Thank goodness some inventors specialize in ways to make our lives a little easier, especially around the house. Borrowing a page from Buckminster Fuller, one of his heroes, James Dyson ‘sees what needs to be done and just does it.’

In a show-and-tell format, Dyson offers a compendium of his labor-saving, ingenious designs, with side bars on business and engineering details. While Dyson has come up with washing machines, wheelbarrows and boats, the lion’s share of his presentation concerns his Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner, which tidily eliminates several nasty aspects of ordinary vacuum cleaners: loss of suction, bag-changing and the emission of dirty air. “As a child, I remembered the screaming noise, smelling stale dust and picking things up in my hands the vacuum wouldn’t suck up.”