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Brainson is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Tom Gasco has loved vacuums ever since he was a little kid.

When my mother would go visit her friends from high school, we would go and after about 20 minutes the lady whose home we were in would notice that I wasn't in the room anymore and she would ask my mother where is Tom?

Well my mother would say where do you keep your vacuum cleaner?

Because that's where Tom is.

Trust me, what he's done with it.

He's going to take the hair off of the brush roll.

He's going to clean the filter.

He'll put a clean bag in and maybe even wipe it off. And then they might let me run it. That was a treat. I was very little, so this was a thrill.

Tom loves vacuum so much that to him the sounds they make are music.

Vacuum pleaters all hit different notes.

The pitch of a motor is a musical note.

So some of them are very loud and some of them are very muffled and quiet.

And so it was always interesting to plug it in and push that button for the

first time to see what that monster sounded like. For Tom the shape of every

vacuum is a

vacuum vacuum and the way the dirt moves as it gets sucked in is like dancing.

As a vacuum cleaner's rotating brush rotates,

it taps a carpet and makes the sand and grit and the debris kind of move a little bit.

So right before you come up to it, you'll see that the stuff is moving.

My thrill was to watch that stuff move, but never quite get the vacuum far enough to

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