Dyson Ltd is a British

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 technology company, founded in 1992 by Sir James Dyson, which designs and manufactures vacuum cleaner

Vacuum cleaner

A vacuum cleaner, commonly referred to as a "vacuum," is a device that uses an air pump to create a partial vacuum to suck up dust and dirt, usually from floors, and optionally from other surfaces as well. The dirt is collected by either a dustbag or a cyclone for later disposal...

s, hand driers

Hand dryer

Hand dryers are electric devices found in public washrooms that are used to dry hands. They may either operate with a button or automatically using an infrared sensor.- Costs :...

, bladeless fans and heater

Heater

A heater is an object that emits heat or causes another body to achieve a higher temperature. In a household or domestic setting, heaters are usually appliances whose purpose is to generate heating...

s. It sells machines in over 50 countries and employs 3,100 people worldwide. The company prides itself on engineering products which work in different and better ways than their predecessors. Dyson’s founder, James Dyson, famously created 5,127 prototypes of his first machine, the vacuum cleaner, in a workshop behind his house, before developing one that he considered worked perfectly, the DC01.

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. He hypothesised 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 feet (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 £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

Wiltshire

Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...

, England, in June 1993. His first production version of a dual cyclone vacuum cleaner featuring constant suction was the DC01, sold for £

Pound sterling

The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...

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.

Patent Infringement

In 1999, US company Hoover

The Hoover Company

The Hoover Company started out as an American floor care manufacturer based in North Canton, Ohio. It also established a major base in the United Kingdom and for most of the early-and-mid-20th century, it dominated the electric vacuum cleaner industry, to the point where the "hoover" brand name...

 was found guilty of patent infringement

Patent infringement

Patent infringement is the commission of a prohibited act with respect to a patented invention without permission from the patent holder. Permission may typically be granted in the form of a license. The definition of patent infringement may vary by jurisdiction, but it typically includes using or...

.

In July 2010 Dyson lost a legal action against Vax in the High Court. The ruling rejected Dyson’s claim that the Vax Mach Zen had infringed one of its registered designs. However, although it lost this case in England (and the subsequent appeal in 2011) it won a similar case against Vax's sister company, Dirt Devil, in France.

The James Dyson Award and the James Dyson Foundation

The James Dyson Award is an international student design award running in 18 countries. It’s run by the James Dyson Foundation, James Dyson’s charitable trust, as part of its mission to encourage the next generation of design engineers to be creative, challenge and invent.
The international winner of the James Dyson award will receive £10,000 for themselves and £10,000 for their university.

The James Dyson Foundation aims to inspire young people to study engineering and become engineers. By visiting schools and universities and providing workshops for young people, the foundation hopes to encourage creativity and ingenuity.
Over 727 schools in the UK and Northern Ireland have used Dyson’s education boxes to send to teachers and pupils in order to learn more about the design process.
The James Dyson Foundation also provides bursaries and scholarships to aspiring engineers.

Cyclone technology

A Dyson vacuum cleaner uses cyclonic separation

Cyclonic separation

Cyclonic separation is a method of removing particulates from an air, gas or liquid stream, without the use of filters, through vortex separation. Rotational effects and gravity are used to separate mixtures of solids and fluids...

 to remove dust and other particles from the air stream. Dirty air enters a conical container called a cyclone, where it is made to flow in a tight spiral. Centrifugal force throws the particles out of the airflow onto the wall of the container, from which they can fall into a bin. The vacuum cleaner uses several stages of cyclones. Centrifugal forces reach 100,000 G

G-force

The g-force associated with an object is its acceleration relative to free-fall. This acceleration experienced by an object is due to the vector sum of non-gravitational forces acting on an object free to move. The accelerations that are not produced by gravity are termed proper accelerations, and...

.

Air Multiplier Technology

Dyson Air Multiplier and Dyson Hot use air multiplier technology which means they can circulate air without the need for blades. Air is pulled in by a small fan in the base of the machine. Using induction and entrainment, the air flow is multiplied 15x by the Air Multiplier and 6x by the Dyson Hot, providing a smooth stream of air.

Criticisms and controversy

In March 2011, the founder and current managing director of Dyson (Sir James Dyson) gave an interview to the Sunday Times newspaper in the UK; he said that international students take the science and technology knowledge home with them after completing their studies. Dyson said some overseas students continue to pose a threat even after leaving the UK. "Britain is very proud about the number of foreign students we educate at our universities, but actually all we are doing is educating our competitors." "I've seen frightening examples. Bugs are even left in computers so that the information continues to be transmitted after the researchers have returned home."

David Willetts, the government minister responsible for British universities, said he will thoroughly investigate the statement provided by James Dyson.

Production moves to Malaysia

Initially, all Dyson vacuum cleaners and washing machines were made in Malmesbury

Malmesbury

Malmesbury is a market town and civil parish located in the southern Cotswolds in the county of Wiltshire, England. Historically Malmesbury was a centre for learning and home to Malmesbury Abbey...

, Wiltshire

Wiltshire

Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...

. In 2002, the company transferred vacuum cleaner production to Malaysia. Dyson claimed that they requested planning permission to expand the factory to increase vacuum cleaner production, but that this application failed. However, the local government claims that no such permission was ever sought, as the land Dyson planned to use was privately owned and the original owner did not want to sell. As Dyson was the major manufacturing company in Wiltshire outside Swindon, this move aroused some controversy. A year later, washing machine production was also moved to Malaysia.

Although nearly 800 manufacturing jobs were lost, Dyson states that the cost savings from transferring production to Malaysia enabled investment in research & development at their Malmesbury head office.

External links

• Dyson official UK website