Who invented dyson vacuums

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Recode talks design and technology with the legendary inventor. It is rare but refreshing when a top technology executive can explain how their product actually works.

Steve Jobs, the late Apple founder, was great at this — the pitchman who could explain deeply why a new device was special; the specific engineering or design trick that made it work like magic. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, condensed and lightly edited.

Dan Frommer, Recode: What did you learn making these latest products? Sir James Dyson: Technology is now moving so fast and is becoming ever more complex. Even we, who started off as hardware engineers, now employ more software engineers than hardware engineers.

And vision systems people, artificial intelligence people, robotics people. We now have five times the number of engineers to do a product than we were doing 10 years ago.

Dyson strikes me as a company that uses hardware industrial design as its main competitive advantage. Do you also need to be doing your own machine-learning software?

But interpretation of vision — what you see with the camera — we are doing. We think batteries are key for us. And robotics. The thing is to be selective and to choose the ones which are really, really important to you and which you can make a real difference. And then buy or direct others in. How involved are you in developing new products? In the beginning, I did everything — I was on my own, building those 5, prototypes, every day.

And I want people to be pioneering and do all sorts of wrong things and make mistakes and understand from their mistakes what could be possible. And also to make sure the marketing people say the right things about it. The performance of the product is what carries it through, not the brand. I hate the word brand. In your demo, you called extra attention to the specific, clever task of emptying your new vacuum.

We feel quite vulnerable on that point. So emptying a bagless vacuum cleaner is, in theory, a slightly messy task. So I wanted to explain that in some detail. Still, Dyson knew he had something potentially great on his hands and pushed on. I still needed to manufacture it and go sell it.

You know the one. Clear canister where you could see all the dust and dirt accumulate. The famous one. With his now-working design, Dyson thought licensing the idea to a company would be simple enough.

The answer: Everybody. Reality was something different. So I added a plastic ball instead of a wheel, which increased stability and manoeuvrability. I called it the Ballbarrow ; the design is still a large part of our vacuum machines today. We have a number of famous designs around our campus in Wiltshire to inspire our engineers.

People have praised the look of Dyson products — our use of bright colours and clear plastic, the industrial appearance — and the vacuum has been called a design icon. We think a lot about design, but appearance always goes hand in hand with how something works.

James wanted a clear bin so you could see how much dust the machine was picking up. We were proud of the fact that if you pull the handle out, it turns into a hose — that kind of thing is satisfying, very neat. I worked on the DC02 , the second vacuum, which came a lot more quickly than the first — two years as opposed to 15, with a team of six design engineers working closely with James.

The idea was to make a compact model, so you could perch it on stairs. We had to go back to the drawing board, redrawing a lot from scratch.