ANNALS OF INVENTION

HOW TO MAKE IT
James Dyson built a better vacuum. Can he pull o a second industrial revolution?
BY JOHN SEABROOK

n the fall of 2002, the British inventor James Dyson entered the United States market with an upright vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC07. Dyson was the products designer, engineer, manufacturer, and pitchmanits auteur. The price was three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. At the time, a bad one economically, most of the major vacuum-cleaner manufacturers were in a price war to produce a machine that could sell for less than a hundred dollars at the retail chains, where low-priced, high-volume sales are the standard business model. The idea that a mass of big-box-store shoppers would spend four hundred dollars for a vacuum cleaner was farfetched indeed. Dyson? Whos he? one vacuumcleaner dealer said at the time, in a Forbes article. If I were Hoover, I wouldnt be quaking in my boots. Not only did the Dyson cost much more than most machines sold at retail but it was made almost entirely of plastic, a material commonly associated with cheap products. And whereas other vacuum cleaners were frosted with sleek exteriors that hid the machines innards, the DC07 looked as if it had been turned inside out: it wore its guts on its skin. In the most perverse design decision of all, Dyson let you see the dirt as you collected it, in a clear plastic bin on prominent display in the machines midsection. Of course, there were comparably priced vacuums on the market, Bill McLoughlin, the executive editor of HomeWorld Business, a trade publication, said recently. But they were niche products sold by door-to-door salesmen who were employed by high-end brands. Dyson had only one salesman, essentially: James Dyson himself, a handsome silver-haired inventor, then in his midfties, who appeared in his own ads. Dyson didnt hawk his vacuum; rather, he explained why it was superior in the calm manner of an engineer (though he
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didnt look like an engineer, eitherhe looked like a British actor playing a Roman senator in an I, Claudius-style production). In its packaging, the company did not rely on a striking logo or a brand image, such as, say, the red squiggly tail of the Dirt Devil. Instead, Dyson oered a brand story. One day in 1978, James Dyson was cleaning his house when he became frustrated with the way his vacuum cleaner quickly lost suction. Tearing several bags apart, he saw the problemthe bags pores, which separate the dirt from the air passing through the bag, quickly became blocked with dust, constricting the airow and reducing the suction. It was an obvious design aw, and yet vacuum cleaners had been made that way for a hundred years. As the brand story goes, Dyson thought about the problem, built thousands of prototypes, and nally came up with a vacuum cleaner that used centrifugal force, rather than a bag, to separate the dirt from the air. By creating a powerful cyclone inside the twochambered circular binthe air inside moves at nine hundred and twenty-four miles per hour, according to Dysonhis Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner could spin even the tiniest motes of dust to the sides of the bin. Because it was bagless, Dyson explained in the ads, the machine never loses suction. Best Buy was the rst national retail chain to carry the DC07. The chains merchandise manager, David Kielly, had taken the vacuum cleaner home with him, and he had undergone the transformative experience that would soon become familiar to many of Dysons customers: the thrilling sight of the bin lling with the dirt and hair that your existing vacuum cleaner had failed to suck up. Dyson had grasped what the companies trying to make hundreddollar vacuum cleaners had forgotten: that a lot of people get their kicks from buying appliances, and are willing to pay

a premium for a machine that will deliver an emotional experience. By October, 2002, Best Buy had sold ten times more DC07s than it had expected to sell, and soon Target began carrying the machines, as did Home Depot, Sears, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Small children related to its vaguely anthropomorphic shape; it looked like a big toy. But it also looked seriousthe solid yellow used for the body of the machine was a shade familiar in power tools but not in household appliances, and it gave the Dyson a gravitas that the lime greens and mulberries of the other brands did not possess. And it was beautiful: the durable polycarbonate plastic was ecked with aluminum to lend the nish the pleasing, glossy sheen that Je Koons brings to the surfaces of his balloon-dog sculptures. Within two years, Dyson was the market leader in dollars spent, and today has a twenty-three-per-cent share of the market. And Sir James Dyson is known to millions as the man who made vacuum cleaners sexy. yson came to New York for a day in June to launch his newest product, a desktop fanthe Dyson Air Multiplier. With the Air Multiplier, Dyson is attempting to do a Dyson to portable electric fans: to introduce a three-hundred-dollar product into a market in which a top-of-the-line desktop fan sells for about eighty dollars, and a serviceable box fan can be had for less than twenty dollars (and for not much more than a hundred dollars you can buy an air-conditioner). By 11 A.M., it was already hot on the sidewalk of West Twenty-third Street, along which Dyson was rapidly making his way to the Best Buy at the corner of Sixth Avenue. He looked comfortable in white sneakers without laces and the Y-3 sportswear that Yohji Yamamoto designed for Adidasnavy slacks and a white warmup jacket, with a T-shirt underneathand he walked with the gliding gait of the cross-country runner he was in the early nineteen-sixties, when, as a schoolboy in the East of England, he rst discovered how much he liked to win. He had not managed to get the ten hours of sleep he enjoys when he is at Dodington Park, the sprawling country estate he owns in Gloucestershire, but he did not appear tired. He wore the air of stoic for-

bearance that he often brings to public appearances for his products, smiling a wan, Id-rather-be-in-the-lab smile. As the face of a company that is all about design and engineering, Dyson is in the paradoxical position of being the chief marketer of an anti-marketing philosophy, and the name behind a brand that pretends to have nothing to do with branding.

Dyson there is no division between the engineers and the designers, such as exists in the automobile industry, for example. We dont have industrial designers. All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers. When you separate the two, you get the designers doing things for marketing purposes rather than functional reasons.

Dyson with his Air Multiplier. He sees design and engineering as the way forward.
On entering the store, Dyson took the escalator down to the windowless lower oor, where consumer products are sold. Pulsating colored lights emanating from screens in the nearby electronics section ickered in the faces of the customers and sta. He stopped by the aisle where the vacuum cleaners were displayed. At the end was the latest Dyson upright, the DC25 Animal, retailing for ve hundred and fty dollars, sitting next to a Dyson cannister vacuum, for three hundred and ninety-nine. The Dyson Animal handheld (two hundred and seventy dollars) sat next to that. Picking up the handheld, he said, I think the main thing is that our products look like what they dothe engineering leads the design. He explained that at There were two Air Multipliers on display at the end of an aisle that featured conventional fans; both were switched on, and air was owing out of them, although at rst glance it wasnt clear how this was possible, because all you can see is a large plastic ringlike an upright basketball hoopsitting on a pedestal, with no visible blade. Whereas Dysons vacuum cleaners proudly display what other vacuum cleaners conceal, the Air Multipliers make a mystery of what in other fans is obvious: where the air is coming from. First we took the bag out of the vacuum cleaner, read the ad copy that went along with the in-store display. Now weve taken the blade out of the fan. An older woman with her hair piled up on her head and covered by a scarf
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ADRIAN TOMINE

was examining the other desktop fans in the aisle. She had walked right past the Dyson display without looking at it. Excuse me, Madam, have you tried these? Dyson beckoned her toward the display. No, I havent. Well, you see, its a dierent kind of fan. Dyson put his hand through the empty portal, with the air of a magician about to pull something out of his hat. Oh! Neat! How much is it? Three hundred dollars! No way! Well, it is expensive, but feel the air that comes out. Much smoother. You dont get that annoying bueting that fan blades produce, do you? Well, yes said the woman, dubiously. And its easier to clean. Well, for the extra two hundred and fty dollars I can clean the other ones. Do you have anything for less than fty dollars? Oh, I dont work here, Madam. I invented the fan. Its mine. Oh, you did? You gured all that out by yourself ? You must be a genius. Im an engineer. What did you study in school? Classics. Oh, classics! Well! With that, the woman stopped a passing salesman and asked him to show her the cheapest fan. Dyson headed for the escalator. Although he hadnt made a sale, he appeared satised. He knew what he was up against, and thats the place he likes to be. n Britain, a few weeks earlier, the rst hot days of the English summer had spiked demand for the Air Multiplier by three hundred per cent, and such is Dysons stature in his own country that the news was noted in several national papers. Dyson is not only the most celebrated British engineer of his time but also the unocial technology czar of the new Conservative government. David Cameron invited Dyson to speak to the Conservative Party conference in 2009 (it was only the second time that Dysons sta had seen him in a suit, the other occasion being when he was knighted, for services to business, in 2006) and asked him to come up with a strategy for reviving the great tradition
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of British engineering and invention, which owered during the industrial revolution and has been in steep decline since the end of the Second World War. When Dysons report on the subject, Ingenious Britain: Making the U.K. the Leading High Tech Exporter in Europe, was published, in March, Cameron visited the Dyson headquarters, in Malmesbury, which is near Dysons home, to promote it. Only a few years ago, it was common to hear London described as the nancial capital of the world. But, since the crash, Britains debts and the tardiness of its recovery had led to talk of rebalancing the British economyrelying less on the nancial sector and real estate, and more on manufacturing and exports. The way forward, Dyson argues in his report, is for Britain to go back to designing, engineering, and manufacturing things. He envisions an economy made up of lots of high-tech engineer-entrepreneurs like him, who will create a second industrial revolution. The top nineteen companies in the world make things, he told me when I saw him in London. And the old economy is growing faster than the new economy, and its more protable, it has greater revenues from exports, and employs more people. To be a wealthy country you need exports. Britains exports tend to be cultural products, like art, theatre, music, architecture, advertising, and TV, made by the so-called creative industries, rather than industrial goods. Dyson objects to the phrase creative industries for two reasons. One, it implies traditional industry is not creative, he said. And, two, it suggests that art and TV and the like are an industry. Theyre not necessarily industries, because they dont make things. Why did Britain decline as an industrial power? In English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 18501980, a classic analysis of this question, Martin J. Wiener argues that, because the industrial revolution failed to produce a fundamental social revolution, the values and prejudices of the old landed aristocracy were left in place. These included a snobbery toward anything related to trade or industry. Therefore, the children of the newly wealthy industrialists valued the arts, leisure, and investing over work and

manufacturing, and the decline of the industrial spirit (and the rise of the creative industries) was inevitable. I talked about Wieners analysis with Dyson, and he agreed with it. Our culture has always been top-down, he said. The ideal was not to work with your hands, not to get down in the muck and the grimean education was seen as a way out of that world, and still is, to a large extent. Those dark, satanic millsthats what people wanted to escape from. My teachers used to say to me, If you fail at school, youll end up in a factory. Well, I didnt fail in school and I ended up in a factory anyway. Fortunately for me. In the U.S., as in Britain, the percentage of citizens who become engineers has been falling for years, as the percentage of college graduates who go into marketing and nancial services has grown. China produces ve times as many engineers as the U.S. Of those Americans who do graduate with engineering degrees, almost half are no longer practicing by the time theyre thirty. DARPA, the Defense Departments research agency, has called the decline in U.S. college graduates with degrees in the so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) an issue of national importance and one that aects our capacity to maintain a technological lead in critical skills and disciplines in the world. Is this decline occurring for reasons similar to the decline of engineering in Britainan inevitable result of a postindustrial culture? Allen Soyster, a director of engineering education at the National Science Foundation, told me he did not think that class played the same role here that it does in Britain he thought the earning potential of jobs such as those in the nancial sector was one of the main reasons behind engineerings shrinking appealbut status was a factor. Medicine and nance are seen as higher-status jobs than engineering, he said. I tried to get my own children to be engineers. One is a nurse practitioner and the other works on Wall Street. He added, Its all a bit sobering. Ingenious Britain calls for a radical culture change in Britain, led by the government, to make the STEM subjects desirable to young people. The Conservative government is backing one of

Dysons proposals, which is to oer tax credits to technology startups, but, with the government in the midst of enacting the steepest budget cuts in a generation to shrink the national decit, theres not much money for new programs at the moment. The James Dyson Foundation, Dysons philanthropic organization, is doing what it can in the meantime to inspire and nurture the design engineers of the future, through educational programs, grants, and scholarships. The foundation helped to establish the Dyson School of Design Innovation, in Bath. It also runs the James Dyson Awarda fteen-thousanddollar prize given annually to student designers from one of eighteen countries, including the U.S., whose design solves a problem. Think of what happened during the Second World War, Dyson told me, when government focussed on invention and engineering as part of the war eort. During the war years, British engineers and scientists invented the jet engine, developed radar technology, and made signicant contributions to the atomic bomb. Because the government wanted to do these thingshad to do them to survive, Dyson said. But after the war we turned away from industry. France didnt. France focussed on building nuclear power plants, and now exports power to Europe. France

also focussed on building high-speed rail. Britain stopped making trains, stopped making airplanes, did not encourage its nuclear scientists, and has all but stopped making cars. And as a result we are in deep trouble. yson was born and reared in Norfolk, about a hundred miles northeast of London. His father was a classics teacher at a boys boarding school called Greshams; he died when James was nine. It was expected that James, too, would become a classicist, like his older brother, or some kind of academic, but Jamesobstinate and quick to challenge authorityrebelled against the dead learning and false divisions between art and science that he encountered there. He studied Latin and Greek, and was interested in making things, so his schoolmasters told him to do art. Art turned out to be the academic study of art, not the making of paintings and sculptures. Woodwork, or shop, as its known in the U.S., was where students made things. In those days you had to choose between art and woodwork, just to ensure that no one with half an interest in aesthetics would get their hands on the tools to reproduce that enthusiasm in three dimensions, Dyson writes in his 2003 memoir, Against the Odds, written with Giles Coren. He was keenly

Just water?

aware of the snobbery with which manual labor was viewed by the art teachers and classicistswoodwork was something done by thickos in a shedand this further alienated him from the school authorities. At nineteen, Dyson decided that he wanted to study in London. He was admitted to the Byam Shaw School of Art, where he met his future wife, Deirdre, and discovered interior design. After a year, he passed an exam to pursue a graduate program in furniture design at the Royal College of Art. It was 1967, the spirit of optimism was in the air, and David Hockney, Gerald Scarfe, and Ossie Clark were among a group of young British artists who were aliated with the R.C.A. Dyson attended structural-engineering classes given by Anthony Hunt, the designer of Waterloo Station, who many years later served as the engineer on Dysons Malmesbury factory. He also discovered the work of Buckminster Fuller. He became more interested in designing consumer products than in industrial design, partly because of the chance to work with plastic, a material that fascinated him. But here, too, Dyson encountered irritating traditionalism: desperate to work in plastic and stainless steel, I had been taken aside and lectured on the importance of wood. While he was still a student at the R.C.A., Dyson began to work for a British entrepreneur named Jeremy Fry, and it was with Fry that he learned most of what he knows about engineering. He helped Fry build a small highspeed landing craft with a smooth breglass hull that they called the Sea Truck. Dyson used the design as his thesis project, and, in 1970, upon receiving his degree in interior design, he was hired to head a department that made and sold Sea Trucks. Among his clients were Scottish lairds who used the crafts to transport sheep and other goods from one island to another. Because the Sea Trucks sat so low in the water, they had a military appeal; Egypt deployed ve of them in its 1973 war with Israel. Later, Dyson and Fry set up their own company. They developed wheelchairs with four-wheel drive and started looking at vacuum cleaners. In 1971, Dyson and his wife bought a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse in

the Cotswolds, and in the course of doing repairs he found himself spending a lot of time with a wheelbarrow. I discovered what a crummy piece of equipment it really was, he writes. It was unstable, and the rubber wheel sank into wet earth and left ruts on the lawn. The wide shallow metal trough slopped its contents and smashed into doorframes, and cement stuck to its sides. Dysons solution was to design a deep molded-plastic trough and to replace the wheel with a plastic sphere. The Ballbarrow, as he called it, was a hit in Britain. Dyson writes that within a year he had a fty-per-cent share of the wheelbarrow market and was selling about forty-ve thousand Ballbarrows a year. But, according to his memoir, before he could enter the much larger U.S. market, his idea was stolen by an employee and taken to a Chicago-based plastics manufacturer, which rushed a knocko Ballbarrow onto the market. It was briey available at Sears, but was soon discontinued. Other inventors might have been crushed by this misfortune, or become full-time litigants. Dyson moved on to his next idea: the bagless vacuum cleaner. In engineering his vacuum cleaner, Dyson followed the trial-and-error method developed by Thomas Edison, in his Menlo Park invention factory. He would build a prototype, test it, analyze why it failed, make one change, and build another prototype. Dyson built 5,271 such prototypes over four years, until he had a machine that satised him. It used not one but two cyclones to separate the grime from the air. He demonstrated the Dual Cyclone, as he called his invention, to dozens of European and U.S. vacuum-cleaner manufacturers, in the hope of licensing his technology to one of them. But almost no one was interested, and the few companies that were oered absurdly onerous terms. In the autobiography, he says that Hoover U.K., the longtime market leader in Britain (which is not related to the U.S. company), wouldnt even speak to him unless he rst signed an agreement implying that anything that emerged from their dialogue would belong to Hoover. In his book, Dyson likens this arrangement to a burglar writing to you to inform you that he would

be burgling your home and assuming that, by warning you, he rendered the theft morally acceptable. He says that Electrolux told him that he would never succeed in selling a vacuum cleaner without a bag. (Bags are a big business in their own right and, as one dealer pointed out to me, a crucial link between vacuum-cleaner sellers and buyers: when you run out of bags, you have to return to the vacuum-cleaner store, where the salesmen get another crack at you.) As Dyson recalls, Amway, the Michiganbased consumer-products company, agreed to a license, then backed away from the agreement, claiming that the machine was not ready for sale. A little later, Amway released its own dualcyclone vacuum cleaner. Dyson sued Amway on various counts, including patent infringement. Amway denied any wrongdoing and countersued for damages. Eventually, the two companies dismissed the lawsuits. In the meantime, in 1985, Dyson sold a license to a Japanese company called Apex, which brought out a pink upright cyclonic vacuum cleaner called the G-Force, which sold in Japan for an astonishing seventeen hundred dollars. A Canadian company called Iona brought a version of the machine to Canada, where it was called the Drytech. Ultimately, Dyson was able to set up a manufacturing operation of his own in order to sell his machine in Britain, and the rst vacuum cleaner entirely of his own design, the Dual Cyclone DC01, went on sale in the summer of 1993. Within two years, the Dyson was outselling the Hoover upright in the U.K. In 1999, Hoover U.K. came out with its own bagless cyclonic vacuum cleaner, called the Triple Vortex. Dyson sued for patent infringement, and forced Hoover to stop its sale of the machine. Since then, however, most of the major brands have marketed their own bagless vacuum cleaners, including the Hoover Platinum Collection Cyclonic with WindTunnel technology, which is available in the U.S. When Dyson visited the Sixth Avenue Best Buy with me, he saw other bagless machines, some with a clear plastic cylinder just like the Dysons. He glanced at one with a pained expression, then quickly looked away, as though he couldnt stand the sight. I could sue,

he said, softly, with a distant look in his eyes. But whats the point? It will just distract us from what were doing now. he desktop fan was the rst mechanical household appliance to use electricity. The original electric fans were the Edco fan, which came out in 1883, followed by the Iceberg, two years later. (Before that, windup mechanical fans, sometimes called shooy fans, were used on dining tables to keep insects away from the food.) The New York Stock Exchange and various banking houses were early customers of the new electric fans, but they didnt catch on immediately in the homeold and tried ways of being uncomfortable proved more acceptable than new and strange comforts, stated The Edison Monthly, in 1916. In the early years of the twentieth century, electric fans were expensive status items in the homes of the wealthy, costing about seven hundred dollars in todays money. (The less well-o could rent one for the summer.) In early models, six brass blades shaped like pizza slices were attached to the shaft of a motor, either directly or by means of a fan belt, and this assembly was hidden inside the base. A light cage of brass covered the blades, to protect them; it wasnt designed to protect people, and fanrelated injuries were common. Most of the major improvements in fan technologyoscillating, adjustable heads, three speed settings, and overlapping, propeller-shaped blades, which were much quieter and pushed a greater volume of air had been introduced by 1930. In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Emerson came out with an Art Deco fan called the Silver Swan, with four overlapping blades and a polished steel grille, and it became a design icon that many later models emulated but never redened. Vornado, a division of the Kansas-based company O. A. Sutton, was among the leading fan companies in the U.S. in the forties and early fties. The year 1956 was the companys biggest, with more than fty million dollars in sales. But the advent of air-conditioning, combined with the cool summers of 1957 and 1958, helped persuade O. A. Sutton to close the business. The heyday of the electric fan passed, and subsequent decades saw the arrival of inexpensive plastic commodities marketed
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to those unfortunates who could not aord air-conditioning. (The Vornado brand was revived in 1989, and its line of new but vintage-looking air circulators has enjoyed commercial success as a niche product.) The Air Multiplier has no visible blades, though it isnt, technically speaking, bladeless: a small impeller, about four inches in diameter, is situated in the base of the machine, just below the motor. The impeller sucks air into the base and propels it up into the ring-shaped, or toroid, head of the fan. As the air passes over the aerodynamic curve in the ring, the air pressure decreases, in accordance with the Bernoulli eect, a well-known principle in hydrouid dynamics. The wings of an airplane are shaped so that air ows faster over the top of themthe rushing air pulls more air along with itcausing lift. The wing on the back of a race car is designed to create the opposite eectthe faster-moving air below pushes the cars rear end down onto the track. In Dysons fan, the negative pressure multiplies the airow, and the cone shape of the ring multiplies the airow again, and the narrow aperture that the air exits through multiplies it still morealtogether, Dyson claims, the volume of air leaving the fan is fteen times greater than the amount of air the impeller sucks in. The Airblade, Dysons hand dryer, introduced in 2006, was the companys rst attempt to apply some of these principles to a product. It uses air to scrape water away from your hands, rather than heat to dry them; it works much faster, leaves your hands feeling cleaner than hot-air hand dryers, and is said to use less energy. But although Airblades are common in Britain, there arent many of them in the U.S. (New Yorkers can dry their hands with one in the rest rooms at MOMA and in the Fifth Avenue Apple Store.) The Air Multiplier is intended for the mass market. Visually, the Multiplier is a triumph: by eliminating not just the fan blade but also the protective grille, Dyson has restored a sense of novelty to the fan and returned it to its early years as a status symbol, for better or worse. Murray Moss, the co-owner of Moss, the highdesign emporium on Greene Street in
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SoHo, told me, It makes me think of one of my earliest memories, which is my parents telling me not to put my ngers in the fan. So to be able to do thishe put his arm through the portal, which is what everyone does on rst seeing the Multiplierchanges my whole idea about this object. Its quite amazing. But does the Air Multiplier work better than the average fan? As I write, on a steamy August day in Manhattan, I have two fans trained on my head: the desktop Air Multiplier is cooling the left side of my face, and a Vornado vintage desktop, the style of which derives from the Silver Swan, is on the right. Both are turned up high. The volume of airow is more or less the same from both, but the air feels dierent: the Multipliers air is cylindrical in shape, and hollow at the core, and it feels airier. The Vornados air cone, on the other hand, feels heaviest in the middle; the sweet spot gradually diminishes as you get toward the edges. The Vornado is made of steel and aluminum; the Multiplier is made of the same glossy hydrocarbonate plastic as the vacuum cleaners. Its much lighter than the Vornado and easier to clean. But the Multiplier is louder. You dont hear the hum of the motor, as you do from the Vornado, but you do hear the rush of air passing through the thin slot, and its not as soothing as a hum. I am trying to sense the annoying bueting that Dyson spoke of to the woman in Best Buy. Maybe my face isnt as sensitive as Sir Jamess, but I dont feel it. What I do feel is hot. Sadly, neither fan is capable of doing much about another sweltering summer day in New York City.

ysons factory and research center at Malmesbury is neither dark nor satanic. Designed by the architect Chris Wilkinson, with structural engineering by Anthony Hunt, it is a long, low, modernist-looking building with a glass faade supported by curved steel ribs. Set in the rolling Cotswolds, amid the English green, the factory seems calculated to explode the binary of the industrial and the pastoralthe machine and the garden. Dyson and his family (he and Deirdre

have three grown children and ve grandchildren) are the sole owners of the business; in 2008, Forbes estimated Dysons net worth to be $1.6 billion. In 2002, Dyson moved the physical assembly of his machines to Malaysia, resulting in the loss of some ve hundred local jobs, and garnering Dyson the only bad press he has ever received in Britain. With the expansion of his business (brought about in part by the reduction in assembly costs), however, Dyson has replaced those lost manufacturing jobs with better-paid engineering jobs. When I visited, in late May, Dyson was in the process of hiring three hundred and fty more engineers, but he was worried about nding British citizens to ll the positions. He observed that India produces a hundred and seventy thousand engineers each year, while Britain graduates about twenty thousand. If I were in India, I would have no trouble nding people. But here its dicult. Even if Britain can stimulate its hightech and industrial sector, there wont be enough British engineers to ll the jobs, based on the current numbers of engineering graduates. (The U.S. is facing a similar problem: according to Edward Gordon, the author of Winning the Global Talent Showdown, by the year 2020 there will be a hundred and twentythree million highly skilled, high-paying jobs but only fty million Americans qualied to do them.) We produce graduates in media studies, and town planners, and psychiatrists who are not getting jobs, Dyson said, and we are not producing what society wants and needs now. In Ingenious Britain he recommends giving scholarships to students who choose to enter engineering, and tax cuts to graduates who launch businesses based on their ideas, as well as to venture capitalists who invest in the new ideas. The Dyson administrative headquarters are on the upper oor of the research center, in a large open space divided by low partitions. Executive oces and meeting rooms are placed around the sides and have glass walls. The youthful sta members dress informally. Dyson forbids the wearing of suits and ties, as well as the writing of memos; workers must talk to each other about their ideas. (He also requires all new employees to take apart and reassemble a Dyson vacuum cleaner their rst day on the job.)

Dysons oce is in a corner, and it is lled with vacuum cleaners and pieces of motors and machines, neatly arranged on all available surfaces. Theres also a drafting board with some drawings on it; he still likes to design by hand. The testing facilities and R. & D. labs are on the lower oor of the building. Dysons engineers continue to tinker with vacuum cleaners. They are tested on dierent types of carpetplush, shag, Wiltonas well as on various kinds of wood oor, using German-made testing dust (ground from natural material) to conform to European testing standards, and American-made dust (ground from man-made silica sand and mixed with talc) to test the machines bound for the American market. (According to a Dyson representative, American machines are louder than the European and Asian models, because Americans associate noise with power and dont trust a quiet machine.) Research-review meetings occur twice a week, and design meetings are held every day, all day; Dyson sits in on many of them. Earlier this year, he stepped down as chairman, and severed many of his management responsibilities, in order to spend as much time as possible in the lab. He is also devoting more time to the activities of the James Dyson Foundation, including the James Dyson Award; this years winner, chosen by Dyson himself, will be announced on October 5th. One of the U.S. nalists is the cunning Copenhagen Wheel, designed and engineered by a small team of students at M.I.T., which transforms an ordinary bike into a hybrid electric bikestoring the energy generated by braking and using it on uphill climbs. The students are rapidly turning their project into a product, which will go on sale next year, for six hundred dollars. On the day I visited headquarters, Dyson reviewed the conductive carbonbre bristles that were being added to the rollers in the cannister vacuum cleaner, replacing the existing nylon bristles. The carbon-bre bristles do not produce the static electricity that causes a thin layer of dust to cling to hard oors. The carbon-bre bristles got a hundred per cent of the dust, a young engineer reported, and showed o some slides that proved this. God. Impressive, Dyson said. The engineer added that they had tested a model made by another leading

brand that had a patent on its anti-static system, but nonetheless left some dust behind. This drew a quiet, slightly smug smile from Dyson. In the companys early years, Dyson told me, we were very focussed on products, but as time has passed we have begun to look further out at more blue-sky stu. He has added chemists and microbiologists to his sta of engineers. Robotics is one area in which they are doing research, and motor technology is another. The Dyson digital motor, which spins three times faster than a conventional motor and is twice as energy-ecient and half as heavy, powers the latest Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner and the hand dryer. Most motors use carbon brushes to transfer current from the power source to the electromagnet; the brushes wear down over time, emitting carbon dust as they do, until eventually the motor stops working. The Dyson motor uses microchips to transmit current, and, according to the companys claims, these are clean and never wear down. The digital motor will power new Dyson productshe wont say what they arebut it could also be licensed to other manufacturers of consumer products, or used in electric vehicles or in other industrial applications. Todays research meeting was concerned with the design of new tooling to bond together two components in the motor assembly, the shaft and the shroud. The space between the parts was very thinbetween ve and ten micronsand, because the motor spins with a hundred kilos of lateral force, the bond had to be strong. An engineer explained that they had come up with a roller that could spread a dab of adhesive around the bearing. He showed a prototype. Sort of like roll-on deodorant, Dyson said. Right. How much time does it take? Weve got it down to point-three seconds. Dyson wondered how much the process would cost. Less than seventy cents U.S. Lets see if we can reduce that. As the meeting broke up, Dyson spotted a feather duster leaning against the corner of someones cubicle. Whats this doing here? he asked sternly.
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 20, 2010 73