Kids Invent Stuff: Yorkshire inventor who sent robot chicken up to space and made world's largest electric toothbrush makes Guinness World Record books again with giant hairdryer

If you fancy creating a popcorn-firing doorbell, making an electricity-generating hat for dogs or sending a robot chicken up to space on a weather balloon, then Ruth Amos is your woman in the know.

It’s fair to say the engineer and inventor has worked on some pretty niche projects over the last ten years, bringing to life the fun, brilliant – and let’s face it, rather bizarre – ideas of primary schoolchildren, all from a workshop in the garden of her Sheffield home.

Now, after several months of top secret hiding, one of Ruth’s latest projects has been revealed, making the Guinness World Records 2027 edition. The largest hairdryer in the world, measuring 1.75m long by 1.6m tall, was completed back in spring in order to be officially verified, and has been stashed in a storage unit ever since.

“We've had this ridiculously large hairdryer that we've had to hide somewhere,” the 36-year-old chuckles. “It's quite tricky to move and has to be hoisted,” she explains. “So it does limit the practicalities of it, but you know, this is what happens when you build giant things.”

It’s not the first time that Ruth has made the record books with a mammoth creation. The 70th anniversary edition, in 2024, featured a 6ft 7in electric toothbrush, which came out of the YouTube channel that she and fellow inventor Cornwall-based Shawn Brown set up nearly a decade ago.

Kids Invent Stuff gives 4-11 year olds the chance to engage with real engineering projects. Each month, the founders set a different challenge and primary schoolchildren send in their invention ideas as pictures or videos, with one brought to life. "We talk to young people about engineering and making and problem solving while building popcorn firing doorbells or seven-foot dinosaurs that mop the floor or jam firing rockets,” says Ruth.

Their 100th invention at the end of 2024 was a major milestone. For the special occasion, they turned an eight-year-old girl’s idea of a robot chicken that poops confetti into reality, taking the invention to new heights by launching it into space. "We sent it up on a weather balloon, not a rocket, unfortunately,” Ruth clarifies. “We don't have rocket budget!”

"There's always a different challenge,” she says. “And there's always things going wrong, always problems to solve, and for me that's really fun to just have a go at building something different. Whether we're 3D printing stuff or coding something or welding something, we're just trying something new each time.”

Though setting a Guinness World Record was not what Kids Invent Stuff set out to do with the giant electric toothbrush, it provided a thrill that Ruth has aimed for ever since. In 2025, the team held a live invention show at Gulliver's Valley theme park in Rotherham, setting a record for the most people making popcorn cannons simultaneously – a total of 157.

This year, Kids Invent Stuff set a challenge for its young viewers to come up with an idea for a world record attempt and after sifting through more than 5,000 entries, the giant hairdryer was selected to be made. It is now among the more than 3,000 achievements that feature in the Guinness World Records 2027 edition,.

“The first Guinness World Record was very surreal having grown up with the books and getting them each year,” Ruth says. “We're very excited to be in the 2027 edition. Year on year it's become even more of an exciting experience.”

"Building the hairdryer, everything was on an industrial scale,” she explains. “We had industrial fans and industrial heating elements and big bits of ducting and we were trying to work out how you make the shape of a hair dryer. It was really fun but also at points we were like this is crazy. Why are we doing this?”

The plan is for the hairdryer to go on display at the Kids Invent Stuff invention shed at Gulliver's Valley, which launched at the start of the summer. As well as showcasing some of the weird and wonderful products, it offers a space for education around engineering, which Ruth is passion about.

It was during her own education at secondary school in North Derbyshire that she was introduced to engineering inventions. Back then, she had hopes of becoming a lawyer, but also chose to study resistant materials at GCSE level because of her school’s focus on design technology.

"As part of my coursework, my teacher challenged me to design something to help his dad go up and down the stairs after having a stroke,” she recalls. Ruth’s resulting creation saw her become Young Engineer for Britain at the age of 16 and she then worked to bring the StairSteady to market, starting a company from her parents’ dining room table.

It dawned on her that she’d very nearly missed out on a career that she loved because she didn’t see “people like me being engineers”. "I ended up doing a lot of work in engineering engagement and realised that we have a massive skill shortage in the UK and that actually we need more young people. We need more diverse engineers and so I started to think about how we encourage that, how we can show what engineering actually is and how creative and exciting it is.”

So with Shawn, who was also a previous Young Engineer for Britain, she launched Kids Invent Stuff – and Ruth now also works as a speaker and presenter, builds creations for various brands and television, and is the author of a children’s book, The Inventors Workshop.

Being a Guinness World Record holder only gives more visibility to her mission. “Children are looking at the world around them and thinking about what is possible and what they can do. But also at that age, they don't have some of the same limitations that we have as adults,” she reflects.

“I look back and even at 16 when I was designing the StairSteady, I feel like part of that came from the fact that I didn't know what I should or shouldn't do or how design worked and I just tried to solve a problem. And I think that's what young people are really great at. They're great at looking around and being like, do you know what? My life would be so much more fun if instead of having to get jam out of a jar, I could press a big red button and it fired out of a rocket on the dining table.

“From an engineering point of view, it's so much easier to engage and get young people excited when you're talking about slime firing superhero suits or you're talking about shoes that walk on water - you're talking to them about chemistry, you're talking to them about motors and linear actuators, but it's in a fun and really engaging way. And I think that's really important.

“It’s showing that anyone can be an inventor. Everyone has great ideas and this is how things come to life. We also try to show things don't work. We don't always know what we're doing and it can be a little bit scary at points, but we're trying to just have a go and have fun along the way.”

- To purchase the Guinness World Records 2027 edition, visit guinnessworldrecords.com/products/books

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