The “Progressive Era” is a term applied to the period of the 1890s through the 1920s in the United States, a time when Americans believed that by working together, using capital and labor and science and education and technology, we could stamp out corruption in politics, rein in the excesses of conspicuous consumption, improve the public health, and cure problems caused by urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and just about any other ill of the modern world.

As the most trivial of trivial illustrations, there was actually a magazine, based in New York City, called Compressed Air; or, The Compressed Air Magazine. A monthly publication devoted to the useful application of compressed air. The cynical 21st century supposes that Compressed Air was an industry magazine dedicated to making money via this particular technology – but while private profit was no doubt a major factor in the magazine’s publication, its editors, citizens of the Progressive Era, were keenly aware of the public benefits of their industry.

For example, in 1905, during the tenth year of publication of Compressed Air, a news note appeared concerning a legal action recently occurring in London.

The owner of a compressed air cleaning company was hailed to court on the charge of wilfully obstructing a street with his compressed air cleaning machine. The street where the machine was in service happened to be a narrow one. The defense made was that this was an invention in the interests of health of the people and that to regard such a case as wilful obstruction would deprive people living on narrow thoroughfares from the benefit of the invention. It was claimed that this machine was no more a wilful obstruction than was a delivery wagon or a doctor’s carriage. The case was dismissed with costs.

Notice that the defense was not that the proprietor had a right to ply his trade for personal gain – rather, he made the claim that suppressing his trade where streets were narrow would deprive a segment of the public of a service rendered in the interests of health. The court agreed.

But what’s a “compressed air cleaning machine”? It’s the opposite of a vacuum cleaner – instead of sucking dirt in, it forced dirt out of upholstery, draperies, cracks in the floor, etc. It was a giant can of compressed air, like the canned air you might use to clean your computer keyboard. The “compressed air cleaning machine” forced dirt out of fabrics and cracks and into the open air, where a second part of the apparatus sucked the dusty air through filters. Hoses threaded through doors and windows led to a machine outdoors – and I’ll bet it was a tremendously noisy machine – that powered both the outgoing compressed air and the incoming dust-laden air, and where the dirt was deposited into tanks for hauling away. Hence the need for the London company’s obstruction of the narrow street.

I don’t have any idea how widespread this technology was – and you’re wondering what in heqq this has to do with Mormon history – so let’s jump across the world to Salt Lake City, where, in 1906, two cleaning companies operated “compressed air cleaning machines.” One was the National House-Cleaning Co., and the other the Utah Sanitary House-Cleaning Co. Both companies would clean your carpets and furniture in your home using their compressed air machines, or would pick up your carpets and clean them elsewhere. Both companies also washed windows, and I suspect did other major occasional house-cleaning chores, like spring cleaning wallpaper from the smoke of coal stoves and furnaces (something you could do yourself with a Silly Putty-like dough that you dabbed and massaged over every square inch of your walls and ceilings). But what both companies advertised most often was carpet cleaning.

If you were a homeowner, the Utah Sanitary House-Cleaning Co. charged you 9¢ per square yard, which to me seems very reasonable. If you ran a hotel, with long carpeted hallways, and large carpeted lobby and meeting rooms, they’d give you a discount – 7½¢ per square yard.

I don’t know what rate the Utah Sanitary House-Cleaning Co. charged the Church when they cleaned the Tabernacle – aha! there, at last, is the Mormon history connection – late in 1906. It likely would have been an expensive job in any case. There was little or no upholstery on seats, and no draperies at windows, but there was carpeting in the long aisles, and it was a big building – and the compressed air machines were used on the pine benches, forcing air into and dust out of every joint in every bench. Even though the Tabernacle was swept regularly and its seats washed occasionally, this was likely the first time in its 40 years of use that such a thorough cleaning job was done.

At least there would have been plenty of room on the Temple Block to park the big machines used to power the compressed air and vacuum devices – no threat from the city for obstructing traffic.

The work was supervised by a man named Martin Olson.

“Every man I’ve got puts on a long face when I announce a church job,” Martin told a questioner. “They know that it means getting into pretty dirty dirt, and lots of it. We don’t know how it gets into the churches or how it happens to stay there after it does get in, with the buildings only open two or three times a week, but the fact remains that the churches we have cleaned in Salt Lake have proved the dirtiest buildings we have had to contend with in the city, and we have cleaned every hotel and theatre, and most of the big office structures, here.”

To onlookers, the operation looked very much like watching a fire-fighting team at work. The men wore helmets and carried long lines of hose, with nozzles pulsating just as if they were spraying water. Air was forced into every nook and angle of the huge building. Clouds of dust and grit rose like smoke and filled the air, which was slowly vacuumed and filtered by the cleaning apparatus.

The Tabernacle proved true to Martin’s experience with the relative dirtiness of churches and hotels. “From the seats on its auditorium floor and balconies, and from its choir loft, we took out exactly fifty bushels of dirt,” Martin claimed, which was deposited into two steel tanks on the company’s engine.

The Tabernacle, for a time, was as clean as modern technology could make it.