Design space: Tangle-free vacuum-cleaning - FT.com Product: Tangle-free Turbine tool for Dyson Design: In-house Territory: UK and US Dyson, the UK-based bagless vacuum cleaner maker, wanted to find a way of sucking up hairs more effectively from carpets and soft furnishings. Conventional vacuum cleaner heads have a brush bar - a horizontal rod with sets of plastic bristles embedded - which rotates rapidly to sweep fibre and dirt into the machine. But the bar can become clogged with hairs that wrap around it. Dyson's engineers rethought the way the bristles are laid out by positioning them on two small flat pieces of oval plastic, which sit on circular discs. These discs counter-rotate to pick up hair and dirt. By angling the discs very slightly to leave a gap between, the hair has nothing to cling to and so is drawn by the suction straight up the centre of the head and into the machine. The Tangle-free Turbine tool is compatible with most full-size Dyson machines. Dyson tested the new head by brushing up long hair left on carpet 50 times without incurring tangles, unlike conventional brush bars. The new head will be available as an add-on and will be incorporated on new machines.