Hey songwriter-connect. Great post and some interesting questions posed. I wonder have you ever though about vacuum cleaners. Here at Dyson we have the experience to offer you the best cleaning quality possible and it all started quite some time ago. In 1971, Dyson discovered a number of problems with the conventional wheelbarrow he was using while renovating his property. He found that the wheel sank 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 Dyson thinking about improvements, and by 1974 Dyson had a fibreglass prototype of a barrow with a ball instead of a wheel. The Ballbarrow was born.[1]
Later that year Dyson bought a Hoover Junior vacuum cleaner. The Hoover became clogged quickly and lost suction over time. Frustrated, Dyson 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.[2]
During a visit to a local sawmill, Dyson noticed how the sawdust was removed from the air by large industrial cyclones.[3] 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 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.[1]
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 Dyson little success, as he struggled to find a licensee for his machine in the UK and America. Manufacturing companies like Hoover did not want to licence the design, probably because the vacuum bag market was worth $500m so the Dyson was a threat to their profits.[1]
In 1983, a Japanese company, Apex, licensed Dyson's design and built the G-Force, which appeared on the front cover of Design Magazine the same year.[4] In 1986, a production version of the G-Force was first sold in Japan for the equivalent of US$2,000.[5] The G-Force had an attachment that could turn it into a table to save space in small Japanese apartments.[1]
In 1991, it won the International Design Fair prize in Japan, and became a status symbol there.
