Many people would love to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for an ultimate achievement of some kind. Here in Connecticut, The Spencer Turbine Company of Windsor has had a chance to participate in a record-stretcher that Paul Bunyan would love. Spencer helped make the world’s largest upright vacuum cleaner, a gargantuan feat that has now been officially recognized by Guinness in its 2005 edition.

If you’ve never seen the world’s largest upright vacuum cleaner, which stands 19' 6" tall and weighs over two tons, you had a chance at the Halloween Parade this year in Anaheim, California. An oversized Dyson vacuum cleaner not only paraded, it performed—and that’s where Spencer comes in. You see, to get in Guinness, size alone isn’t enough…the machine has to actually suck up dirt just like your Hoover at home. To do that, the vacuum cleaner has a heart of pure Spencer. More about that later.

If Anaheim wasn’t on your travel itinerary this October, you can still see the record-breaker on the Discovery Channel in December. The whole idea of a giant vacuum cleaner started on Discovery’s BIG! show, which is devoted to the design and fabrication of really huge items.

BIG! has created a jumbo toaster, a giant clock, a monstrously oversize espresso machine and, yes, an enormous Dyson upright vacuum cleaner. In the words of the show’s producer,“In each episode, universally recognized items are fabricated from scratch at a scale that tran-scends conventional limits. But these extraordinary products aren’t just engineered to satisfy
our curiosity. The stakes are raised when we take these behemoths out of the factory and into the world outside.” In other words, everything they make has to work just like its normal-size counterpart, only on a steroid-pumping scale.

In the case of the BIG! vacuum cleaner, its realistic behavior is dependent on a Spencer multistage centrifugal vacuum producer buried inside the Dyson machine. In the real world, this kind of product is usually sold as part of a
very large Spencer central vacuum system used in industrial and commercial applications for heavy-duty vacuum cleaning, material conveying, fume removal, high-velocity dust collection and the like.

The BIG! show is a creation of Original Productions in California, where Reverend Gadget (“Gadget” to everyone) is variously described as an engi-neer, team leader, designer, fabricator and artist. Gadget is a stickler for authenticity. He said,“ If we’re going to make a giant Dyson vacuum cleaner, it has to be the real thing. We started evaluating ideas as to how to generate enough vacuum for a scaled-up cleaner. Dyson engi-neers
came up with the required airflow rate and horsepower. I started my research for a vacuum source and found Spencer. Every different way I searched, all the people I contacted, everybody sent me back to Spencer as the blower and vacuum experts.”

Even though the market for King Kong-sized vacuum cleaners is not a big one, Spencer gave Gadget excellent cooperation in the face of an imminent deadline. Gadget explains, “As usually happens in television, everything’s done at the last minute. By the time we decided on this product there wasn’t much time. They rushed the order through Spencer (units of this size are
all built to order) and got it to us on time, which was pretty amazing.”

And so is its performance. As Gadget says, “It really sucks.” The vacuum producer utilizes a 40-horsepower motor running on 480 volts, but no outlet in their shop had that kind of juice. So they installed a generator outside and fired it up. Everyone was very impressed with thevacuum output, especially when they discovered the Spencer unit was only running at half
power! Gadget explains, “I went out, turned up the generator and the Spencer machine really took off. In fact, we have added a big bypass valve to reduce its output so the intense vacuum doesn’t collapse the acrylic cylinder that collects the dirt.”

The Spencer vacuum producer has a 36" diameter. The inlet is 8", the discharge is 10" and, as Gadget says, “It really moves some air.” And the Dyson vacuum will really move some dirt when it appears on BIG! in December on the Discovery Channel. Watch your newspaper, as they say, for date and time.