The History of Chimney Sweeping

By Chuck Lee, owner of award-winning Imperial Chimney Sweepers in DeKalb, Illinois — in the chimney trade since 1987.

People have cleaned chimneys for as long as they have burned fuel indoors, but the trade as we would recognize it took shape in the 16th and 17th centuries. As cities grew and coal replaced wood in much of Europe, houses were built with tall, narrow masonry flues to carry away heavier, dirtier smoke. Coal soot and wood creosote coated those flues quickly, and a clogged chimney meant a smoky house at best and a chimney fire at worst. Cleaning them became a full-time occupation.

Why chimneys had to be swept

A working flue relies on a clear, warm passage for smoke to rise. Soot and creosote narrow that passage and, in the case of creosote, add a layer of concentrated fuel to the inside of the chimney. Left alone, deposits reduce draft, push smoke back into the room, and eventually ignite. The same physics applies to a fireplace in DeKalb today, which is why the trade has never gone away even as heating technology changed around it.

The age of the climbing boys

Through the 1700s and much of the 1800s, British flues were often built deliberately narrow, with sharp bends. The cheapest way to clean them was to send a small child up the inside with a brush and scraper. These apprentices, known as climbing boys, were frequently orphans or children sold into the trade, some as young as five or six. The work was brutal. Children were cut and burned, developed deformed spines and knees, and suffered a chimney-soot cancer that the surgeon Percivall Pott identified in 1775 as one of the first recognized occupational cancers. Some became stuck and suffocated in the flues they were cleaning.

Reform and the end of climbing boys

Reformers campaigned for decades against the practice. An early Act in 1788 set a minimum age but was barely enforced. Further laws in the 1830s and the Act of 1840 went further, forbidding anyone under twenty-one from being sent up a flue, yet masters kept using children anyway. Change finally came after a boy named George Brewster died in 1875 while cleaning a flue at an asylum near Cambridge. His death pushed Lord Shaftesbury’s Chimney Sweepers Act of 1875 through Parliament, requiring sweeps to be registered and licensed with the police. With enforcement behind it, that law effectively ended the climbing boys.

The rod and brush that replaced the child

A better tool had already arrived. Around 1828 an Englishman named Joseph Glass introduced a system of cane rods joined by brass screw fittings, with a brush head that a sweep could push up the flue from the hearth below. It bent around the flue’s turns, needed no child, and did the job better. Glass is generally credited with inventing the modern chimney brush, and the rod-and-brush method he popularized is still the foundation of how a chimney is swept today. His equipment was endorsed by the reform society working to abolish the climbing boys.

Luck, soot and the Victorian sweep

Even as the work remained dirty, the chimney sweep picked up a cheerful reputation. Victorian tradition held that a sweep brought good luck, and couples considered it fortunate to meet one on their wedding day. That image, softened further by films and stories, is the cheerful soot-smudged figure many people still picture, a long way from the grim reality of the climbing boys.

Steel, cameras and a modern standard

The twentieth century brought steel and poly brushes, rotary cleaning systems driven by a drill, and, most importantly, the inspection camera. A modern sweep no longer guesses at the condition of a flue; a camera on a rod shows the full liner from bottom to top, revealing cracks, gaps and glazed creosote that no brush would find. In the United States this work is guided by NFPA 211, the national standard for chimneys and venting, which calls for a chimney to be inspected at least once a year. It is the standard we work to on every job.

The trade in DeKalb today

Northern Illinois gives a chimney plenty to deal with: wood and gas heating through long winters, and dozens of freeze-thaw cycles that work water into masonry. The tools have changed, but the goal is the same one the trade has always had, a clear and sound flue that carries smoke safely away. Imperial Chimney Sweepers has carried on that work in DeKalb since 1987, pairing the rod and brush with camera chimney inspection and modern chimney sweeping. When a flue is worn out inside, we restore it with a new liner through chimney relining rather than sending anyone up it. More than a century of reform stands behind that simple promise.