Blog number 420 **** 19 September, 2010
I happen to be this household's househusband. I have done a lot of carpet vacuuming over the years, and my greatest frustration with that job is running the vacuum over a small piece of paper or lint and having the damn thing just lie there, laughing at me. Many a time I have bent over, picked up the speck and dropped it in a different place and tried vacuuming it again. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't. What goes on in the mind of a piece of inanimate clutter, I really don't know.
I once saw a standup comedian do a bit on this very problem with vacuuming. So it's not just me.
Yesterday I was reading an article in the New Yorker about this genius engineer who also got frustrated with poor results from his vacuum cleaner and this guy, unlike me, looked into the problem. Right off he went to the source of the perplexity and discovered that when a vacuum cleaner sucks up dust, lint, and pieces of dead skin, the first place it goes is to the sides of the bag and sticks there, thus plugging up the air flow and destroying the vacuum ability of the machine. It is such a simple and obvious solution to the conundrum that I am very surprised that I didn't figure it out. Yeah, yeah. I know. Hubris. Get over it.
So this engineering genius, what he did was to invent a vacuum cleaner that doesn't use a bag, but instead uses centrifugal force in some magical way.
We have already ordered one. They are expensive, but then so is everything else. This is America, after all.
This guy also invented a fan with no blades, just a hole. No moving parts as far as I know. I haven't a clue as to how that works. Magic, probably.
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