Original subtitles

VACUUM STARTS

We spend a whopping two years of our lives doing housework.

And most of that time is spent pushing one of those,

a vacuum cleaner.

Sucking up dust has become a national pastime.

Here in the UK, we buy seven million vacuum cleaners every year.

You missed a bit, Gregg! Sorry!

VACUUM STOPS

Vacuum cleaners are an indispensable part of our cleaning routine.

So to find out how they're made, we've come here, to the biggest

vacuum cleaner factory in the country.

I'm Gregg Wallace...

This is vast!

It's massive!

..and I'm going to extremes...

People are going to break in here with balaclavas on and free these.

..to suck up as much knowledge as I can...

It's acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, Gregg.

GREGG LAUGHS

..about what puts the va-va-voom into a vacuum!

That is fabulous, bordering ludicrous.

I'm Cherry Healey, and I investigate what's hidden in the depths

of your vacuum cleaner.

We have got evidence of dust mite poo in your dust. Oh, no!

Burn everything.

And I'll be sweeping across the country to find out how bristles

fit into brushes.

And historian Ruth Goodman...

Booth's Vacuum Cleaner Company!

..is in search of where the suction all began.

And does that work? Not very well.

SHE LAUGHS

This factory churns out 5,000 brand-new vacuum cleaners every day.

And we're finding out exactly how they do it.

Welcome to Inside The Factory.

This is the Numatic Factory in Chard in Somerset.

On this 32 acre site, they make 1.2 million vacuum cleaners a year.

They come in a huge range of styles and colours,

with more than a thousand models to choose from.

But tonight, we follow the production of their biggest seller,

the Henry vacuum cleaner in bright red.

And the process begins with a bright red tanker,

and Head of Operations Stuart Cochrane.

Morning! Hi, Gregg. Nice to meet you.

It's a chilly morning, my friend. It is a little bit, isn't it?

What is that a delivery of, please?

Well, this is a 25 ton delivery of polypropylene,

so I've got a bucket over here to show you what it looks

like inside the tanker.

May I? Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, it looks like little ice crystals!

I don't know what polypropylene is.

Is it plastic? It's plastic.

So how much of that is on there?

So there's 25 tonnes of that on there,

and that silo will hold 50 tonnes.

So we top up the silo with the tanker.

How much of that would you need to make one of your vacuum cleaners?

There's about a kilo, just under a kilo of polypropylene

in one of our vacuum cleaners.

Tanker in position, the polypropylene begins to flow

and production of my vacuum cleaner begins.

Where do we go from here?

So we need to follow the pipe from the silo inside the factory.

I hope it's warmer in there.

From the 50 ton silo, the plastic pellets travel along the pipe

straight into the distribution area.

What is all that? It's like a bowl of noodles!

Well, Gregg, this is where all the pipes to the silos have come

into the factory and this is where we distribute the material round

all of our machines. And the one that we need is over here.

I can see stuff moving around.

55mph from here to the machine.

They go 55mph? Up three there, yeah.

Which silo are we now connecting up to which machine?

Well, this comes from Silo 56-710.

This tube goes off to machine 007

so we need to connect that to that.

So you need to connect up 007.

Has it got to be a strong bond?

It's got to be a very strong bond, Gregg.

Luckily for me, you don't have to be a secret agent

to connect the pipes.

There he goes. There they go.

All my lovely little pellets.

Can we follow my pipe of plastic up to the machine?

Yep. Come on, then. This way.

My pellets are shaken and stirred as they're fired towards the factory

with me and Stu in hot pursuit.

On average, we spend over an hour a week vacuuming,

but have you ever wondered what you're actually sucking up?

Cherry's been getting her hands dirty to find out.

SHE GASPS

Chances are you haven't given a lot of thought to the contents

of your vacuum cleaner.

That is, until you need to rescue a much-loved item from inside it.

But what is dust and why do we need to get rid of it?

To find out, I've called in the dirt expert, Dr Tim Cockerill.

Dr Dust, I presume.

Cherry, I'm ready to see some dust. Come on.

Tim is on a forensic hunt for the mucky bits in my home.

What is dust? The definition of dust is just small particles

that can float around inside the air.

Inside dust, we've got everything from fibres from our clothes,

from carpets, pet hairs, skin cells.

And so everybody's dust is unique.

It's a bit like a fingerprint.

Attaching a special filter to the end of my vacuum cleaner,

Dr Tim will collect samples from two dust-rich rooms,

starting with the living room - and the sofa that my cat owns.

It probably is mostly cat hair.

Then it's up to my bedroom.

It's like a really rubbish version of Ghostbusters. I know, it is.

Is that all from my mattress?

A different pot of grot for every room. Lucky you!

Should be on my business card. SHE CHUCKLES

To test the samples, we're taking them to Brunel University,

where we can magnify my dust by more than a hundred times

to discover exactly what's in it.

First up, the living room.

What did you find? This is the dust that we sucked up

from the side of the sofa. Wow!

What on earth is this weird long tube thing?

Now, this is a cat hair.

There are lots of bits of skin cells. What is all this colour?

All of these colourful bits, they're probably coming from clothes,

perhaps the sofa itself.

Actually, all of these are microplastics that we could

breathe in. And who knows what they can do there?

So I'm filling up the air and the atmosphere

with microplastics, potentially from the sofa, my clothes.

If your clothes are made of synthetic fibres, yeah.

We don't yet know the health consequences of breathing in

microplastics, but vacuuming it up has got to be better

than inhaling it.

Before he reveals the sample from my bedroom,

Tim shows me what could potentially be lurking in my bed.

That dust is alive and moving and crawling.

This dust disco is caused by dust mites.

Are dust mites in everyone's bed?

They are very, very common, so it would be unusual for you

not to have dust mites in your bed.

Should I be worried? Well, dust mites don't bite you,

so they're not parasitic mites.

For some people, if you've got an allergy to dust mites

or, more specifically, to the dust mite droppings,

well, then that might be a problem.

Time to see if my mattress is alive with mites.

Ugh, it's really strange. It looks a bit like snow. It does, doesn't it?

These are pretty much all human skin cells.

There is not a single living dust mite in this sample here.

So I'm dust mite free?

Well, no, you can't necessarily say that because dust mites themselves

are very difficult to pick up.

So how would you know if you've got dust mites or not?

Well, what we can do is we can put in a sample of the dust

from your mattress and we can test it for basically dust mite poo.

What? You're going to try and find dust mite poo in my mattress? Yes.

This just gets better and better.

Tim's using a lateral flow test that will detect

even the smallest amount of dust mite poo.

I can tell you, we have got evidence of dust mite poo in your dust.

Oh, no! Burn everything!

Dust mites don't harm humans, but their droppings

can cause allergic reactions.

So how do we fight back?

Is there any way that I can prevent dust mites?

So it can be really difficult to get rid of the dust mites themselves

if they're living right inside the mattresses.

You can, of course, vacuum a mattress to get rid of some

of the particles that they produce,

or you can cover your bed in a mattress protector.

They don't let the dust mite droppings get out,

and they don't let the human skin cells get in,

so they deprive them of their food as well.

But it's really important to say that for most people,

dust mites are not a problem at all.

Hm. If you say so, Tim.

But vacuuming can help to remove dust mite poo

and potentially dangerous microplastics, too.

It has been a real eye-opener, finding out what is lurking

inside my vacuum cleaner.

And it's definitely making me want to clean a little bit more.

Back at the factory, my plastic pellets have been sucked

from the silo and are hurtling around 3km of pipes.

This factory is a hive of activity.

A multitude of machines are operated by 1,000 workers,

making the 32 parts for my vacuum cleaner.

This is vast! I'm amazed.

I seriously am amazed.

If you're going to put a vacuum cleaner together, where do you start?

I think the best place for us to start is with the drum,

the base of the vacuum cleaner.

Across this vast 32 acre site,

forklifts are constantly whizzing between the 30 buildings.

And I need to get a move on, too.

I'm heading to drum moulding in building number four

to catch up with my plastic pellets.

So, Gregg, this is our drum press.

So, my little plastic pellets, right, they're going down that tube

and into this? Yes. I might be being silly here, but the plastic pellets,

they are white and the bottom of your vacuum is red.

Am I being silly, or...? No.

There's a little small hopper on the side of it,

and we're pulling material out of this bin.

It's accurately metred in there at the rate of 2% of red... Oh!

..to 98% natural. Because it's such a strong colouring agent,

we only need 2% to get the strong colour that we need in the product.

I've gotcha!

To make the drum for my vacuum,

the pellets are fed into the injection moulding machine.

It's massive! It's massive, and inside it's got the shape

of the drum and... Hang on, all that hydraulics, all of that

just to make the little plastic face of the vacuum?

Well, this machine is a 600 ton machine,

but we need 300 ton of clamp force to keep the mould closed

as we're injecting the plastic in.

Give me an idea of what 300 tonnes would look like.

300 tonnes is three space shuttles or 24 London buses.

The pellets are fed into the machine towards a rotating Archimedes screw,

which draws them through a heated tube, where they melt and mix

with the coloured dye to create a molten red plastic.

When the space at the end of the tube is full,

the screw pushes forward like a syringe,

driving the liquid plastic into a huge steel mould.

The mould is then cooled to around 50 degrees,

forcing the plastic to harden for my base.

One every 55 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So, that's about 10,000 drums a week.

That's an almost mind-blowing process for somebody like me.

But there it is. It's red, it's shiny. It's ready to go.

There are 47 injection moulding machines at work across the factory,

and Stu and I are staying in the moulding area

because he tells me the next one is guaranteed

to put a smile on my face.

Just here on your left.

You're making the faces!

This is the face machine. They're the faces!

You make two at a time. That means they're twins.

Sorry, Stuart, it doesn't really look much like a face.

Well, we need to print the eyes and the smile onto this face.

The freshly moulded faces are dropped onto a conveyor

that carries them directly to the printing area,

where a large pad loaded with ink is waiting.

So, pad printing is a great way

of printing a 2D print onto a 3D object.

Because your face is curved,

you can't put a flat printer on it.

No, absolutely. The face is curved and the silicone pads mould

around that shape.

That's fantastic.

How did you come by, please,

having a face or a vacuum cleaner in the first place?

Well, the story that I've heard is, many, many years ago,

we were at a trade show and somebody on our stand painted a face

on the vacuum cleaner kind of for a joke,

just to attract people to the stand.

And then people started coming in and saying,

"We'll buy the one with the face on it,"

and that's what we've been doing ever since.

So that face has come a long, long way from a drawing

at a trade show, right? It has, indeed.

So, talk me through what's happening here, please.

You can see the slides moving in and out, and on these slides,

there's an engraving of the shapes that we want to print onto the face.

So in that engraved shape, we essentially get a puddle of ink

in the shape that we want to print.

And then the silicone pads come down, pick up that puddle of ink

and transfer it to the moulding.

There are five pads in total - two for the whites of the eyes...

..one for the smile...

..and the last two print the pupils...

..to complete its happy expression.

It actually looks like they're going under a grill there, are they?

Yes, it's dropping off onto a conveyor

through an infrared curing oven. Curing oven?

A curing oven to dry the ink and cure it and make it hard.

And is it done, then? Yes. Do you want to go around the corner

to see the finished article? Yeah, please.

They're still warm, but they are dry.

They are absolutely lovely.

They do make you smile.

So my drum has its face.

Next, I need some wheels.

And the raw material for those arrives in one ton bags.

Would you like to release it for us?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I would.

Whoa! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

That is brilliant.

This colourful pile of polypropylene is offcuts

from other factory processes.

Look at that.

And once chopped into fine pieces...

Amazing!

..they're fed into machines to make parts almost entirely

of recycled plastic.

How many wheels do you reckon you make out of that?

Well, this will make about 23,000 wheels, Gregg. Wow!

Can I come back and play with this?

The recycled plastic is mixed with black dye

and fed into a moulding machine with a difference.

This is called a two-shot machine because it's moulding two different

plastics at the same time.

So the inner hard part of the wheel

is made out of our recycled polypropylene,

and then the outside is moulded in a softer rubber-type material.

The outside coating is made from TPE, or thermoplastic elastomer,

which gives them a soft outer ring.

Like a tyre. Like a tyre, exactly that.

So the wheel run smoothly when we're pulling

the vacuum cleaner along.

The finished wheels roll straight onto meet up with the moulded drums,

which are being delivered - still hot from the press - by a robot arm.

Here at drum assembly, all the pieces for my vacuum's base

come together.

Onto my drum go the wheels,

a pair of casters,

some hubcaps,

a nuzzle, a smiley face

and then a bag and a filter,

all in less than a minute.

In charge of this lightning quick work station

is Agnieszka Julkowska Polaszek,

who's letting me have a go.

I won't be as fast as you.

So, take my wheels first of all. Yes.

It's not working. Are you sure?

It's not going in. Look.

Try again.

Ow, it's hot.

There's no hanging about on this job...

I've got it. Now, the coasters. Yeah.

..because as the drum cools, it's shrinking...

You have to feel the click.

SHARP CLICK Yeah. Click.

..making it harder to attach the parts.

Gregg, you forgot something. Hubcaps!

In there like that? Yeah.

Now I put the face on? Yes.

Slide and click.

Slide and click. Oh, that's good. Well done.

Now get the nose. Perfect.

Then you take a bag, print-side up. Yeah.

The bags are imported from Belgium and they go in to catch the dust.

And then... And a filter. ..and then a filter. Yeah.

And the filter that comes from China catches any dust

that might escape from the bag.

There we are. Well done.

There we are. Well done. That's not bad, right? Great job.

Thank you.

With my drums fully assembled,

they're put to bed in a vast holding area,

where they'll slumber safely until I've got the top half done.

When you see the amount of vacuum cleaners being produced here,

it's hard to imagine a time before we had them.

Ruth's been scouring the past to find out when our reliance

on these gadgets began.

VACUUM BUZZES

By the 1970s, this was a familiar sight and sound

in rooms across Britain,

but when did we start sucking up the dirt in our homes

rather than just sweeping it up?

And when did we start calling it "hoovering"?

Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin

To find out, I've travelled back in time

to the Black Country Living Museum...

..where Sam Watson is waiting with an array of contraptions.

Sam, hi!

Ruth! What a lovely collection of vacuum cleaners you've got.

Thank you very much indeed.

How did they start, then, vacuum cleaners?

Well, in 1907, you have machines like this which are just manual

bellows machines, pull the dirt up, take the dirt down.

They're rubbish. They are.

These early bellows managed to suck up the dust,

but without any way of trapping it, they just spat most of it out again.

But in 1908, an asthmatic American janitor called James Murray Spangler

solved the problem with a machine that could catch AND trap the dirt

using a simple fan and some household objects.

Well, what Mr Spangler did

was take his fan and mount it into a tin...

Yeah. ..with a broom handle on it.

And if I just lift the tin up, I can show you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fan going through a tin. The fan spins around and you have a hole

at the back for the dirt to go, a hole for the air to be pulled in,

and that creates the airflow. Right.

And does that work? Not very well.

SHE LAUGHS

So how does this rather Heath Robinson thing

go into production?

Well, Mr Spangler gave one to his cousin, Susan,

and his cousin Susan showed her husband, William,

and William was so impressed by it,

he bought the patent and started a company

called the Electric Suction Sweeper Company.

It's a bit of a mouthful! Doesn't fully roll off the tongue,

but his family surname did, which was Hoover.

Oh! Mr Hoover.

With a refined design, the Hoover became an instant hit

across America, and in 1932, the company built

a factory in Britain.

UK customers were sucked in by clever marketing, offering them

the chance to try an exotic new cleaning experience for free.

"Hoovering for nothing."

And in this promotion, Hoover have 5,000 brand-new machines

to be lent out for a period of two days.

And in no time at all,

hoovering became not only a regular pastime,

but also a common English verb.

Hoover brought efficient cleaning to our homes, but there was a time

when vacuums were so big,

they couldn't even get inside the house.

I'm on the trail of a pioneering British invention that cleaned up

the Victorian vacuum business,

31 years before Mr Hoover's machine hit our shores.

Here at Blists Hill Museum in Shropshire,

curator Lauren Stephenson is showing me one they've recreated.

Hello! What on earth is this huge contraption?

Well, this is a reconstruction of a British vacuum cleaner

that dates to 1901. 1901?! Yes.

It was invented by a British engineer called Hubert Cecil Booth,

and it's a horse-drawn cart that would have pulled up

outside your house, and all the hoses would have gone up

through your windows and doors

and that's how you would've cleaned your house. I see.

So it's actually... The vacuum cleaner is here.

Yes, this is the vacuum cleaner.

And then, obviously, the hoses go in. The hoses go in... Yes.

..to clean your house.

This is quite an operation, isn't it?

A petrol-powered motor sucked air into the box via a hose

and through an internal filter to trap the dirt,

much like a modern vacuum.

It drew a lot of attention. VACUUM BUZZES

And not all of it positive.

What a commotion!

And sadly, for me, the noisy engine didn't pull the cart.

GROANING

How far do we go with this thing? Not much further.

Booth's Vacuum Cleaner Company!

Anybody need their house cleaned?

What a novelty it must have been,

getting your house cleaned from outside.

Was it an expensive thing to have done?

It cost as much as a junior domestic maid's wages for a year.

Wealthy clients would hold vacuum cleaner tea parties to enjoy

the spectacle as Mr Booth's team of specialist cleaners set to work.

Ah, this is much better than doing your own hoovering, isn't it?

Victorian homes were heated by coal with plenty of soot to suck up.

And where there's muck, there's brass.

He was cleaning places like Buckingham Palace,

Westminster Abbey, so he was really, really well known.

And it even made Booth a multimillionaire.

Gosh, so 1901, a British company

is commercially successful with vacuum cleaners.

The first to pioneer suction technology

similar to our modern vacuums, Mr Booth truly trumped Mr Hoover.

Who knows? If it had really caught on,

today, we could all be doing a spot of "boothering".

Back at the factory, I'm 52 minutes into production,

and my vacuum cleaner has been fitted with some wheels,

casters and a filter.

The bottom half is complete, but now I need to sort out some suction,

so I'm heading back to injection moulding.

Stuart, I have the bottom half now of the vacuum cleaner.

What about the top half?

Well, you've come to a good place, Gregg,

cos this is where the top half starts.

And we call it a motor housing.

The motor housing comes in two parts, moulded in adjacent machines.

The motor's added further down the line, but Stuart's got one

to show me how it all fits together.

So, the motor sits on the bottom motor housing.

And we take a top motor housing to put over the bottom motor housing

to enclose it all, and then we can make a vacuum.

Yeah, I've never really understood how you make a vacuum,

how a vacuum cleaner works.

What makes it, like, suck up like that?

Well, we've got a cutaway model

and that will help me show you how it might work.

So in that, you can see our bottom motor housing and top motor housing

and the motor in the middle.

And on the motor, there's some fans,

and it's like a hairdryer in reverse.

So instead of blowing, it's sucking air out of this drum.

So as the air rushes out of the drum, it creates a vacuum

and the air tries to equalise that pressure by rushing in

through the hose into the bag in the filter and bringing with it

the dust that's around in the air. I've got you.

That motor may be small, but it's powerful.

The fan spins at 35,000 revolutions per minute,

sucking in air at 90 miles an hour.

That's 32 litres of dust-filled air a second.

This demonstration shows a lot, but it also shows that I've got

a long way to go before I've got a finished one.

What do I need now?

Well, the next thing you need to do is to get some power to the motor,

so you need some wiring and a switch.

All right. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much indeed.

I'm off again in search of suction.

The wiring section is right at the heart

of this sprawling factory complex.

It's where all the vacuums' internal electronics are put together

by the loom assembly team,

and it's overseen by wiring section manager Nathan Bandy.

Nathan? Nathan! Gregg.

I am enjoying myself here, I really am.

Listen, I need power, power from my machine.

Am I in the right place? You've come to the right place.

So we cut all the wires that goes into the loom assembly.

What is a loom assembly?

It's just like a small cluster of cables. Right.

But without those, we've got no power. No.

So where do the wires go into the loom?

Over in the loom assembly area.

Are you going to show me that? Yeah, come with me.

I think it should be like a lunar assembly area,

and it'd be all like moons and stuff.

Back on Planet Factory, they use 2,400 kilometres of wire

every year for the looms on this model alone.

All that for a little group of wires that connect the on-off switch,

transmitting electricity to power the motor.

So all these people here, they produce the looms.

Oh, I see.

So basically, Maria here, she's connecting all the wires

that would cut off the machine and putting them together,

connecting the switch and the power light.

Can I have a go? Yes, sure. Can I use your chair?

There are six wires to add to the loom,

and Maria puts the whole thing together in just 30 seconds.

There's two white ones.

No pressure, then.

Like that? Yeah, the white side. The white cable.

The white wires carry the power from the on-off switch to the motor.

And then the blue one goes at the back.

The blue and brown wires connect the on-off switch to the mains power.

So they go to the front.

OK, and then I've got the two sensors. Not yet.

Not yet, you have to... Oh, no. Whoa, whoa, whoa!

I've got to put a switch on. Yes. Whoa, where are they?

Oh, they're in here. In front of you, yes. In the left side, yes.

And the switch sits on top and joins the whole lot together.

Ah, there we are.

Ah! Ooh. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

OK. Slide it out. Slide it out.

To finish it off...

Ah!

..I connect the power indicator light.

And that's my loom, right? You're a pro. Thank you.

You're welcome. Right, I've got a loom.

Where do I go with my loom?

You've got to take that to Roy over in assembly.

And where's that? Over there. Thank you.

With my wiring loom and switch,

I'm a step closer to powering up my motor.

Hey! But first it needs to be installed

in the electrical assembly area, where project manager Roy Pool

is revved up and ready to go.

Hello. Oh, hi. You look like you're in charge.

You must be Roy. I am. How are you doing, Gregg?

I've seen how the switches are made, but I don't really understand

what happens to the ends of these cables.

OK, what it does, it gets fitted to the electrical module,

which Adrian is doing here.

My wiring loom is attached to the electrical module...

..which transfers electricity from the mains cable

to the on-off switch and then onto power my motor.

And the secret of making all that work is a very clever piece of kit.

What are those metal rings?

OK, that's a contact ring.

So the power will come through the mains lead,

through to the wires underneath.

The metal rings are electrical contacts,

and they enable the mains cable to wind up inside the vacuum cleaner.

I'm sure there's a good reason, but explain to me, why don't you

just connect the cables fixed to it?

OK, because what we have is a ten metre cable that winds up

inside the head of our vacuum.

And if you pull it out, you can see it twisting round.

So if it was fixed at that point,

it would twist and snap as you wind it around.

Because you reel it in and out,

if it was fixed, they might twist and snap off. Twist and snap.

So instead, two metal strips are attached to the end of

the mains cable that sits above the electrical module

in its own housing.

The strips make contact with the rings and,

just like a dodgem at a funfair, they deliver power through the rings

to the motor below, even as they spin around.

When I was a kid, I used to have a racing car set that fitted

onto a metal track. That's the same system that you've got

in your vacuum cleaner? That's exactly that.

So it's about the contact, not the physical connection.

Genius!

So what I need now from my old mate Stuart is a cable holder

with the metal contact strips that will help deliver power to my motor.

Can I grab this?

I get it.

That's it, right?

That's the same as the underneath of my motor racing car

when I was a kid. They're the bits that hit the rings.

And that component fits right over the top there and can spin.

I can show you that if you want, Gregg. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They can fit over the top here and then can spin

so that we can reel the cable onto that.

And the power comes down to these two cables

which attach to the motor.

I get it. I finally get it. I really do.

That spins around like that with the cable, but that doesn't matter

because the brushes all the time are in contact with those rings.

With those rings, exactly that.

I absolutely get it.

Eureka!

Finally, a ten metre power cable is wired to the top of the metal

contact strips, and the upper and lower sections

are screwed together...

..to create the connection that delivers power to my motor.

Clever designers are coming up with all sorts of new ways

to keep things dirt-free.

Cherry's been looking at a piece of kit which could transform the way

we clean our streets.

Thanks to some incredible innovations in the world

of robotics, it's now possible to clean our homes

without lifting a finger.

But could this technology have applications

outside the home, too?

To find out, I've come to this unassuming building

near Birmingham to see a state-of-the-art prototype.

Hang on a minute.

Meet the UK's first driverless road sweeper.

As well as classic cars, this company makes autonomous vehicles,

and I'm meeting Julian Turner to learn all about their robo sweeper.

Hello, Julian. Lovely to meet you. And you.

It isn't a natural leap from sports car to road sweeper.

How did you get there?

You'll actually see that the vehicles are very similar,

so it's got a chassis, space frame chassis.

It's got the bodywork, it's made out of the same material.

The only thing that's really different is one requires a driver,

this one doesn't require anyone.

Can I see it in action? Let's go.

Julian and I are putting the robo sweeper through its paces

on this empty airfield.

It's a bit like Top Gear,

only much, much slower.

Bottom Gear, if you will.

But first of all, we need a mess.

They would never ask Freddie Flintoff to do this.

Let's see how this Lone Ranger copes with this little lot.

Three, two, one, off she goes!

Ooh!

She's not speedy, but she's efficient.

That's amazing and surprisingly quiet.

Yeah, I mean, it's pure electric.

How is she actually sucking up the rubbish?

So as it's going along, it's navigating, finding the rubbish

and then putting the brushes on and the suction.

It's checking everything to make sure that it's picked up the litter

that's in front of it. And then we also have a camera behind it

checking that it's actually picked it up afterwards.

How is this powered?

It's powered by a lithium battery,

but what we've trialling at the moment is this new technology

called a graphene supercapacitor - or carbon-ion,

as some people call it.

It allows you to charge a vehicle in two minutes from flat to full.

I mean, that is stunningly quick.

On a full charge, the sweeper can clean for up to six hours

and suck up around half a ton of rubbish.

But what about its robot power?

How does the automated system work?

Why doesn't this just bash into things?

So the navigation system on this vehicle's got loads

of different sensors on it. So it's got GPS.

This is accurate to about 5mm.

You've got a camera and then underneath it,

you've actually got radar.

The robo sweeper also uses something called lidar, which emits pulses

of laser light to form a 3D picture of the world around it.

All these tools combine to give the robo sweeper

a comprehensive view of whatever it encounters.

So in theory, it should be able to respond in a fraction of a second.

What people, I think, will be really concerned about

is whether this vehicle is going to be able to stop.

What happens if a child jumps in front of it?

And obviously, there's only one way to prove that, isn't there?

I think you should have a go and jump in front of it.

OK, here we go. Pray for me.

Nobody told me I'd be playing chicken with a robot road sweeper.

Nooooo!

Nooooo!

No!

Ah, it works.

And even a surprise attack doesn't seem to faze it.

Just let you know, it works.

So, where are you going to roll it out?

So later this year, we're going to be doing some more work

with Manchester Airport Group -

that's at Manchester, East Midlands -

as well as going into some of the city centres.

It still needs to undergo extensive trials and licensing approval

before it's allowed on public streets, which is good,

because I'm pretty sure this one has taken a liking to me.

Stop it!

Stop it!

Back at the factory, and 57 minutes into production,

I've moulded the vacuum base,

fitted some wheels and wired it up ready for power.

And that's my loom, right?

Every new vacuum cleaner will have to pass quality control.

So to find out how they keep things up to scratch,

I'm heading to the on-site test centre.

MOTOR STARTS

In charge of this inquisition...

..is Senior Design Engineer Ian Lawrence.

GREGG CHUCKLES

What are you doing to them here?

They're all lined up. What are you doing?

What we've got going on here, Gregg, we've got switch testing.

OK, it's your finger poking this lots of times.

We've got hoses flexing,

we've got floor nozzles banging around, handles twisting.

If it moves, we'll test it. GREGG CHUCKLES

What, you literally keep turning them on and off? Yep.

100,000 cycles minimum.

How many times have they been turned on and off?

So these in this cabinet now

have been on and off 25,000 times in the last 24 hours.

That's brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant.

How do you choose which machine is going to be tested?

What we do is we would typically take a random selection

from production and then bring them up here and put them on test.

Let me ask you, seriously,

how long is this little machine been in production? For 40 years.

Right. So you know it works. Because we test it.

The product is constantly evolving.

We have to keep testing and keep qualifying the product.

That is fabulous, bordering ludicrous.

What else do you do to them?

Over here, we've got some going for a walk. Go on, then.

GREGG CHUCKLES

This place is nuts!

There are parts being bashed and dropped into every corner.

Ah-dah!

GREGG LAUGHS

What is that?

It's like a vacuum cleaner racecourse!

Is there a name for this enclosure?

Yeah, this is the trundle rig.

A trundle rig. A trundle rig.

What we've got here is we've got a variety of floor surfaces.

They're being dragged over thresholds, bumped around,

knocked on the equivalent of a doorway -

things you may find in an office or a home.

They will go round here 20,000 times.

That's not fair!

I tell you what, people are going to break in here with balaclavas on

and free these. Do you think so?

THUDDING, RATTLING

I don't think they're sad, I think they're pretty happy.

Only cos you painted a smiley face on them. Well, maybe,

but I think they're happy.

Time to head back to the factory floor.

And after walking all over this massive site,

I reckon I'm almost done.

My base is ready to go...

..and the top half is coming together nicely,

but there's still something important missing.

Stuart!

Hello. Hi, Gregg. Stuart. Stuart, look.

I've got the motor housing, right, I've got my electrical module.

Yeah. What I need, I know, is a lid.

Yeah, you need a cover to go on top of that.

It's made on the machine over here.

That is really shiny. Shiny, because we're using

this different material called ABS.

ABS? What is ABS?

It's acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, Gregg,

which is why everybody calls it ABS.

GREGG LAUGHS

Is that right? ABS it is.

Why is it so shiny?

ABS is very durable, but it looks really nice,

which is great for the top of our product.

The drum that you've made out of polypropylene is very tough

and will take the knocks that the base of the vacuum will make.

So by using those two different materials, we get a product

that performs really well and lasts a long time

but also looks good for our customers.

I've also got a dome that's very shiny and very elegant.

STUART LAUGHS

The cover may be made from a different material,

but the process of injection moulding is the same as the base.

Molten plastic is pumped under extreme pressure

into a dome-shaped mould, and 50 seconds later,

out pops a perfect, shiny cover...

..which immediately has the excess plastic removed before a handle

is speedily added and any rough edges taken off.

Can I have a go at putting the handle on?

Yes, you can. Stand back. Let's have a look at this, shall we?

So...

..you're supposed to put it in and twist it.

I can't. It won't.

Almost there, Gregg.

SHARP CLICK Yes! Yay!

Oh, yes!

I wasn't very good at that, was I?

I mean, really, really bad.

Is there anything else I can get?

Well, these are ready to go to the assembly line.

So what you need now is a set of wands. Wands? Yeah. Really?

Sadly, no magic broomstick on offer,

so I'm off on foot to meet the old sorcerer himself, Roy.

Roy, are you a wizard? Because I've been asked to come and get a wand.

Are they really called a wand? OK, they are a wand.

It's the name that we give the bits of tube that join the hose

to the brush.

The wands start life as a 422mm stainless steel tube,

which are fed into a machine that reduces one end by one millimetre

and stretches the other by 1.75, so they'll slot neatly together.

So how many bits does your average vacuum have?

So it has a set of three.

This is the straights being made here and then we add

one more piece, so there's two of these and one bend,

which we can show you just around the corner.

You do a bend round the corner? Just round the corner.

I think that's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

The factory makes more than a million vacuums every year,

so that's a lot of pipe.

In fact, they cut and bend 90 miles of wands every week.

Ooh, this is different. What happens here?

So what we're doing is we're putting it in a hole

which we call the volume control punch.

I think my wife would like to pick one of them to me.

The volume control is a two by one centimetre hole that acts

as a pressure release valve.

So when you suck up the curtains,

you can open the valve and pull them back out of the hose.

And then we go on to the bend,

which forms the handle part of the set.

And if you want to put on the gloves, you can have a go.

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to.

Looks simple enough.

Insert the wand, twist so the hole face is up and hit the button.

Abracadabra!

Stand back, Roy. Absolutely. I'm going to bend my first wand.

So as long as my hole's up the right way, I'm going to have a bend.

You'll see the green light come on when it's located near enough.

And hold it... That is no weight.

You've only got to just tickle it. It's a very sensitive piece.

Right, so... Go for it. So hold it in, you're on.

And hold it there. Oh, I gotcha.

Mate, I'm good at this.

See that, you know what that is?

That's magic, that is. That's magic. Well done.

Now I've got a full set of wands, I'm going to need something

to stick on the end of them.

So Cherry's been to a factory in nearby Wiltshire,

where they conjure up the brushes.

We use bristles, brushes and brooms for so many things,

from sweeping up the leaves to scrubbing our nails...

..to the brushes for our vacuum cleaner.

But have you ever wondered how are they made and what are they made of?

I'm at a factory in Wiltshire where they make five million brushes

a year, including some for the royal household.

So I'm bristling with excitement

to meet company chairman Philip Coward.

Hello, Philip!

What a buffet of bristles. It is fantastic.

But before I see how Gregg's vacuum brushes are made,

I want to know what makes the perfect broom?

Philip, how do you choose the right bristle for a broom?

Well, it depends what you want to do.

If you want a really stiff brush for cleaning the yard,

then we know that you use this arenga palm fibre,

which comes from Indonesia.

It's very hard-wearing, and there's a multitude of other fibres here

going up through the various textures till you get the one

you've got there.

That's for cleaning horses' faces.

Because they're soft, it doesn't upset the horse.

When I get my first pony, I want one of these.

But today, I'm sticking to the basics for my broom.

And for that, I need the tougher arenga fibre,

a sustainable material taken from the stem of palm leaves.

My batch is loaded straight into the brush machine.

So this is where we make the broom.

Wow, what an amazing machine!

61 centimetre-long wooden blocks are loaded into one side.

The arenga fibre is then folded and punched tightly into each hole

and held in place with a small wire staple.

I've seen a lot of machines in my time.

This one is absolutely amazing.

Well, this is unique. It's the only machine like it in the world.

It was built specially for us.

A broom head is completed every 75 seconds.

Oh, look, here we go! That's the finished brush.

That wouldn't make a very good pastry brush,

and I think it might be a bit big for Gregg's vacuum.

It would be much too big, but if you come with me,

I can show you where we've got some smaller ones. Yes, please.

For Gregg's vacuum brushes, we need a totally different

selection of bristles,

starting off with a soft round brush that's perfect for dusting.

What are we using for our vacuum cleaner accessories? Right.

Well, the brush has a mixture of polypropylene. OK.

And then this is grey horse hair that comes from Paraguay.

The hair is trimmed from the horse's mane and tail.

So we use a mixture of 50-50 of that because the horse hair

gives it a much better dusting quality,

and the plastic to give the strength of the brush to hold it up.

The plastic brush mounts are fed into a hungry machine...

It's like a really stressful fairground game.

..and placed onto a carousel by a robot arm.

Next, 26 holes are drilled into each ring

and the plastic and horse hair bristles are pushed in

and secured with a wire staple.

It's a bit like a brush machinegun.

Reload! Reload!

On the next turn, the brush is trimmed,

before being ejected onto a conveyor belt.

They make 900 of these vacuum accessories an hour.

It's really soft and strong and springy.

Perfect for a spring clean.

Gregg's vacuum cleaner also comes with a rectangular brush

made with just the short, stiff polypropylene,

built to withstand more aggressive cleaning.

In total, 40,000 brushes are produced for the vacuum factory

every week.

..288, 289, 290.

Six times a week, pallets containing almost 7,000 brushes

are loaded onto a lorry.

There you go, Gregg. Broom-broom!

I really hope that you don't brush off all my hard work.

At the factory, one hour and five minutes into production,

every piece of my vacuum cleaner has been moulded, wired and fitted...

..all in preparation for their trip to final assembly.

Drums, motor housings, cable reelers and all the other parts

are travelling from every corner of the factory to this one area,

to be assembled into a complete vacuum cleaner.

That's my motor housing. That's right.

At this point, it has the motor put into it.

Fine. Fine, fine, fine.

And there's the cover. Absolutely.

So, hang on a minute, hang on a minute.

I've now got the motor casing, got the reeler housing,

I've got the cover. Are we putting the whole thing together here?

This is where it happens. Now the whole of the top end of the vacuum

comes together at this point.

And like everything in this factory, assembly happens fast.

First, the motor that comes from Italy is added.

Then the next operator adds the upper motor housing and wires it

to the motor, adds the reeler and then the shiny new cover.

And then what we have is the screws being inserted from underneath

with the robotic arm to hold the whole of the lid together.

So hang on a minute. The white lid is coming over the casing

and that's holding it in place and the screws are coming up from below?

Absolutely that. We're measuring the depth and the torque strength.

I mean, that is happening at a rapid pace.

Well, this is where we get to the 30-second cycle

in each of the stations.

In case you blinked and missed it,

the lower housing forms the base,

then the motor with a jacket of acoustic wrap.

The upper motor housing drops in on top,

with the reeler coming in above,

before it's all finished off with a nice, shiny cover.

And finally, the top is ready to be united with the base.

Oh, look, there's my wheels and my smiling face. Absolutely.

So the head now meets the drum for the first time.

Is that now, for the first time, a working vacuum cleaner?

That works. Before we release it, we have to do a few tests

just to make sure that it's OK.

In a series of final checks, it's plugged in and powered up

to check the suction reaches a precise 225 millibars.

Then they take a photo for the records and it's ready to go.

It's extraordinary. It's taken ages to make all the different parts.

But then it comes together as a vacuum cleaner in 30 seconds.

One goes through every 30 seconds.

So hang on, hang on, hang on.

We're putting all the electronic bits together.

We're putting my base wheels, smiley face, right?

We plugged it in, we know it's going to work. That's it, right?

Now what? It's off to packing. Thank you, Roy.

No, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, Gregg.

After just one hour and 20 minutes, my vacuum cleaner is complete.

It's been built from 32 separately moulded parts

and gone through 21 pairs of hands on its journey from plastic pellet

to fully functioning vacuum.

And I reckon I've covered about four miles following it.

From final assembly, they're boxed up and head straight to packing,

where they're loaded into jumbo stillages, or crates to you and me,

ready for the trip to the dispatch warehouse.

All right, my friend. Follow me. Do you know where you're going?

And luckily for my aching legs...

HORN TOOTS Jamie! You all right, son?

..I finally got a lift.

Follow that jumbo! Go on, Jamie.

It's a quarter of a mile drive across the site to the huge storage

and distribution centre...

Mate, thank you very much indeed.

..where I'm meeting Distribution Manager Dave Hiscox.

Are you Dave? I am. Come on in, Gregg.

This is massive!

This can't all be dispatch, surely?

This is the palletising area.

And then we put it away into the rack. 21,000 square feet in here.

About nine tennis courts, Gregg, you can fit in here.

Crying out loud!

Where are your trucks? Where are your lorries?

Well, these guys will put these pallets down the chute,

and then the other end, there is a lorry

waiting to actually take the stock away.

What do you mean, "down the chute"? It'll go down one of the chutes.

You put it on here and it rolls down? It rolls down. Whoa!

The chute is sloped to an angle of six degrees,

which ensures a leisurely one-minute, 45-second trip

to the other side.

GREGG CHUCKLES How about that for timing?

Lovely job. There's our pallet. What do we do now?

Forklift straight onto a truck? That's it.

We're loading eight to ten a day.

The vacuums from this one factory

will be cleaning up right across the United Kingdom.

The UK is the largest market, but they're also exported

around the world, with Henry hot spots in Holland,

North America and Portugal.

It's a big old wagon.

So how many of these leave your factory every week, every day?

We load about eight to ten lorries a day. Every day? Every day.

52 pallets on a load, 936 units.

So there's another 51 to go. Shall we have a look? 51 to go.

Can I see the chutes again? Cos I really like that.

Do you ever ride them? DAVID CHUCKLES

I had no idea how much effort goes into making

these little dust suckers.

I've been blown away by the injection moulding...

That is massive!

..floored by how my machine gets its power...

I get it. I finally get it.

..and completely sucked in to the world of extreme testing.

That is fabulous, bordering ludicrous.

What I really loved was seeing how everybody worked with such speed

and precision, from a few plastic beads to a vacuum cleaner

that's built to last. Now, that is some transformation.

Ready? Come on, son.