James Dyson leaps out of his chair like a restless child and picks up a big yellow-and-gray vacuum—one of several Dyson contraptions congregated around the podium at the Wired Business Conference last May. The audience laughs uneasily. Will he break into song? Start vacuuming the stage? "Do you want to know how to empty it?" he asks, ejecting the transparent chamber where hypothetical dust bunnies collect. "You take the bin off and ..." There's a click and the canister's bottom flaps down, releasing a cascade of imaginary grime. The thing is, the audience probably does know how it works. Many of them own Dysons. It's the top-selling upright vacuum brand in the US.
Twenty years after he launched his business—now a multinational enterprise with nearly 4,000 employees and $1.5 billion in annual sales—Dyson, at 65, still radiates a nuclear inventor's heat. He's the Jobs and Wozniak of home appliances, equal parts designer, engineer, and marketer. Before alighting on the design for his first bagless vacuum in 1983, he spent five years in his coach house on a farm in the Cotswolds, building 5,127 prototypes. When Dyson talks about that time, he mostly recounts his failures—and lavishes praise on his wife, Deirdre, an artist who supported him through his obscurity. "A painting can take a year, so she understood the primeval need to have a project, and that it might take a rather long time." Even now, as a knighted billionaire, Dyson is still trying to prove to the world that his devices are game-changers. He's not satisfied to come up with products that are incrementally better. With every release, he insists on atomizing entire categories through simple, lethally effective innovation.
If there's any method to his company's inventing madness, it's in how he and his engineers build better machines by taking things away. First Dyson Inc. introduced cyclonic chambers, which stripped the bag from vacuums; next it launched a forced-air hand dryer effective enough to eliminate the need for paper towels; and then it nuked the blades in traditional heaters and fans. But with every subtraction, the company has added power, efficiency, and sheer wow factor to our domestic appliances. Can it keep that innovative edge in today's Kickstarted marketplace? Like Apple, Dyson Inc. protects its intellectual property with courtroom nunchucks disguised as patents. But that doesn't seem to have slowed it down. The company's latest product—the cordless Animal hand vac—continues the less-is-more streak, once again leaving competitors in the dust.
Wired: How long did you spend tinkering to develop your first bagless vacuum?
James Dyson: I've been inventing since college, which was 42 years ago. And the process is pretty much always the same. You see some big problem—something that has a big Achilles' heel—and you can then proceed in one of two ways: You either develop a technology to solve the problem, or you happen to come across a technology that solves the problem. When you start, you really think you're going to get there quickly, and it always takes much longer than you ever thought.
“When students learn that engineering is about making things and taking them apart, they see it’s a creative subject.”
Wired: Both your ballbarrow design and cyclone technology were ripped off by other companies—most famously Hoover, which lost the patent suit you brought. Do you believe that intellectual property should be preserved at all costs?
Dyson: My own view is that patents are absolutely correct. Henry VIII promoted them in England and said they should last for 20 years, and they still do so today. If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.
Wired: But today it seems like patents are often being used to stymie competition. Do you believe in open source design?
Dyson: A lot of the steps of software development are not that inventive. I think it's fine for that to be open source. A patent has to be something more, something unexpected. My view—a very contrary view—is that patents increase competition. If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology. But you can't patent something that another skilled engineer in the field could have calculated or done with his basic knowledge.
Wired: Now that Dyson is a sprawling, multinational corporation, how do you keep the spirit of innovation alive?
Dyson: We try to make the corporation like the garage. We don't have technicians; our engineers and scientists actually go and build their own prototypes and test the rigs themselves. And the reason we do that—and I don't force people to do that, by the way, they want to do it—is that when you're building the prototype, you start to really understand how it's made and what it might do and where its weaknesses might be. If you merely hand a drawing to somebody and say, "Would you make this, please?" and in two weeks he comes back with it and you hand it to someone else who does the test, you're not experiencing it. You're not understanding it. You're not feeling it. Our engineers and scientists love doing that.
Useful By Design
James Dyson has revolutionized ordinary household items by reinventing them from scratch. Here's a look at some of his major innovations. —Sara Breselor
At 22, Dyson designs a high-speed marine transport vehicle. His Sea Truck can carry 3 tons at nearly 50 mph.
His wheelbarrow has a ball-wheel that won't sink in dirt. It grabs a 50 percent UK market share.
A cyclonic separator at a local sawmill—which uses centrifugal force to suck sawdust from the air—gives Dyson an idea for a vacuum cleaner. He builds a rough prototype that day.
He completes his first bagless vacuum. It's the first major change to the vacuum cleaner since its 1909 patent.
Dyson licenses his bagless vacuum technology in Japan; a pink cleaner called the G-Force becomes a hit.
The G-Force finances the first model Dyson sells under his name. In 18 months it's a best seller in the UK.
Dyson is named to the British Design Council and made a trustee of the Design Museum, only the second person to hold both positions at once.
Dyson Inc. wins a patent lawsuit against Hoover for its imitation of the cyclone mechanism.
Dyson creates the "Wrong Garden" for the Chelsea Flower Show. It has little greenery and features a fountain in which water appears to flow uphill.
The company introduces its first small, efficient, brushless motor, which powers its DC12 vacuum.
The Airblade dries hands in 12 seconds, compared with a conventional hand-dryer's 47 seconds. Dyson is knighted.
Dyson's bladeless electric fan, the Air Multiplier, reinvents an appliance that had been unchanged for more than a century.
Dyson Inc. debuts the DC44 Animal, which weighs 5 pounds and cleans a ceiling as easily as a floor. Its products are now sold in 52 countries.
Click the arrows to move through the timeline.
Wired: Do they ever fail?
Dyson: Absolutely. It's when something fails that you learn. If it doesn't fail, you don't learn anything. You haven't made any progress. Everything I do is a mistake. It fails. For the past 42 years—I've had a life of it.
Wired: Yours are enviable failures.
Dyson: Well, the moment it works—having built, say, 5,126 prototypes, and you make your 5,127th and it finally works—you immediately lose interest in it. You don't go off and buy a bottle of champagne and celebrate, because you're on to the next thing. It sounds like an awful life. Well, it is quite stressful, but it's hugely enjoyable too, because you spend your time examining why things didn't work and trying to understand. And then, in desperation, doing the wrong thing, doing something that someone more skilled would never dare do. Maybe it doesn't quite work, but it sends you off on a new path. It's exciting, it's pioneering, and it's also sort of just being obtuse.
Wired: Now it seems you're trying to keep that spirit alive with the James Dyson Foundation, which encourages young engineers to tinker and make stuff.
Dyson: I think most countries, certainly the US and Britain, need more engineers, and they're just not coming through our schools. In the UK we have about 12,000 engineers a year coming out of universities and thousands of vacancies—and that's going to be some 200,000 vacancies in five years' time. The shortfall is going to be enormous because manufacturing companies are going to have to gear up to compete in production technology.
I'm afraid we've become rich and successful and lost sight of what made us rich and successful. And, you know, competition is coming from China, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore—45 percent of graduates in Malaysia specialize in science or technology. So our foundation started off in Chicago with after-school classes in three schools, where students learn engineering and design with our Engineering Box [a Dyson product, like a bagless vacuum, that students deconstruct]. Seeing that science and engineering is actually about having ideas and making things and taking products apart and learning how they work, the students learn that it's a creative subject!
Wired: What's new in your latest release, the cordless hand-vac addition to the Animal collection?
Dyson: Cordless vacuums are designed for quick jobs, but you need enough power to do the job; you don't want the power waning over time. Our new digital V2 motor is incredibly small and efficient and spins at more than 100,000 rpm, making the new DC44 Animal the most powerful cordless vacuum on the market. We also honed the materials in the traditional lithium-ion battery, extending the full-power run time by 25 percent. And we wanted to tackle the problem of fine dust. The nylon bristles that you get on most vacuum brush bars create static, so fine particles cling to the floor. We experimented with carbon fiber, which has antistatic properties, and it worked perfectly, so we added a row of carbon fiber bristles to the cleaner head, making it much more effective at picking up stubborn fine dust.
Wired: Can you implement that innovative motor in other household devices?
Dyson: In almost anything, I think. You know, a car has about 40 electric motors in it. Airplanes have a huge number of electric motors. It's not limited to vacuum cleaners—our motors have myriad applications. Until about 10 years ago, everything had to go faster and be bigger and flashier. But things have changed. Now we have to make things that don't use resources—they're smaller, lighter, and use less electricity and materials. It's an exciting time for an engineer to be really creative. Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward. You can't do the same old thing now; you've got to do something better.
Wired: What's next for Dyson Inc.?
Dyson: Robots! A robotic vacuum cleaner requires more sophisticated technology, but don't be fooled—the foundations are the same: efficient batteries, powerful motors, and cyclones that don't lose suction. Our digital motor makes over 3,000 adjustments per second. And to withstand the g-forces generated by this high-speed motor, we made a part called the impeller out of PEEK, a superstrong, flexible thermoplastic used in aeronautics. This is where vacuum robotics can fall short; a robot that knows where it's going but lacks suck and dust-separation technologies misses the mark. Software design is important, but first you need robust hardware that can do the job.
Shoshana Berger (shoshana_berger@wired.com) is Wired*'s development editor.*