Truck mount carpet cleaner : Which one was first?
Bill Bane of Bane-Clene was certainly one of the first to introduce an extractor mounted in a truck. Here is what he said in his 50th Anniversary reflections.
“I started thinking about the possibility of truck-mounted carpet cleaning equipment in the mid ‘60s. Pumps were available that could move the cleaning solution from the truck to the cleaning head, but recovering the dirty water with fan-vacs remained a problem. That little sewage pump introduced by Bill Wisdom was the missing piece of the puzzle. A larger model of that pump would make it possible to create enough vacuum for water recovery beyond 100 feet. An electrical engineer worked out a design that would let a 1½ horsepower electric motor with dual capacitors, drive the large vacuum and solution pumps that we needed on only 12 amps. With an idea inspired by tanker trucks and using available technology, we built our first two truck-mounted carpet cleaning systems in January of 1969. They were designed on the Wisdom concept but our pumps, tanks and motors were larger and bolted to the floor of the truck.