Dyson: Why isn't he giving Tesla sleepless nights?

Sir James Dyson

Sir James Dyson is a genius. Any man that can make vacuum cleaners cool, deserves some form of technological kudos.

Not just that, but he has made this writer wax lyrical about how 'fun' his 'Airblade hand dryers' are. If a company has got you excited about drying your hands, then quite frankly they are capable of anything. However, Dyson always seems to be holding back, creating devices that are sleek and sexy and much better than their mainstream rivals... but nothing world-changing. If they can make the world's greatest and most energy efficient hand dryer, why don't they try developing alternative energy sources or the flying car?

This week, the company has unveiled their latest contraption - the Dyson Air Multiplier - a fan that creates airflow without blades. Dyson has said it is simply due to the problems caused by regular fans, such as the difficulty in cleaning them and their ability to catch fingers, but you can't help but feel it's a solution to a non-existent problem, especially when he defends it by saying it gives you "smoother air."

Despite my cynicism, it does show that Dyson isn't afraid to move into different markets, however it has taken the firm three years to come up with The Air Multiplier. Also, it appears the company's innovation comes not from a drive to make money (I mean how big is the desktop fan market really?), but from a desire to do something different.

Speaking to The Independent, Sir James said of his products, "I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision. I do something because I think it's a good piece of technology and works better than an existing piece of technology in the areas we're going into."

"We weren't in the market for hand-driers but we thought we had a good product so that's how we operate: develop technology and then make a product using it."

It also appears that the company's products are the result of simply experimenting and trying new things and then creating products around their discoveries, rather than setting out to create something. In the case of the fan, the company noticed, whilst developing the Airblade, that the air that came out at 400mph was also dragging in a lot of air with it, creating a much greater airflow than was coming out of the blade. In Dyson's words, "It wasn't much use a hand-drier but we thought it was a very interesting phenomenon... it was a spin off from observing something that was totally useless for the hand-drier but had another application."

So what is the future for the company? Moving into another domestic appliance market or are they hoping that the next strange of experiments will lead to something more fantastic... like my aforementioned flying car.

"We're developing technology that could be moved into the automotive field, but we're several years off," Dyson said. "We're developing electric motors and they're going to be very important in cars, and we're also working on batteries."

So Dyson cars AND batteries. Looks like this writer wasn't too far off the mark, however Dyson is aware of the fact that major improvements need to be made to the world's consumption of energy to prevent the current levels of power that are wasted.

"We need to make another big advance - which I think is happening - in the field of material science. Harry Kroto, a famous British person, developed Carbon 60. It's fascinating because, for example, we lose 40 per cent of our power down through the National Grid through heat and poor conductivity. Now, with Carbon 60 you can make carbon nano-tubes and string them out and get something like six times the conductivity of copper as well as being cheaper and much lighter and so on. So if you could save that 40 percent that's wasted in the National Grid, look at that."

"So if you could have solar collectors in the Sahara and you could send cables back to England on the way. It would be very cheap and you start to use solar power really efficiently. Solar voltaic cells at the moment are in their infancy and are not very efficient, but carbon nano-tubes could transform that because of their conductivity and surface area. So I think the greatest advances will probably come, and will be enabled by, advances in materials and that will trigger great product advances."

If anyone could make it happen, my money would be on Dyson.

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