Dyson Company

Dyson is an appliances manufacturer. Its main products are vacuum cleaners that use cylonic separation. The founder, James Dyson, used centrifugal particle separation after finding that to restore suction, the dust bag in his vacuum cleaner needed to be replaced – even when it was not full.

In 1979, James Dyson bought what was then the top of the range vacuum cleaner. He became frustrated with how it rapidly clogged and began to lose suction so he emptied the bag to try to restore suction but this had no effect. Dyson opened the bag and noticed a layer of dust inside, clogging the fine material mesh. 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 conjectured the same principle might work, on a smaller scale, in a vacuum cleaner. He dismantled his machine 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 world’s first vacuum cleaner without a bag.

According to 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 Dual Cyclone prototype designs between 1979 and 1984. The first prototype vacuum cleaner, the G-Force, was built in 1983, and 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.

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. In their research for the vacuum cleaner, when Dyson asked people whether they would be happy with a transparent container for the dust, most respondents said no. Dyson and his team decided to make a transparent container anyway.

In 1999, US company Hoover was found guilty of patent infringement and later admitted that it did consider buying the patent from James Dyson, but only to keep the technology out of the market.

After the introduction of the 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.

Click here for some Dyson products.