The world’s great metropolitan centres are symbolised by towers of glass reaching many levels into the sky. Even small and medium-sized cities and towns have high rise buildings, apartment blocks and sweeping glass facades in shopping malls and other retail precincts. All this glass needs to be cleaned–and on a regular basis.

This is the challenge facing the modern professional window cleaner. It is a very long way from the demands faced by their counterparts, some sixty or seventy years ago, when the first squeegee channel blades were introduced. Strangely, though the scope and scale of the job has become infinitely magnified, the tools to carry out the work and the materials they are made from haven’t changed very much in the intervening years.