Alexander M. Lewyt; Inventor Held Many Patents

Alexander M. Lewyt, 79, who held patents on scores of inventions. His penchant for invention, he once said, was so strong that he had chronic insomnia from lying awake at night envisioning new products. When he learned of undertakers’ difficulty in fastening neckties on corpses, the teen-age Lewyt devised a new kind of bow tie that clipped on. He sold 50,000 of them. But he probably was best known for the compact Lewyt vacuum cleaner, which had no dust bag and was designed not to interfere with TV or radio reception. In the first eight years after the vacuum cleaner was introduced after World War II, Lewyt Corp. sold 2 million of them. During the war, Lewyt Corp. did a multimillion-dollar business making such things as radar antennas and popcorn poppers. Lewyt sold his interest in the company to Budd Co. in the 1950s. In Sands Point, N.Y., on Friday.