Design the Dyson Way

James Dyson's so-called overnight sensation, the Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner, was anything but. In 1979, James Dyson began work on a radical design for a vacuum cleaner in the stables behind his house. For the next 12 years, despite increasing debt, he tried unsuccessfully to interest manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic in what he called his cyclonic vacuum cleaner. He began production on his own in 1992. Ten years later, after hundreds of prototypes, thousands of modifications, and millions of tests, one in four British households owned a Dyson. Still, Dyson's design kicked the venerable bag-type machine to the curb, replacing it with a cyclone that spins at the speed of sound, in a chamber that can't clog. The Dyson vacuum?s outer cyclone rotates at 200 mph, removing debris and most of the dust while an inner cyclone rotating at 924 mph drives fine dust and even particles of cigarette smoke out of the air.