A keen-eyed sales executive for an East Yorkshire manufacturing company was so intrigued with a gadget he saw on television's Tomorrow's World that he pursued its inventor - and won a year-long contract worth more than £1 million.

Stuart Sonley, of McKechnie Plastic Components in Stamford Bridge, tracked down Charles Ifejika, creator of a tiny revolutionary automatic contact lens cleaning machine called Complete Rapidcare. As a result, McKechnie is now manufacturing and packaging 10,000 of them a week and has taken on ten more jobs. Mr Ifejika has patented the battery-driven device whose two lens cradles vibrate at 2,700 oscillations per minute, the effect of which has been positively evaluated by Moorfields Eye Hospital.

The process takes just two minutes avoiding the time-consuming and fiddly "soak it" cleaning process.

Mr Sonley said: "He was going to a Chinese manufacturer, so we invited him to our factory, assessed his invention for a week, then while we kept the concept, redesigned it in a way that knocked 50 per cent off the price and we were away."

Updated: 12:03 Tuesday, February 24, 2004