# Daisy daisy



## Olly Buckle (Sep 7, 2010)

I was reminded of this by the name of one of our newer members.
  Ask most people English People, probably most English speaking people, “Do you know ‘Daisy, daisy’” and they will not refer you to the WF member of that name but commence to bawl the opening lines of a song’s chorus.
  Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do
  I’m half crazy all for the love of you
  Which carries on to describe how the marriage will be a poor affair, for he is not rich, and they will leave for the honeymoon on a tandem cycle.
  The song is called Daisy Belle and was hugely popular, firstly in London music halls and then across America, at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. The lyrics and history are too well documented on Wikipedia to be worth repeating here, but it lead me on to think of other things. 
  One of the reasons that the song was so popular was because of its reference to the bicycle. Amongst ordinary people, who would never afford a horse, bicycles were not only ridden for mundane journeys, cycling clubs became hugely popular and large groups of young men and women would venture out of the cities, in their free time. This lead to the tar-macadaming, or blacktopping, of roads, and allowed the motor car to flourish a few years later.
  Now, the next bit is purely hearsay, and my Google skills are insufficient to get me past vacuum cleaner salesmen. But I am told, in the days before vacuum cleaners, there was a company which supplied a vacuum to houses in the Chelsea, Battersea areas. Pipes would run throughout the house so that a hose could be clipped on and a room cleaned. There would be a filtered chamber outside which was emptied regularly by the company.
   What has this to do with roads and bicycles? Well, in those pre-industrial days most of what was cleaned up was ash-dust from the fire or human hair and this made an ideal addition to the tar used in blacktopping. The vacuum company cleaned up (Sorry about that). They charged to supply the vacuum and they charged to remove the waste, then they sold the waste they had charged to remove. 
  Most curiously of all they ended up selling the waste to Russia, whose road programme was behind ours, so Russian roads are bound together with the hair of Englishmen. That could puzzle some future archaeologist with a hand held DNA analyser, Englishmen come from everywhere.


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## The Backward OX (Sep 7, 2010)

Slightly off topic but the way to use Google effectively is to be creative with your search terms. If one group of words doesn't find what you seek, try something else. It might take a few minutes but eventually it'll be there, somewhere. And you can also enclose your search term in double inverted commas - "Olly toothpaste" - to narrow the search.

History of Vacuum Cleaners ßlink


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 8, 2010)

You had the same problem I did, stuck with vacuum cleaners, these people are supposed to have created a vacuum and then supplied it to the house via a pipe. Anything with the words Vacuum supply in gets inundated with people wanting to supply me with vacuum cleaners, anything else seems to get me science laboratory methodology. By the way that geezer writes terribly, "Creating attachments such as ... attachments" "The last name associated with vacuum cleaners".


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## The Backward OX (Sep 8, 2010)

When you have a minute or three, have a read of this - or scroll down to 'pneumatic dispatch tubes'. We had them here when I was a kid. That Brunel feller might know a thing or two.

Atmospheric and Pneumatic Railways


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