James Dyson

As a boy, Dyson attended the prestigious Gresham’s schools in rural Holt, North Norfolk. After graduation he went to London, where he attended the Byam Shaw School of Art for a year (1965–66) before studying furniture and interior design at the Royal College of Art (1966–70). At the latter institution he was introduced to the creative possibilities of uniting engineering with design. In 1970 he went to work for Rotork Controls Ltd., Bath, Somerset, where he and the company’s unconventional chairman, Jeremy Fry, designed and produced the Sea Truck, a small, fast, versatile flat-bottomed fibreglass landing craft for use by military or civilian customers. In 1974 Dyson founded his own company to produce the Ballbarrow, a plastic wheelbarrow-like bin that rolled on a load-spreading ball instead of a narrow wheel.

In 1978 Dyson, having grown impatient with clogged air filters in his Ballbarrow factory, built a cyclone particle collector similar to devices used in larger industrial plants, such as sawmills. Adapting this solution to home vacuum cleaners, he worked for the next five years, testing more than 5,000 prototypes, before he produced a satisfactory model that swirled incoming dirty air around a cylindrical container, where the dust was separated by centrifugal force and settled by gravity while the purified air escaped out the top. Makers of traditional bag-type vacuum cleaners showed no interest in Dyson’s bagless device, arousing in him a lasting antipathy toward conventional businesses. He sold the cleaner, known as the G-Force, to a company in Japan, where it became a commercial success and won a design prize in 1991. In 1993 Dyson opened a plant in North Wiltshire, and within two years his Dual Cyclone model became the top-selling vacuum cleaner in Britain, despite a retail price considerably higher than that of competing brands. Dyson’s elegant and practical appliances went on to win many design awards and were exhibited in art and design museums around the world. He followed up the vacuum cleaner line with other products, such as the Air Multiplier bladeless fan, introduced in 2009, in which air drawn through the base unit is blown over the inner surface of an ethereal airfoil-shaped ring, inducing air surrounding the ring to flow in an uninterrupted stream.

Dyson’s design and commercial success lent authority to his quest to revive the spirit of invention in Britain. In 1997 he published Against the Odds (cowritten with Giles Coren), an autobiographical account of his persistence in the face of discouragement. The following year he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2002 the James Dyson Foundation was established with the aim of encouraging young people to enter engineering through the awarding of prizes and grants. In 2009 the Conservative Party invited Dyson to propose policies to encourage innovation, and he replied in March 2010 with Ingenious Britain: Making the UK the Leading High Tech Exporter in Europe, a report that suggested, among other ideas, more freedom for universities to design unconventional engineering curricula and more collaboration between universities and technology companies.