More than 5,000 prototypes: the price Dyson paid to create the bagless vacuum cleaner

The vacuum cleaner is making a strange noise. It's barely picking up any dust. James Dyson stops in the middle of the dining room, turns it off, and bends down. He opens the lid, takes out the bag, replaces it, and tries again. Nothing: the dust has accumulated inside the bag's fabric and completely clogged it. Dyson mulls over the problem. It's the late seventies. Dyson lives in Bath, in southwest England, and is an industrial designer. For some years now, he's been working on developing all sorts of products, like the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow with a spherical wheel, designed to improve stability on construction sites and in gardens. He takes the vacuum cleaner to the workshop and completely disassembles it: he's looking for the source of the problem. If the suction disappears, it's because something, somewhere along its path, is blocking it.

As he watched the airflow, he recalled an industrial cyclone he had seen in operation at a factory. It was a system that separated dust from the air by spinning it at high speed, without filters. A question arose: could that same principle be incorporated into a household vacuum cleaner? The answer led to the product that made him a multimillionaire: the first bagless vacuum cleaner on the market with cyclonic technology.

Today, Dyson is a multinational technology company headquartered in Singapore, with a presence in over 65 countries and more than 14,000 employees worldwide. The company designs and manufactures vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, hand dryers, bladeless fans, climate control systems, and personal care products, and focuses much of its resources on research and development: thousands of engineers work in fields such as fluid dynamics, robotics, acoustics, and engineering. But the leap from that makeshift workshop to a global multinational was neither immediate nor straightforward. In between lie years of failed tests, industry rejection, and risky decisions that explain how a homegrown idea ended up becoming a technological empire.

The madness of prototypes

Obsessed with making the vacuum cleaner work, Dyson locked himself in his workshop. He would disassemble the vacuum, adjust a component, reassemble it, and observe what happened. He changed the angle of a cone, the diameter of a tube, the air speed. Sometimes the dust settled where it shouldn't; other times, the system lost stability. Each test ruled out one solution and hinted at another. Over five years, he built 5,127 prototypes, until he arrived at a model capable of separating dust from the air without losing suction.

With the prototype under his arm, he knocked on the doors of the major vacuum cleaner manufacturers in the UK and the US. When he showed them that the machine didn't need bags and maintained its performance over time, they all turned him down. The problem wasn't that the invention didn't work, but that it worked too well: it eliminated a huge parallel business—the replacement bags.

For years, Dyson was stuck in that rut. He had a viable technology, but he couldn't find anyone willing to manufacture it. However, in the mid-1980s, a Japanese company agreed to license his cyclonic system. That agreement led to the G-Force, a vacuum cleaner that was sold in Japan as a high-tech, almost luxury product. It cost around $2,000, won an international design award, and, above all, proved that the concept had a market. With the revenue from that license, Dyson took the step he had always dreamed of: in 1991, he founded his own company. Two years later, the first vacuum cleaner under the Dyson brand hit the market.

Dyson's first model had a key idea behind it: it was a bagless vacuum cleaner that didn't lose suction with use. The design was groundbreaking. It had a transparent bin and no replacement parts were needed. The marketing message was equally innovative: it didn't promise more power, but rather less energy consumption. By 1995, it had already become the best-selling vacuum cleaner in the UK and forced the entire industry to react. From that initial success, Dyson grew and diversified, always applying the same logic: identify a weakness and eliminate it. It expanded its product range to include hand dryers, fans, and personal care products, outsourced production, and moved its headquarters to Singapore.