This article was taken from the November 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Don't call Sir James Dyson a businessman. His bagless vacuum cleaners, bladeless fans and other convention-defying appliances may have scooped him £206m profit last year. And, in three decades, he has gone from relying on his wife's income as an artist to amassing an estimated personal fortune of £1.45 billion. But Dyson is quite insistent. "I'm not a businessman," he says. "I'm a designer and engineer."
Dyson's headquarters sit on the outskirts of Malmesbury, a pre-Roman town in Wiltshire, south-west England. The box-shaped building covers the area of four football pitches and its low, undulating roof echoes the surrounding Cotswold hills. Much of the facade is clear glass, but the ground floor where the engineers work -- Dyson often alongside them -- is hidden behind mirrored panes.
On an ashen-skied afternoon in early July, Dyson, who at 64 has a trim physique and platinum-white hair, is sitting on a high-backed Charles Eames chair in his airy first-floor office.
It's on the north side of the building and is enclosed by transparent partitions; a square, Carrera-marble table dominates the room and metal shelves displaying bookmarked design anthologies jut from the far corner.
Arranged next to the walls: Dyson's inventions. Here are the Dual Cyclones, his suction-retaining vacuum cleaners; the water-scraping Airblade hand drier; the non-buffeting Air Multiplier fan. Today, he shows off a new addition to his oeuvre: a portable fan heater, the result of three years' hard engineering. It's called the Dyson Hot, and he hopes it will make traditional versions a thing of the past.
Dyson's modus operandi is to reinvent everyday products whose design has calcified into a standard that he believes to be flawed. "Doing a Dyson", as his approach has become known. "People tend to just continue to make what's out there at the moment and that's all you can buy," Dyson says, in gentle received pronunciation. "But that's not the way I like to do things." The advantage of this strategy is that his markets already exist, and he is able to innovate through a user's eyes.
So it was with his new heater. "The thing that I have always remembered about conventional heaters is you switch them on and you get this terrible smell of burnt dust," he says, with a sigh. "We had those in my [childhood] house in Norfolk. We could make toast on them; they were quite useful in that sense. But, in terms of health and safety, they shouldn't be used at all. And fan heaters are such feeble blowers they don't heat the air in the room, they only heat you fairly locally."
It was making a cooler that finally inspired Dyson to invent a better heater. In October 2009, he was in New York to debut his Air Multiplier fan. The device looks unusual because it does not have external blades, but form entirely follows function. A spinning impeller in its base draws in 27 litres of air per second, and sends it up and out through a round slit in the Air Multiplier's ring-shaped head ("which I love calling an 'annulus', because it's a slightly naughty word," says Dyson). The rush of air drags yet more air through the loop from behind, multiplying the jet 15 times. The promise: strong, non-choppy airflow and a safer product.
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New York was soon to be locked in winter's cold grip. "It certainly wasn't the time to be launching a fan," he recalls. "There were a number of us sitting around, and we said, 'Why aren't we doing a heater?' It was a joke that suddenly became serious."
Dyson hoped that a heater would offset the Air Multiplier's predicted seasonal demand. He also suspected his engineers could directly repurpose the bladeless technology. Later, while riding in a yellow taxi, he proposed the idea over his mobile phone to Peter Gammack, the company's head of new products. They resolved to set the machinery of innovation at Dyson HQ into action, tasking their engineers with finding the fastest way to heat a whole room to an even, steady temperature -- without burning dust. And from that decision flowed a process of repeated failure.
Thomas Edison, the American inventor, is synonymous with trial-and-error innovating. He would build a prototype, test it, watch it go wrong, tweak the design and build another. Over and over again. It's how he developed the practical light bulb that he unveiled in 1879. Dyson has volumes about Edison on his bookshelves at Dodington Park, his country house in Gloucestershire, and, over a century later, swears by his approach. (In the 1980s, Dyson's Ahab-like quest to find out how to make a bagless vacuum cleaner involved 5,126 failures.) "At school, you're not allowed to fail; the wrong answer is a bad thing," Dyson says. "But all failures are valuable because they all teach you something. I have lots of them every day." His company would later use this monomaniacal process to give heater manufacturing a shot in the arm.
The heater's first tentative prototypes began life as sketches. "The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you're totally free," says Dyson. He opens a book on his office table to show a finely etched diagram that he composed yesterday for a future innovation. Drawing helps explain ideas quickly, he says. "My best example is [Sir Alexander] Issigonis with the Mini.
He drew the entire mechanics in a 3D sketch sitting in a deckchair at the Grand Hotel in Nice. I know this because a friend of mine saw him do it."
Anxiety about the heater's design focused on a pair of challenges: regulating room temperature, and keeping the bodywork cool. Regulating room temperature was fiddly. It was unclear where to position the thermostat within the machine for an accurate reading. Cooling was even more important. The team had fixed on housing ten ceramic stones in each side of the heater's plastic head -- an elongated hollow ring -- to produce heat. A current would warm them up to a self-regulating 200 degrees Celsius, below dust's burning point but hot enough to affect the bodywork. Some early prototypes distorted.
Solutions to both design challenges made use of the air passing through the machine. Tests showed that placing the thermostat by the intake vent was best. And, as the current moved up through the fan's innards, a portion of the cold air could be siphoned off and pumped around -- rather than through -- the stones, cooling them and insulating the surrounding plastic. This air could then be blown out as a protective barrier between the hot airflow and the inside of the head as the heat is pumped into the room, reducing the device's surface temperature. In all, over 500 prototypes were built before Dyson and his team hit on a design that worked. But getting it working was just the half of it.
The ground floor of Dyson's headquarters includes a large testing facility. Here, new machines are scrutinised for longer than their intended lifetime, which is 600 hours for plug-in models. Vacuum cleaners are rolled forwards and backwards repeatedly by mechanical arms and trialled on different types of carpet to assess how quickly they pick up specially created testing dust. There is a microbiology lab, a hermetically sealed chamber for measuring sound levels, and a cage where the products are automatically bashed and dropped to see where they break.
Elsewhere, there are manual testers. "We have women -- they're all women, for some reason -- just knocking fans over all day long," says Dyson. "They knock one over 200 times, take a photograph, knock it over another 200 times, take photographs and write comments."
The heater was tested throughout its development. One significant hurdle was reducing its electromagnetic emissions to within national standards -- safety levels are set at different levels in different territories. Initially this proved tricky as the circuit that controls the ceramic stones created disturbance, and the plastic bodywork didn't offer much in the way of shielding.
Engineers had to refine the components carefully. Heaters were also sent to homes in America, Europe, Asia and Australia to be tried in real-world environments ("running them in anger", as Dyson's engineers term it). The testers returned a complaint: it smelled funny. It turned out that a layer of silicone intended to protect the ceramic stones from humidity and damage emitted an unpleasant odour when hot. Dyson's team found a way to treat the substance to get rid of these unwanted fumes.
At the start of July, problems having been surmounted, the heater was ready for the shops. It could warm a room up to 37 degrees Celsius -- or function as a cooler (though for technical reasons, Dyson says, not as efficiently as the Air Multiplier). To calibrate the business to tackle design problems, Dyson has imposed a clearly defined corporate philosophy. Its core function is to encourage "outrageous suggestions". Take recruiting. "I like naïvety," he says. "We try to choose people without experience. And we don't employ any [pure] industrial designers at all." It means that his staff aren't polluted by received wisdom, he says, helping them to think afresh. There are also a few artists, even furniture designers -- people with no formal engineering training at all.
Like Dyson himself. "If you don't understand why the sums don't add up, and you make a suggestion, most of the time you'll be wrong," he says. "But just occasionally you'll be suggesting something quite unusual. And a non-hardened engineer is probably more likely to do ridiculous experiments."
Ridiculous can prove lucrative. In 2004 Dyson was working on a product that never saw the light of day. He won't say exactly what it was, in case his company develops it in the future, but it involved water and powerful slivers of air. One day an engineer attempted to dry his wet hands with the airflow. "We all noticed, and suddenly said together, 'Hand drier'." In 2006 the company launched it as the Airblade, which uses cold air and dries hands in ten seconds, consuming, Dyson claims, 80 per cent less energy than a warm-air equivalent.
Another key tenet of his philosophy is resisting brandisation.
On their first day at Dyson, every new member of staff, including senior executives, is presented with a box containing a vacuum cleaner in pieces. They have to assemble it themselves, and they are then allowed to keep it once they're done. It sends a clear message that engineering is the company's priority (Dyson spent almost £1 million a week on research endeavours in 2010). "There are people who believe in brands; I happen not to," Dyson says. "We're designing things that have got to work properly and have better performance than other things. We don't allow anyone to use the word brand here. It's not in our lexicon." David Kester, chief executive of the Design Council, says that the resulting function-led designs are sometimes misunderstood. "There are style gurus who don't like the look of a Dyson product," he explains. "I think they are massively missing the point. When you follow that
[engineering-focused] logic, as Dyson does, you end up with a different aesthetic altogether."
Dyson also believes in staff freely sharing ideas. That's why his design-engineering floor is entirely open plan. "Normally companies would keep R&D groups separate, so nobody knew for security reasons what was going on," he says. "But we've decided to go down the other route. There are merits in that -- it sparks off ideas and people suggest things, not in their field but in some other field. But it is risky." Employees are trusted not to tell even their partners about what they're working on before a product launches. The lack of segregation throughout the floor tightly enmeshes design with engineering, and encourages staff to make and test their own prototypes quickly because they don't have to walk long distances. Dyson explains that it's paramount to experience a technical failure firsthand to truly understand it. Also for immediacy's sake, he asks staff to minimise memos and emails. "If you're sending an email you're probably not thinking, you're probably not interacting to create something." He prefers people to talk in person.
To foster this culture of exploration, Dyson has tried to charge the building with a university atmosphere. There's an internal courtyard that he compares to a quadrangle, and sculptures made from recycled hot-water cylinders, intended to look like students talking, are dotted about the site. "We want people here to feel that they're at the cusp of discovering something," he says. "I very much wanted that feeling through the campus -- I've never called it a campus before, but I suppose I could start doing that -- and for it not to feel like a factory."
Dyson never was one to bend the knee to tradition. In 1956, he was sent to Gresham's boarding school in Norfolk, where his father had, until his death the same year, been a classics master. Dyson developed a keen interest in acting, and in 1964 was cast in the house production of Sheridan's The Rivals. His responsibilities included organising the programmes, which he decided to have printed as a scroll. This format was not only in keeping with the period, he calculated, but also cheaper than paying for the programmes to be folded. Two days before opening night Dyson was called to his housemaster Paul Colombé's study. He walked in to find Colombé sitting behind his desk, furious. One curled scroll from a batch that had been delivered from the printers was perched in front of him. "Your programmes are a disgrace," he said. "Programmes should be flat, not scrolled!" "I'm sorry," Dyson replied to his housemaster, "but I was following the period example." "I will have them reprinted flat," said Colombé.
Dyson beat a hasty retreat out of the door. "It was my first major brush with convention," he reflects. "I thought I was right and he was being illogical. Not a bad lesson for a teenager: don't always stick to convention but don't expect universal acceptance.
It was seminal in that sense."
In 1966 he earned a place at the Byam Shaw Art School in Kensington -- the first Gresham's boy to attend art college. A year later, Dyson joined the graduate course in furniture design at the Royal College of Art (RCA). Quickly switching allegiance to the interior-design programme, he learned structural engineering at the hands of Anthony Hunt, the designer of Waterloo International station, who would later work on his former student's Wiltshire headquarters. But Dyson grew weary of traditional materials and flirted with industrial design. Still, he writes in his 1997 autobiography Against the Odds: "The [industrial design] classes did not have the sulphurous whiff of revolution about them.
The first time I looked in they were all sitting around fiddling with slightly stylised Ascot heaters. That was their task for the term -- to remodel the standard Ascot heater -- and they were all being encouraged to produce something essentially the same, but with the odd little variation. There was no change in function, operation, technology or core thinking." A successful product, he realised then, had to be entirely new. And it had to be elegant.
Dyson would one day carry through these convictions into his own heater, and by the time of its launch he would be provost of the RCA.
A formative influence on his thinking was Jeremy Fry, managing director of the manufacturing company Rotork, to whom Dyson pitched for business while still a student. Fry became a mentor to Dyson, and the director's attitudes were readily absorbed by the would-be pioneer. "[Fry] had no regard for experts in other fields," writes Dyson in Against the Odds. "Always teaching himself whatever he needed to know as he went along." Together they built the Sea Truck, a fast landing craft that became Dyson's RCA graduation piece. Rotork sold it, making millions (Egypt used five of them to take out Israeli napalm emplacements during the 1973 war). Dyson says that the Sea Truck was his first encounter with something that didn't look like the conventional object; some cruelly described it as a "Welsh dresser on water". But it taught him to not be afraid of that, "because what it did," he says, "it did rather well."
Dyson's next invention had to weather similar criticisms. In 1972, he began renovating a 17th-century farmhouse in the Cotswolds that he had bought with his wife, Deirdre. He frequently used a wheelbarrow, and became irritated with how it tipped and fell over; with how cement stuck to the sides and water sloshed over the edges; how it rusted and how it sunk into soft ground. His solution was to make a deeper version from moulded plastic, and install a large ball at the front. He named it literally: the Ballbarrow.
Garden-centre managers blanched at the design, so Dyson sold it by mail order. It raked in around £600,000 a year. But, as Dyson tells it in his memoirs, he was betrayed. Before he could launch the Ballbarrow in the US, a former employee stole the design and starting making it in Chicago. Dyson had assigned the Ballbarrow patent not to himself but to a company he didn't own outright, which launched legal proceedings against his wishes -- Dyson predicted this course of action would be costly and distracting.
The firm had been losing increasing amounts of money and brought in more shareholders to raise capital. Eventually, Dyson held a minority stake. In 1979, the board kicked him out.
Since then, he has retained personal rights to all of his inventions (his present company -- which he does own -- reportedly files on average one patent a day; in 2009 only Rolls-Royce filed more in the UK). He also keeps full control of production, marketing and management: nothing is outsourced. "I always liken it to the human body -- if you go and get other people to be your brain or your arm or your leg or your heart, you're not a complete and whole being," he says. It was a principle held dear by his design hero, the 19th-century civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Dyson says he also shares his hero's thirst for the original. "Brunel had this sort of disease where he couldn't bear to do something that was similar to something else," he says. "I've always got to be moving on, making a big leap. But minor, tiny leaps compared with Brunel's huge leaps. I go down and look at several of his leaps occasionally -- the SS Great Britain and Clifton suspension bridge. We're lucky because they're all around us here." Brunel's stubbornly single-minded approach was a vital inspiration to Dyson on his big-bucks innovation: the bagless Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner.
In the 1970s, at his Ballbarrow factory in Bath, Dyson had a problem. The wheelbarrow frames had to be sprayed with epoxy powder, which was electrically charged to stick to the bodywork.
When the substance missed, it got sucked away by a giant fan. The factory had a huge screen to collect the dust, but every hour or so it would clog up like a vacuum-cleaner bag. "We'd have to stop, take the screen down, shake it out and hopefully you could catch the useful powder. Then put the screen back up and start the plant up again," he recalls. Dyson asked friends in the paint industry for advice and they said other people used a cyclone. "I looked up in the textbooks what a cyclone was. I'd seen them outside factories and in sawmills and so on. And I discovered that they centrifuged the dust out of the air without any sort of membrane filter." He decided to build his own. There was a sawmill on the same trading estate as his factory, with a nine-metre-high cyclone on its roof. It looked like a cone-shaped chimney and Dyson wanted to find out how it worked. "You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer," he says.
Under cover of dark, he crept out to the sawmill with a torch, scaled the fence and climbed up to the cyclone. "I didn't know what was inside it, so I went to have a look," he says. There were no security guards about so he inspected the structure and made some sketches. It's the only such caper he recalls in his life: "My one bit of excitement!" Dyson made and installed his own cyclone the next day. It worked perfectly. Coincidentally, he had also been getting frustrated with how his state-of-the-art vacuum cleaner lost suction as its bag clogged up -- a problem, he realised, that had to be common to all such machines. Dyson spotted a terrific opportunity. He made a crude prototype cyclone-based vacuum cleaner (basic modelling, he emphasises, is all you need to do at first), which revealed that the principle worked at smaller scale.
Four years of iterations, and 5,127 prototypes later, there was a finished product. But convincing shops to stock the Dual Cyclone was a process fraught with refusals. It had a transparent bin and manufacturers balked when they saw it. In the spirit of Brunel, Dyson was undeterred. "I believe that even people who are not engineers like to understand how unusual things work," he says.
That's why the coloured areas on the bodywork of his otherwise silver machines are designed to highlight the technically exciting parts. But there was also a more human rationale for being able to see inside the Dual Cyclone. "There's a little bit of the German lavatory in it," he says. "What you do sits there and you inspect it before flushing it away. So there's a little bit of morbid curiosity."
Between 1985 and 1986, he succeeded in licensing the bagless vacuum cleaner in Japan and Canada. Eight years later, he began manufacturing it himself in the UK. It did extraordinary business and, by 1996, Dyson was producing the best-selling cylinder cleaners on the market. The technology was complex, but the sell was simple: "100 per cent suction, 100 per cent of the time." In marketing, he says, it's vital not to overcomplicate. And he often appears in his ads -- a means of distinguishing himself from the faceless competition. "It's defining who we are. When I appear in an advert, I'm not trying to sell [the invention] to you, just explain why I did it." And, yes, Dyson's products are expensive.
The Dyson Hot heater retails at £269.99; his latest Dual Cyclone uprights go for around £300. But price, he says, is a signifier of quality. "We make a product that has new technology, which is made of the best materials -- so making it is very expensive to do," he says. "Other people can do what they like." His washing machine, the Contrarotator, which was released in 2000 and attempts to recreate washing by hand, was especially costly to manufacture. "There was a margin but it was a negative one," he says. After five years, the Contrarotator was discontinued.
Hanging on the wall of the RCA senior common room, there is one solitary piece of art that's not a painting or photograph. It's a framed, disassembled Dual Cyclone in 24 parts. Dyson has signed the bottom-right corner of the installation with a flourish; the artist marking his work. "Beauty can come in strange forms," he muses. His inventions' space-age aesthetics have played a significant role in his success.
But that success is also down to making hard-nosed business decisions. In 2002, Dyson moved the hand assembly of his products to Malaysia, at an initial cost of almost 800 jobs. "It's not a nice experience having to make people redundant," he says. "But we would have gone out of business had we not moved." The company needed more space. "We wanted to expand where those trees are," he says, gesturing beyond his office window. "The council refused us planning permission and we had to go somewhere. We had our suppliers 16,000km away and it was very difficult to operate like that." He stood firm in the face of obloquy and says that, as a result of the move, he is paying more tax and rapidly employing more staff in the UK. In 2009 the Sunday Times Rich List estimated Dyson's wealth to be £560 million. Two years later, it placed him at £1.45 billion.
The new heater is coming off the Malaysian assembly lines and being sent out to shops. But Dyson and his engineers are already preoccupied with innovations for the next decade. He won't reveal details of what's hidden under sheets in the test labs. All he will say is that, in making them, he could depart from the habit of a lifetime. In the future, "doing a Dyson" might no longer simply mean rethinking tired designs. "We may do a radically new product," he says. "One that has never existed before."
*Charlie Burton is Wired's associate editor. He wrote about
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
