Reality was something different. The companies that turned him down were right about one thing, it was a good idea. The pricey device which also converted to double as a tabletop to save space became something of a status symbol and won the International Design Fair in Japan. Sales there helped Dyson head off on his own and found the Dyson company in The rest is vacuum history.
That year, Dyson set up his own shop in Cotswolds, England, and grew a business that quickly became a household name in the United Kingdom and later the world. In early models, six brass blades shaped like pizza slices were attached to the shaft of a motor, either directly or by means of a fan belt, and this assembly was hidden inside the base. Most of the major improvements in fan technology—oscillating, adjustable heads, three speed settings, and overlapping, propeller-shaped blades, which were much quieter and pushed a greater volume of air—had been introduced by In , in the midst of the Great Depression, Emerson came out with an Art Deco fan called the Silver Swan, with four overlapping blades and a polished steel grille, and it became a design icon that many later models emulated but never redefined.
Vornado, a division of the Kansas-based company O. Sutton, was among the leading fan companies in the U. But the advent of air-conditioning, combined with the cool summers of and , helped persuade O. Sutton to close the business.
The heyday of the electric fan passed, and subsequent decades saw the arrival of inexpensive plastic commodities marketed to those unfortunates who could not afford air-conditioning. The impeller sucks air into the base and propels it up into the ring-shaped, or toroid, head of the fan. As the air passes over the aerodynamic curve in the ring, the air pressure decreases, in accordance with the Bernoulli effect, a well-known principle in hydrofluid dynamics.
The wings of an airplane are shaped so that air flows faster over the top of them—the rushing air pulls more air along with it—causing lift. It uses air to scrape water away from your hands, rather than heat to dry them; it works much faster, leaves your hands feeling cleaner than hot-air hand dryers, and is said to use less energy. The Air Multiplier is intended for the mass market. Visually, the Multiplier is a triumph: by eliminating not just the fan blade but also the protective grille, Dyson has restored a sense of novelty to the fan and returned it to its early years as a status symbol, for better or worse.
But does the Air Multiplier work better than the average fan? As I write, on a steamy August day in Manhattan, I have two fans trained on my head: the desktop Air Multiplier is cooling the left side of my face, and a Vornado vintage desktop, the style of which derives from the Silver Swan, is on the right.
Both are turned up high. The Vornado is made of steel and aluminum; the Multiplier is made of the same glossy hydrocarbonate plastic as the vacuum cleaners. But the Multiplier is louder. What I do feel is hot. Sadly, neither fan is capable of doing much about another sweltering summer day in New York City. Set in the rolling Cotswolds, amid the English green, the factory seems calculated to explode the binary of the industrial and the pastoral—the machine and the garden.
In , Dyson moved the physical assembly of his machines to Malaysia, resulting in the loss of some five hundred local jobs, and garnering Dyson the only bad press he has ever received in Britain. With the expansion of his business brought about in part by the reduction in assembly costs , however, Dyson has replaced those lost manufacturing jobs with better-paid engineering jobs. When I visited, in late May, Dyson was in the process of hiring three hundred and fifty more engineers, but he was worried about finding British citizens to fill the positions.
He observed that India produces a hundred and seventy thousand engineers each year, while Britain graduates about twenty thousand. The U. The Dyson administrative headquarters are on the upper floor of the research center, in a large open space divided by low partitions. Executive offices and meeting rooms are placed around the sides and have glass walls. The youthful staff members dress informally. Dyson forbids the wearing of suits and ties, as well as the writing of memos; workers must talk to each other about their ideas.
He also requires all new employees to take apart and reassemble a Dyson vacuum cleaner their first day on the job. The testing facilities and R. They are tested on different types of carpet—plush, shag, Wilton—as well as on various kinds of wood floor, using German-made testing dust ground from natural material to conform to European testing standards, and American-made dust ground from man-made silica sand and mixed with talc to test the machines bound for the American market.
Research-review meetings occur twice a week, and design meetings are held every day, all day; Dyson sits in on many of them. Earlier this year, he stepped down as chairman, and severed many of his management responsibilities, in order to spend as much time as possible in the lab. One of the U. Then one day I was at a local sawmill and noticed how the sawdust was being removed from the air by large industrial cyclones.
My engineering instinct kicked in. Could that work on a smaller scale? So I created a cardboard prototype and strapped it on to my machine. Fifteen years and 5, prototypes later, I had a bagless vacuum cleaner.
Then I received a call from a Japanese company, Apex. I got on a flight and, after several all-night meetings, signed a deal. Corporate Entertainment. Female Comedians. Music Acts. Something Different. Black History Month. Emotional Intelligence. International Women's Day. Celebrity Chefs. Reality TV. TV Presenters. Online Motivational. Share on. Read More.
0コメント