Has Our Man In London Seen The Future?

By CBSNews.com London producer Tucker Reals.

Dyson being in the home care sector, I had visions of a miracle device allowing me to clean my toilet in 10 seconds, preferably without touching it, as I dialed the press liaison's number at the bottom of the e-mail. She apologized, but said she could reveal nothing.

So, walking down a small alley in London's fashionable Soho neighborhood this morning, on my way to a basement warehouse for the Dyson unveiling, I was eager — and all the more so for having been promised an opportunity to try out the mysterious new device myself.

James Dyson is familiar in this country for about a decade of television commercials promoting his popular vacuum cleaners.

He's been inventing for most of his adult life. His bagless "cyclone" system vacuums started storming the market in the early 1990s. They began making headway in the U.S. market about two years ago.

Dyson decided to produce the machines himself in 1983, after big manufacturers decided the product would cut too much into bag sales.

Prior to the vacuum, Dyson designed the "Truckboat" in 1970, a cross between a pickup truck and a whaler, and then the "Ballbarrow," a wheelbarrow that rolls on a giant plastic ball to avoid cutting a groove in your yard and to be more maneuverable. Both were successful.

More recently Dyson hit the laundry market with a washing machine that attempts to simulate the most effective method of getting your clothes clean — hand-washing. The dual drums of the Dyson machine rotate in opposite directions, "stretching" the dirt out of fabric.

Now, back to the future.

Dyson stepped onto a stage in front of about 30 eager technophiles and journalists.

"Welcome to this subterranean studio, and, oh, excuse me…" he said, before disappearing behind a door in the stage labeled with the familiar man/woman emblem of all public toilets.

One artificial flush sound later, he emerged, walked to a fishbowl next to the stage, and dipped his hands in the water. He then dried them using a typical push-button blow dryer mounted on the wall, as a digital clock ticked away 30 seconds.

"Well, they're still a bit wet," he said with a frown.

To the other side of the stage, and another fishbowl. At this point one of his assistants turned a panel in the wall and revealed Dyson's latest brainstorm, the Airblade.

Dyson stuck his hands in, pulled them back out, slowly, 10 seconds to be exact, and proclaimed them to be completely dry.

The Airblade uses two, flat, sheet-like jets of air, coming from either side of your hands and allegedly blowing at 400 mph, to squeegee your hands dry with air pressure. It's sort of like the mammoth blow-dryers at the end of a carwash.

OK, so it can return a precious 20 seconds per wash to our busy modern lives Can that really be enough to sell these units to hotels, hospitals and restaurants at almost $1,000 a pop when traditional hand blowers are available for around one fifth that cost?

According to Dyson, it will save a business owner 80 percent on energy bills compared to the standard dryers, and 96 percent compared to buying paper towels. So perhaps it can.

The Airblade saves energy by using a new motor design that's capable of spinning at 120,000 rotations per minute, compared with normal electric motors in current dryers that crank at about half that. Also, because the unit doesn't use evaporation, there's no heat needed, which also cuts down on electricity.

Dyson launched into an anti-evaporation tirade. He accused the dryers we all know, which use heat and forced air to evaporate water from you hands, of creating a "cocktail of bacteria" on your flesh, which you then spread by touching the door handle on your way out.

The Airblade, he said, avoids mixing such nasty cocktails in bar bathrooms by purifying air at the intake point with a HEPA filter, just like the one in fancy vacuums, and eliminating the need to rub your hands together, which apparently disturbs sleeping bacteria under your first layer of skin.

What about the water air-squeegeed from your hands? It is blown down into a small drain on the unit, and then goes through an iodine resin micro filter, which allegedly kills almost 100 percent of the bacteria draining down with it.

Then, to eliminate the need for plumbing, the water drips onto a small gyrating plate that uses high frequency vibration to "atomize" it, and then expel it as a "harmless invisible mist."

Proof being in the pudding, I was eager to dip my hands in the fishbowl. The Airblade felt a lot like someone dragging two rubber window squeegees down the sides of my hands — but it worked.

Some water did drip down the outside of the unit, but as Dyson's chief microbiologist for the $18 million Airblade project told me, "you will lose a little, but it's a lot better than the puddle of nasty water you get under a regular dryer."

All public restrooms — particularly those in bars — are occasionally made the workshop of graffiti artists and vandals, so I wondered how well such a technologically advanced piece of machinery would hold up to, say, someone grabbing hold of its tempting form and trying to pry it off the wall.

As luck would have it, a couple of punk-rockers from the Soho streets had wandered into the Dyson press event and were bent on, as they tend to be, destruction and malevolence toward all things. They immediately targeted the unfamiliar units mounted on studio walls for journalist tryouts.

I saw one of them pull, with all his strength, on an Airblade. He actually had to be pulled off the device and removed, along with his friend, from the event by Dyson staff.

The Airblade, the exterior of which I then learned is constructed of 100 percent cast aluminum, did not bend or budge.

According to Dyson's General Manger of Communications, Mark Scanlon, the company hopes to make Airblades available to the U.S. market for testing by Yankee hand-washers and vandals alike, by the middle of 2007.

As a fellow journalist remarked to me upon pulling his hands slowly from the device, "well, it feels like the future."

By Tucker Reals