen as early adopters of the technology, or looking to retain domestic help made scarce by the First World War.