Secrets of Dyson: ALICE BEER visits its gadget-laden HQ to try out the products of tomorrow

Like Charlie Bucket at the gates of the Wonka Chocolate Factory, I was overexcited as I drove into Dyson's Wiltshire HQ.

In a morning with some of Dyson's top engineers at my disposal, I planned to lift the lid on some of the secrets behind those iconic household gadgets.

Who decides what products we next need in our homes? How does an idea become a machine and obviously, most importantly, what is in development right now behind closed doors?

Full disclosure, I am a huge Dyson fan - I don't have every gadget, but I have spent more wages than I would care to admit on a collection of cleaning, drying, straightening, and cooling machines.

With 30 years as a consumer journalist under my belt, there aren't many domestic appliances or household tools that I haven't had my critical hands on.

A machine that I actually want to use, that does the job with ease and efficiency is surprisingly hard to come by.

The first time I really registered the draw of a Dyson product, I was filming a TV show in the mid-nineties.

Ordinary street, ordinary house and it sticks so clearly in my mind that when someone dropped a crushed biscuit on the floor, the interviewee reached for a purple and gold wand hanging on a dock by the kitchen door and effortlessly vacuumed up the mess.

No scrabbling in the cupboard under the stairs, no dustpan and brush, no shifting and reaching for a socket. It was a household chore completed in beautiful efficiency.

I was smitten.

Dyson is of course James Dyson and he is woven into every product that leaves the factory. Earlier in the week, it revealed Dyson had sold 20million units in a single year for the first time in its history.

An inventive and curious child, James grew into a questioning adult and one day at home, challenged by a wheelbarrow refusing to move across a soggy garden, he questioned the accepted shape of the everyday object, swapping a slim stick-in-the-mud wheel for a ball that rolled easily over the clay.

Spray painting the new barrows then led to contemplation of the technology of airflow.

It was then the extension of this new knowledge about the movement of air led to a home operation on James' poor performing vacuum cleaner.

It lost suction power as the bag filled up. I can only imagine the happy domestic scene as James constructed and tweaked it's structure until the fundamental prototype of the bagless cyclonic vacuum cleaner was born on his floor.

Famously, it was to take 5,127 factory iterations of the machine before it was ready to go to market.

Trial and error, trial and error, many times over, leading finally to success.

The first stop on my Dyson tour was a chat with senior engineer, Ketan Patel.

My opener: Is this building full of brilliant minds making decisions about what we mortals need in our homes and how we want our everyday machines to function?

He put me right. Dyson machines are not made by boffins in white coats disconnected from the real world.

This is not a business where ideas get stuck in the system or stay in an unread email.

The feedback from homes where Dysons have to earn their keep goes straight into a live and receptive process.

Sadly, grandma is no longer here to enjoy the launch of her influence onto the UK market next year.

In the next laboratory, shelves bear pots of every kind of household detritus that one might possibly need to vacuum off the floor, (even same brand but slightly different cereals from across the world).

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Here engineers are testing probably the most radical vacuum redesign since the first Dyson stick.

The motor has been shrunk to the diameter of a two Euro coin and the narrow shaft of the stick, now not much broader than the inner tube of a loo roll, is where the dirt satisfyingly collects.

Miniaturising is obviously a drive for Dyson sales in the East where the PencilVac 15067795 has just launched.

The tweaks that will apparently radically improve the vaccuuming experience have been well received: A green light shines from both the front and the back of the head, illuminating dirt, fine hairs and particles.

Why green? Because it is apparently the most comfortable light for the human eye to see and because research showed that it was the least common floor colour in the UK.

I was handed a PencilVac to try out moving from carpet to concrete floor.

Did I notice the conical rollers which mean no more hair getting tangled and slowing down performance?

Also the soft padded edges meaning scratching kitchen kickboards will become a thing of the past.

The engineer is so excited about the innovations it is contagious.

I can confirm that the PencilVac is so manoeuvrable and agile it would easily get to the Blackpool stage of Strictly Come Dancing.

We waltzed down the corridor, passing the lab where dust mites are bred to be vacuumed up from mattresses - and on to meet a much friendlier lifeform: Sophie in the sound lab.

It's actually a semi-anabolic chamber (think sophisticated foam wedges on the walls and ceiling), where Sophie and her colleagues analyse the noise of every iteration of every machine (and of course those of competitors), to make sure it is not just quiet enough but that by extrapolating all sorts of information way above my GCSE grades, they can make the sound more appealing to the human ear.

Oh yes, and the ears of your four-legged friend. You can't make a vacuum head to brush down Fido if the process is uncomfortable to his ears and he wants to escape.

Sophie, like all the Dyson employees I met on my visit, is gentle and passionate about what she does.

If she left her anabolic chamber to come to a dinner party, you would be enthralled by her engineering passion.

You would also discover that Sophie was in the first cohort to graduate from the Dyson Institute back in 2021 after a four-year course.

The Institute now, the most over subscribed engineering course in the UK, attracts the best and most brilliant young minds and shapes them to be the British design engineers of the future.

Oxbridge places are turned down for one of 40 coveted spots in a year group and it's not hard to see the attraction; Students live for the first year on site in beautiful modern pods.

They are paid a salary and like all employees they eat for free at the Dyson restaurant.

Working alongside engineers for three days a week and studying for the other two, students are honed to take up a guaranteed position within Dyson when they graduate.

With 39 per cent women and 30 per cent from low-socio economic backgrounds, this is a great thing.

In a few months, the Dyson Spot and Scrub AI will launch with the ability to recognise objects, vacuuming or wet rollering as it sees fit! no more clearing floors so your robot can clean.

I was fascinated as the machine returned to its base and separated the wet and dry dirt, cleaning itself and recharging for the next session.

I am always astounded that Dyson maintains the market share that it does: these machines are not cheap.

The truth is that people who can pay, will and 50 per cent of vacuum cleaners sold in the UK are Dyson.

There is also now pressure to demonstrate longevity and circular sustainability, so on to the testing lab where I press buttons and pull levers, simulating household wear and tear on a cleaning head.

All Dyson tech is built to run for seven years without degradation.

Machines can be sent to Dyson after their days and refurbished models can be purchased at a discounted price.

As everyone was being so friendly, I dared to share that both my mother and my sister had purchased replacement non Dyson batteries cheaply online when their machines started fading.

At half the price of a new Dyson battery, it will be what many do.

Earnestly, my new engineering friends stressed that a bargain replacement battery will not have longevity, you will end up having to replace it sooner and it could have questionable safety implications.

They are right but the message is hard to push out there.

Behind every door at Dyson there is someone in a lab coat doing something unexpected in pursuit of perfection - which is Wonka like.

In the beauty lab, some of the country's biggest brains spend hour after hour exploring the optimum methodology for curling, waving, straightening or drying hair.

Racks of slightly macabre human hair hang waiting to be selected for trial.

Every styling tool is developed to produce desired results that last without damaging the hair.

To that end the first Dyson cosmetic hair range has just launched, containing a sunflower oil that has been harnessed on Dyson farmland.

With more than 9,000 granted or pending product patents, Dyson has never been an inward-looking company but its stretch into farming 36,000 acres across Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset is exciting.

Curled hair and spotless floors might be first world pursuits but Dyson is now seeking to solve the real problem of food security and he's starting on British soil.

Approaching farming from a manufacturing perspective, Dyson has increased the yield of strawberries grown traditionally by 250 per cent and uses heat and Co2 from anaerobic digesters to grow them all year round.

With a little anaerobic digestion of my own, I sampled both strawberries from Lincolnshire and the beef from Somerset farmland.

Both were exceptional and if the by-product of this farming method can heat and cool houses too this is exciting.

It might just be that long after the driers, vacuums and robotics of today have been replaced, sustainable agriculture might just be James Dyson's legacy.

After three hours of testing and probing and frankly getting over enthusiastic about the ever evolving tech, I tried to sneak a picture of the big mirrored glass building known as D9 that sits in the centre of the Dyson campus.

It was the first firm 'no' of the day. D9 is where the secrets are. Computer screens are covered up and my visitors pass was never going to give me access.

But as I was refused even a photo outside, I could tell that Dyson has more tricks up its sleeves for our future homes. Steamers? Air conditioners? I tried to get employees to blush or react to a correct guess.

These guys have great poker faces and I drove out through the gates content that I was leaving the problems of future domestic drudgery in capable hands.

James Dyson really is the Willy Wonka of practical modern day household technology.

Sure, it's hard to compare a sleek, high-performance vacuum cleaner to an everlasting gobstopper, but I know which one is far more useful in everyday life…