When: 1986
Where: Wiltshire, England
Why: James Dyson re-wrote the rulebook for the simple vacuum cleaner and became an inspiration for manufacturers, inventors, entrepreneurs and designers
How: The poor performance of Dyson’s household vacuum cleaner led him to discover that a bagless model would clog up less easily. Nearly 10 years later, his Dual Cyclone design was selling successfully in Japan
Who: James Dyson
Fact: A Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner accelerates dust particles to speeds of 924mph around the cone
Hoover’s unique selling point was the alleviation of manual chores, an aspiration encapsulated in the slogan ‘It Beats as it Sweeps as it Cleans’. Dyson’s ‘Say Goodbye to the Bag’, then, captures how substantially the technology that had dominated the vacuum cleaner market since the turn of the 20th century was disrupted by the Dual Cyclone cleaner. The invention emerged when James Dyson realised that industrial cyclone technology could be miniaturised for the home. By dispensing with the porous bag (that quickly clogged, resulting in a loss of suction), the Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner offered greater efficiency and a contemporary design.
The roots of James Dyson’s invention, patenting and subsequent commercialisation of a bagless vacuum cleaner lie in his successes and mistakes in an earlier venture. In 1971, when working on the 300-year-old farmhouse he had bought but couldn’t afford to renovate, he became fed up with the shortcomings of the builder’s wheelbarrow he was using. In all the thousands of years since its inception, he thought, nobody had ever stopped and said: ‘I could design this thing better.’
Three years later he was in production with the Ballbarrow, a much more stable and user-friendly design that was an immediate hit with the gardening public. It was never taken up by the building trade however, where resentment was ‘almost masonic’, teaching him the important lesson that the entrenched professional will always resist innovation much longer than the private consumer.
Kirk-Dyson, the company making Ballbarrow, did well in the domestic market in the mid-1970s, but was overly indebted and got into difficulties when it tried to enter the American market. In 1979 Dyson was sacked from his own company, following a dispute over rights. Dyson wanted to hold on to the intellectual property he had created – something he advises designers to do by all means. His partners, including his sister Shanie and her husband, wanted to sell the company, and promptly did so. As a result, James Dyson didn’t speak to his sister and brother-in-law for 10 years, and learnt the lesson, he says, that one should not go into business with relatives.
Dyson quickly realised that, although vacuum cleaner technology had been trusted for generations, it was fundamentally flawed.
In 2005, Dyson resuscitated the ball-versus-wheel concept, applying it to his vacuum cleaners and making them more manoeuvrable. But the invention for which he is best known, the Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner sprang from the industrial processes at Ballbarrow, rather than from the technology. Its inspiration, once again, came from a domestic chore at another farmhouse, to which he had moved his family.
Frustrated by the poor performance of their old Hoover upright, the Dyson family bought a powerful cylinder cleaner but found that it too lost suction after a short period of use. Dyson started experimenting with emptied used bags and new bags, noting a rapid decline in suction after a short period of use: ‘It had to be that the pores of the bag – which were meant to let out only air – were in fact clogging with dust and cutting off the suck,’ he decided.
Dyson quickly realised that, although vacuum cleaner technology had been trusted for generations, it was fundamentally flawed. From that moment, he declared war on the entire industry that had built up around a failing product. However you spin it, he argued, the bag would always be the weak link.
If the nuisance had been limited to the domestic arena, James Dyson might have gone on living with it. However, his engineering breakthrough was stimulated because, at about the same time, he had to deal with a similar problem at work. A powder-coating plant had just been installed at the Ballbarrow factory. Excess powder was collected in the booth by something that in essence was a huge vacuum cleaner with screens instead of a bag. The process had to be stopped every hour to clear the screen, and this down-time was a costly problem.
On investigation, Dyson found that big industrial powder coating companies used a cyclone, a tall cone that spun the fine powder out of the air by centrifugal force. He obtained a quote to have one built at his factory, but the cost was beyond the means of the business. Instead, he set about making one himself and used as a model the nearest available working unit, at a nearby timber mill, where it was used to collect sawdust.
Armed with sketches he had made at the sawmill, he welded up a 30-foot cyclone from steel sheet and installed it above the powder-coating plant, after discarding the screen with its cloth filter. The next day’s production went ahead without any stoppage, as any powder that escaped was drawn into ducting that forced it round the walls of the inverted cone: it then spiralled down to be collected in a bag at the bottom and reused.
This success stimulated Dyson’s thoughts to return to the problem of his vacuum cleaner at home. This cyclone was like throwing away the vacuum cleaner bag and never having to replace it. There was no reason, he thought, why the cyclone should not work in miniature. The same night, in October 1978, he went home and ran the old Hoover Junior just to prove that the collection was the problem, not the suction. Then, he made a one-foot high version of the cyclone out of cardboard, attached it to the Hoover and set about vacuuming his house.
Dyson had learnt that in a cyclone (a cone with its point facing downwards) the air is forced in laterally at the top, forcing it to spiral down. A particle that is revolved inside a curved wall increases its speed three times, and if the diameter of the curve is reduced, as in a cone-shaped chamber, it will continue to accelerate. A cyclone in a vacuum cleaner accelerates the dust particles from around 20mph on entry to 924mph at the bottom, where it is travelling at 324,000rpm.The mass of the particles at this speed is increased and they are thrust to the sides of the cone. Thus, the air at the centre is free of all matter and can be exhausted through a chimney while the dust falls into a bowl. That is the principle that all Dyson cleaners use. James Dyson didn’t invent it, but he engineered its application to the small-scale vacuum cleaner.
In 1979 Dyson set up the Air Power Vacuum Cleaner Company in partnership with Jeremy Fry, and spent the next three years making prototypes of varying designs and using different materials. His approach has always been to make one change at a time, testing it to see if it improves the performance, so it took four years to reach a working prototype. One intractable problem, the different performance in the cyclone of different sized and shaped particles, required a number of modifications before it could be solved. The solution was to combine two cyclones, an inner, high-speed one to catch the finer dust and a slower, outer chamber to separate larger objects such as hairs and bits of paper. This is what’s meant by a Dual Cyclone.
In 1982 Fry and Dyson decided that they had an invention and decided to sell the licence to manufacture it, changing the name of their company to Prototypes Ltd. Failure in the UK and US markets – due largely to resistance to change on the part of traditional manufacturers – was followed in 1986 by success in Japan, where the G-Force cleaner was launched by Apex Inc. Despite its price of £1,200, it was successful as a niche product and the sale of the Japanese rights enabled Dyson to set up his own manufacturing company at Malmesbury in Wiltshire.
The robustness of its casing and the fact that you could see the dust collecting in its transparent chamber were among the many innovations that appealed to purchasers.
The factory and research centre opened in 1993 and the DC01 cleaner rapidly became a design icon. Its impact on the market was as much due to the model’s bright colours as to its technology. The robustness of its casing and the fact that you could see the dust collecting in its transparent chamber were among the many innovations that appealed to purchasers. By September 1994, once the reluctance of the major retailers had been overcome, the Dyson had overtaken all other vacuum cleaner brands in the UK. In 2005 it became the market leader in the USA.
In December 2006, James Dyson was knighted for his innovative contribution to British industry. Continuing sales saw his personal fortune swell to an estimated £1.45bn in May 2011.
In October 2010, the Dyson Group reported a doubling of it profits to £190m and a turnover of £770m, attributed largely to international sales. It is targeting South America, India and China in the medium term, while building on sales in the UK and USA, its two main markets.
In the decades since the first Dyson vacuum cleaner was launched, the Dual Cyclone principle has been refined by the addition of smaller, high-speed cyclones to cope with greater volumes of air, known as Root Cyclone and used in models from DC07 onward. In 2005 the Ballbarrow concept was united to a vacuum cleaner in the DC15, which uses a ball instead of wheels to enhance manoeuvrability. Many variants have been added to the product mix, including hand-held vacuum cleaners (DC16) and animal hair cleaners.
Furthermore, the Dyson brand has expanded its range to encompass an innovative high-speed, energy-saving hand drier and a bladeless fan, the Air Multiplier, further cementing the brand’s position in the global retail market.
Although the Dyson Dual Cyclone range is no longer the only bagless vacuum cleaner on the market, it has continued to lead the UK market and has become a major brand in Japan and Australia.