This is a question mostly to our EUropean members: _loong_ time ago some friends of my parents had a real weird vacuum cleaner. that thing absolutely fascinated me, but I never saw one after they moved away. Can you help me identify that beast?
It looked like 2 satellite dishes screwed together, the top one was a light yellow, the bottom one deep red. Looked like a flying saucer or something like that. Really futuristic. _Maybe_ it could have been a Hoover, but I'm absolutely not sure. I guess it was late 70ies or early 80ies, but I could be wrong. I remember it from the late 80ies and they gave it away in maybe 1991.
Any ideas what that could have been? I can still remember how much I wanted to have that thing and how mad I was when they gave it away "to the poor" (they were a rather religious family and the woman gave it away while he had promised I would get it... and I was 5 or 6 back then.)

I've got wayyy too much time on me hands:

Is it this golf ball by any chance?



A Hoover Constellation from 1952

Read about them at this website:
http://www.137.com/museum/hoover.htm

Nope, i found that one too. Flatten it quite a bit and you got it, this one is pretty much like a ball. The thing I was talking about is maybe 40 cm in diameter and really flat, I think it was only 15 or 20 cm. A blown-up disc, try to imagine an inflated record or something like that..

No idea about your machine T-R, I'm afraid, but that Hoover model pictured above was still very common when I was a kid in the early 1970s. It came in a variety of color combinations.

The Hoover brand of vacuum cleaner was so popular in Britain in the past that the name became used as a general-term for any vacuum cleaner. It even got adapted to a verb, as in "I'll just go and hoover the living room."

We actually had the machine you are describing when I was a kid. It's a hoover something anyway. Look up google for hoover & collection or history or something and you should find it.

That hoover pictured is a bit like a hover craft it floats on a cushion of air. Wheels would have been a lot less wasteful of energy

Thanks DJK!
Think I found the thing at Ebay.
Seems to be the Hoover celebrity S3167.

Image should work until auction ends.

{ Edited to keep image available on ECN's server -- Paul }


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 09-27-2003).]