Dyson (company) - History

History

In 1971, Dyson discovered a number of problems with the conventional wheelbarrow he was using while renovating his property. He found that the wheel sunk into the mud, was unstable and was prone to punctures; the steel body caused damage to paint work and became covered with dried cement. These problems got James thinking about improvements, and by 1974 James had a fibreglass prototype of a barrow with a ball instead of a wheel. The Ballbarrow was born.

Later that year James bought a Hoover Junior vacuum cleaner. The Hoover became clogged quickly and lost suction over time. Frustrated, James emptied the bag to try to restore the suction but this had no effect. On opening the bag to investigate, he noticed a layer of dust inside, clogging the fine material mesh and preventing the machine working properly. The machine only worked well with a fresh bag, it lost suction over time. He resolved to develop a better vacuum cleaner that worked more efficiently.

During a visit to a local sawmill, Dyson noticed how the sawdust was removed from the air by large industrial cyclones. Centripetal separators are a typical method of collecting dirt, dust, and debris in industrial settings. Such methods usually were not applied on a smaller scale because of the higher cost. Dyson reportedly hypothesized the same principle might work, on a smaller scale, in a vacuum cleaner. He removed the bag from the Hoover Junior and fitted it with a cardboard cyclone. On cleaning the room with it, he found it picked up more than his bag machine. This was the first vacuum cleaner without a bag.

According to @Issue: The Journal of Business and Design (vol. 8, no. 1), the source of inspiration was in the following form:

In his usual style of seeking solutions from unexpected sources, Dyson thought of how a nearby sawmill used a cyclone—a 30-foot (9.1 m)-high cone that spun dust out of the air by centrifugal force—to expel waste. He reasoned that a vacuum cleaner that could separate dust by cyclonic action and spin it out of the airstream would eliminate the need for both bag and filter.

Dyson developed 5,127 prototype designs between 1979 and 1984. The first prototype vacuum cleaner, a red and blue machine brought James little success, as he struggled to find a licensee for his machine in the UK and America. Manufacturing companies like Hoover didn’t want to license the design, probably because the vacuum bag market was worth $500m so the Dyson was a threat to their profits.

In 1983, a Japanese company, Apex, licensed James' design and built the G-Force, which appeared on the front cover of Design Magazine the same year. In 1986, a production version of the G-Force was first sold in Japan for the equivalent of US$2,000. The G-Force had an attachment that could turn it into a table to save space in small Japanese apartments.

In 1991, it won the International Design Fair prize in Japan, and became a status symbol there.

Using the income from the Japanese licence, James Dyson set up the Dyson company, opening a research centre and factory in Wiltshire, England, in June 1993. His first production version of a dual cyclone vacuum cleaner featuring constant suction was the DC01, sold for £200. Even though market research showed that people wouldn’t be happy with a transparent container for the dust, Dyson and his team decided to make a transparent container anyway and this turned out to be a popular and enduring feature which has been heavily copied. The DC01 became the biggest selling vacuum cleaner in the UK in just 18months.

After the introduction of the cylinder machine, DC02, DC02 Absolute, DC02 De Stijl, DC05, DC04, DC06 and DC04 Zorbster, the root Cyclone was introduced in April 2001 as the Dyson DC07, which uses seven smaller funnels on top of the vacuum. By 2009, Dyson began creating other air-powered technologies, the AirBlade hand drier, the Air Multiplier bladeless fan and Dyson Hot, the bladeless fan heater.