CERTAIN IMPROVEMENTS IN APPARATUS FOR CLEANSING OR REMOVING THE SOOT FROM CHIMNEYS
Year: 1856

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PROVISIONAL SPECIFICATION left by William Mills at the Office of the
Commissioners of Patents, with his Petition, on the 24th October 1856.
I, WILLIAM MILLS, of Congreve Street, Birmingham, in the County of
Warwick, Carpenter, do hereby declare the nature of my said Invention for
"CERTAIN IMPROVEMENTS IN APPARATUS FOR CLEANSING OR REMOVING THE SOOT FROM
CHIMNEYS," to be as follows, that is to say :-
I have found that the brush-headed machines, now commonly used, attached
to a cane or other jointed handle, and worked up and down chimneys, fail to
remove the major part of the soot, which, from the smoke invariably forms a
thick hard crust throughout the interior surfaces of flues, and which sooty
crust is too hard and compact to be removed by the action of brushing. And
my object is to adapt an apparatus that shall somewhat assimilate in its
working (for the removal of the soot) to the plan adopted by climbing boys,
namely, that of scraping down the surfaces of the flues, and this I do in the
following manner:-I find from experience that chimneys vary but little in
the size of their construction, say, as a rule, about 8½ inches by 13 inches,
and I provide myself with a vertical shaft and socket from six to twelve inches
long, fitted with a pulley at the top, and a hollow at the bottom for the insertion
of the cane or other handle, and about midway on this vertical shaft I secure a
metallic plate, which would be best formed from wrought iron, and to this

page_text: piece one, two, or more metallic plates (corrugated or otherwise) are secured
by hinge joints, and spring or springs if necessary; and on the outside of the
plate or plates, thus described, I attach cords, which working over the pulley or
pulleys at the top, and which cords may be brought down through a hole or
holes in the cross plate close to the handle, by the side of which it descends,
and by the aid of the cord or cords, when the apparatus is pushed up to the
top of the chimney, the user may raise the flap or flaps into an horizontal
position, which, when thus expanded, will fill up the volume of the chimney;
thus it is evident that by pulling the apparatus down, it cannot fail of scraping
off the whole of the soot that has deposited itself on or about the walls of the
flue in which the machine may be operating.
As a modification, I may in some instances attach a small brush head
mounted on a cane of about three feet in length, for passing up and cleaning
out chimney pots and contracted parts at the tops of chimneys, and by using a
thin sheet of steel fitted with friction rollers, set in lateral elastic bearings, I
may be able to do without the necessity of using cords and hinge joints, and
further, if necessary, I may make the collapseable plate at the head of stout
thick leather, or gutta percha, strengthened where needed by metallic plates,
thus in every instance maintaining the principle of scraping; and instead of
using jointed canes for the handle as now generally used, I propose in some
instances to use gutta percha made round, of about an inch in diameter,
and long enough for reaching the tops of ordinary chimneys; this will
admit of being bent up into a large coil, and may be carried about with great
portability; but to obtain a sufficient amount of rigidity for working, I
propose to cover it as it is pushed up the chimney with a series of lengths
of bamboo canes, split through the middles for the purpose of readily applying
them, and to which they may be secured in any suitable way.