There were a number of things
that Dad was looking
at in terms of products
that ranged from a potato peeler
to an amphibious vehicle,
a battery powered wheelchair
and then the vacuum
cleaner was the last one.
I'd been made to use a vacuum cleaner
when I was very young by my mother.
We used to have a hoover upright.
We didn't have sockets
because there was nothing
to put in a socket,
on the end of the cord
was what looks like
the end of a light bulb.
So you had to climb up a stool,
take the bulb out of the central light
and put this plug
looking thing into the socket.
And so when I had a family
in a home of my own
and I bought the most powerful
vacuum cleaner you could buy,
I was amazed to discover that
most of the time
it didn't pick up very well.
I don't remember him doing much vacuuming.
In the factory
that made the ballbarrow
We had a huge plant to spray
paint the frames
and we sprayed them with dry powder.
A lot of the powder misses
and you have to suck it away.
And we were sucking it
through a cloth screen
and every two hours
we had to replace or
shake off the cloth.
So I asked around in the industry
what smart people did,
and they said, Oh,
they have a thing called a cyclone.
We couldn't afford to buy one.
So we decided to build one, one weekend
and it was 25 foot high.
It was huge and we welded it together
and connected it up with the top
peaking through the factory roof.
It sucked the waste powder away
all day long, collected it
in little sack at the bottom,
and we were just able to take the sack off
and reuse the powder
to spray back on frames.
This was a form of filter
that never clogged.
Like the big cloth
in the powder coating plant, clogging,
because the dust blocked holes.
This is what was happening
in the paper bag
and therefore stopped
the air going through,
and I wondered why we couldn't
use this huge cyclone
inside a vacuum cleaner.
So I rushed home
and made a cyclone out of cardboard
and put it on the back of my upright
vacuum cleaner very simply
and very easily able
to test out the theory
by just taking an existing product,
getting rid of the bits
I didn't want and replacing it
with a very simple crude cardboard
and gaffa tape model
and pushed it around the house
and it worked.
It solved a problem.
But could I imagine myself
being a vacuum cleaner manufacturer?
You know, could I possibly
take on all these huge
giants like Electrolux
and Hoover, Miele and so on?
Just in the back of my head,
but in my heart, I suppose
I thought I'd done something important.
You don't know then,
wether it's going to be commercially successful
whether it's going to work,
even whether you're going
to be able to make it.
It's fragile.
They can just blow away.
But it's the beginning.
And I remember other people
being involved in the previous ones,
the vacuum cleaner
being very much Dad on his own.
And then I remember him
painstakingly building a vacuum
forming machine, which is,
I mean, in itself,
quite an incredible feat.
This is this is the kind of thing
I was doing every day.
I'd go out and build
things that looked like
this so that were usually made of brass.
I'm putting an exit pipe
and an entry pipe
and then a collection
chamber at the bottom here.
I would do
these sort of tests day
after day and record
how well they worked.
And here these are
just some of the five
and a half thousand models
that I made of various sorts.
Banging and crashing, sawing and
And there, honestly, every day,
there was a development
and then a failure and a development
then a failure.
I'd be able to do about one test like that a day.
And I get in the next day
and make a different cyclone
and do another set of tests
day after day, month after month,
as it turned out year after year.
Apart from that, we had
a normal family life.