The revolutionary bag-less cleaner invented by the British businessman James Dyson is hoovering up sales from Hoover, which created the first vacuum cleaner in 1908 and whose name became synonymous with US prosperity in the postwar years. It was the aspiration of every American housewife to own a Hoover.

After just two years of sales, Dyson’s “dual cyclone” cleaners control 20.7 per cent of the US market, ahead of Hoover’s 15.6 per cent, as sales volumes more than tripled in 2004.

Although Hoover still sells more cleaners by volume, the higher price of Dyson’s brightly coloured designer machine puts the British brand ahead in terms of the value of sales.

The Wiltshire-based company said that its success was the result of word-of-mouth promotion of the machine’s cleaning power. In its television advertisements, Mr Dyson promises: “Nothing gets clogged ever.”

Now the jazzy Dyson brand has become a fashion statement in America, with cameo appearances on the popular sit-coms Friends and Will & Grace.

Laura Billings, a columnist for the St Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, suggests that the Dyson is to vacuum cleaners what the heavy-duty Humvee off-road vehicle is to cars.

“The Dyson is worth every penny for the simple reason that men can’t wait to drive it,” she writes. “Maybe it’s because Dyson advertised during hockey games next to commercials for Hummers that has conflated the new-age Hoover as a hot ride. Maybe it’s because promises of powerful motors and continuous suction speak to men on a deep cellular level. Maybe it’s because the first model was released in bright yellow, the color of construction tools and Caterpillar machines that boys are born wanting to drive.

“All I know is that my husband chose a weekend when I was out of town to take the kids for a test drive, and he came home with the most expensive model they had, costing about $500. When I got home Sunday night, the entire house had been sucked clean. The cobwebs. The radiators. The tops of the light bulbs,” she said.

“Other women have noticed the same phenomena.”

Alan Miller, who writes the “Old House Handyman” column for the Columbus Post Dispatch, offers a different explanation. “Everyone gave me a hard time about the old Hoover, but I thought it worked just fine. If I changed the bags once in a while, it seemed to keep the place clean,” he said. “A day after using the Hoover, the kids used the Dyson and filled a gallon bag with dirt from our just-cleaned carpets. We felt like we should take showers just knowing how much dirt had been in the house.”

A Hoover spokeswoman said figures from the industry tracking service Traqline showed that Dyson had exceeded Hoover in dollar terms for upright cleaners, only in the fourth quarter of 2004 and still lagged behind Hoover’s unit sales. “The true story is that we still had more market share in 2004 in terms of dollars and we have had about three times as much in units, “ the spokeswoman said. “As far as consumer brand preference is concerned, we still are number one, from our own independent studies.”

The Dyson cleaner’s success is all the more remarkable because it commands top dollar at a time when vacuum prices are plummetting — battering suppliers such as Hoover. “We’re thrilled with how quickly we have become the biggest in America. Our average selling price there is $500 when you can buy a vacuum cleaner for as little as $75 there,” Mr Dyson said.

“We’ve moved the manu- facturing to Malaysia but we still control everything that goes on there. We have 1,200 people in Malmesbury and we’re continuing to grow there.” In Japan, the Dyson machines are also popular. Floors constructed from woven grass tatami mats have long made the Japanese vacuum cleaner a minefield for outsiders. But by selling the Japanese “tatami-friendly” versions of its cyclone cleaners, Dyson has made impressive headway.

The problem faced by entrants to the Japanese market has always arisen from the mixed nature of Japanese floors. Most homes include areas of polished hardwood, carpeted rooms and at least one traditional tatami room. The wood and the carpet require powerful suction, while the tatami requires a gentle breeze.

Hoover began manufacturing in 1908 when Susan Hoover tried a machine invented by her friend, Murray Spangler, an Ohio inventor. She convinced her husband, who owned a leathergoods business, to buy the patent. Americans now appear to feel, however, that the British inventor has managed to come up with a better vacuum cleaner.

BLOW-BY-BLOW FIGHT TO BE NO 1

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