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An exclusive visit inside Dyson Singapore’s R&D labs

By Alvin Soon - 22 Jul 2016

An exclusive visit inside Dyson Singapore’s R&D labs

Photograph by Darren Chang. Art direction by Ken Koh.

Vacuum cleaners are boring.

On a list of electronics, they rank somewhere between refrigerators and washing machines in interestingness.

Until you see a Dyson. In a sea of mostly similar home appliances, a Dyson vacuum cleaner stands out. Where other cleaners remain modest with plain colors and simple lines, a Dyson shouts with its bright plastic colors and exposed mechanical innards.

For its first feat, Dyson turned the normal vacuum into a supernormal object of desire, and then did the same with electric fans in 2009. Previously another boring appliance, the electric fan had hardly changed its form in more than a hundred years. The Dyson Air Multiplier knocked the very idea of a fan around its head; it generates wind without any blades. Seeing one for the first time makes you wonder how it’s done — and then it makes you wonder at how somebody made you wonder about a fan.

A glamor has certainly grown over the Dyson brand. If you believe the marketing, Dyson Operations Pte Ltd. is an engineering-driven company that’s pushed by the ambition to create products that really work, and isn’t afraid to break old ideas to do it.

Which is why I’m looking at a mural on the walls of Dyson Operations, Singapore, and reading about Sir James Dyson, the massive failure.

 

Dyson is a spectacularly successful company. 

It remains privately owned, so its actual performance is secret. But it’s no secret that Sir James Dyson, its founder, is a billionaire a few times over. Dyson products sell in over 65 countries around the world, and the company employs over 1,000 engineers worldwide.

The mural I’m reading, in the lobby of its Singapore offices, doesn’t start there.

It starts in 1979, after James Dyson gets frustrated with the lackluster performance of his Hoover vacuum cleaner. Unlike the rest of us who would just grin and bear it, Dyson decides to get to work.

He’d recently seen how a nearby sawmill used a cyclone to spin dust out of the air using centrifugal force, and he wonders if a similar cyclone on a vacuum cleaner could do the same, spinning dust out of the air it sucks up and depositing it into a canister, thereby eliminating the need for a bag and filter in the cleaner.

Dyson tests it — he rigs a mini cyclone onto his Hoover, using cardboard and tape, and it actually picks up more dirt than the original vacuum. He realizes that he’s onto something, now he just needs to turn his idea into an actual working product.

James Dyson and the first Dyson vacuum cleaner, the DC01.

What James Dyson couldn’t have known was that it would take him five years to make a fully functional prototype. He would go into debt, and his wife would have to teach life drawing lessons, as well as sell paintings, to make ends meet. They would become so poor that they would grow their own vegetables and rear chickens for food.

It would take James Dyson over 5,126 failures before he finally makes a cyclone vacuum cleaner work, with prototype 5,127. A paragraph on the mural asks, somewhere on the halfway mark: “Would you have given up by now? Be honest.” And I have to really give it some thought. How many times can I encounter failure before I quit? 10? 100? 1,000? 5,126?

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