FWIW I own a Henry, and I had no idea the name was a play on Henry Hoover's name -- it's not manufactured by Hoover, after all, and it postdates the word becomi

FWIW I own a Henry, and I had no idea the name was a play on Henry Hoover's name -- it's not manufactured by Hoover, after all, and it postdates the word becoming a generic term by a long way. I think the article's take on it is more likely -- machines branded Hoover were so ubiquitous in the first half of the 20th century that the term became a common word (the OED has cites for 'hoover' the verb with no capitalization or quote-marks starting in the 1940s), and once something is a common word it gets passed on to later generations regardless of whether the actual device in use is one from the company or not. (Though I remember in the early 1980s the hoover my parents had was indeed a genuine Hoover...)