Roto-Rooter Plumbing & Water Cleanup (formerly called Roto-Rooter Plumbing & Drain Service) is a Cincinnati-based company providing plumbing repair, sewer & drain services, and water damage cleanup services to residential and commercial customers. Roto-Rooter is a United States company founded in 1935 which originally specialized in clearing tree roots and other obstructions from sewer lines. As of 2020 it employs thousands of plumbers, and service technicians throughout the U.S. and Canada who provide plumbing and sewer and water damage cleanup services. Roto-Rooter also employs manufacturing technicians and assembly workers at its manufacturing plant in West Des Moines, Iowa. The plant manufactures the company's patented, proprietary Roto-Rooter sewer and drain cleaning machines as well as sewer and drain cleaning cables and blades. Roto-Rooter is one of the two subsidiary divisions of the publicly traded Chemed Corporation, of which the other one is a hospice care provider VITAS Healthcare. History In the late 1920s, Samuel Oscar Blanc (1883–1964) was motivated by a stubbornly blocked sewer at his son's (Milton L. Blanc) Des Moines, Iowa, apartment to seek a better solution than digging up the sewer line to remove tree roots that had invaded the underground sewer pipe. By 1933, Samuel Blanc had fashioned a sewer-cleaning machine from a washing machine motor, wheels from a child's little red wagon, and a 3/8" steel cable. The cable rotated with a sharp C-shaped blade attached to the tip. This rotating motion cut tree roots out of sewer lines, eliminating the tedious and expensive need to dig up pipes and clear obstructions by hand, thus inventing the world's first heavy-duty Plumber's Snake. Blanc's wife, Lettie (née Lettie Jensen), called his invention the "Roto-Rooter". By the mid-1930s, Blanc was selling his patented "Roto-Rooter" machines for $250 and incorporated a business around it called Roto-Rooter Corporation. Many who were eager for work in the midst of the Great Depression started their own Roto-Rooter businesses throughout the upper Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Northeast. Sewer cleaners are not required to have a plumbing license so in the 1930s a man could earn a decent living with only minor training operating the Roto-Rooter machine and a willingness to advertise his local business. Roto-Rooter's sewer cleaning service allowed homeowners to avoid digging up lawns and landscaping to reach underground sewer pipes. This modern breakthrough was such a revolutionary concept in the 1930s and 40s that Roto-Rooter featured an illustration of