James Dyson Moves Beyond the Air-Whooshing | The New Yorker

On a recent morning, James Dyson, the seventy-seven-year-old British billionaire and vacuum-cleaner magnate, sat at a long table in a glassy second-floor office overlooking his brand-new Dyson retail store on Mercer Street, in SoHo, and gestured toward recently exposed brick walls. “It’s a decommissioned fire station,” he said, pulling up a time-lapse video showing architectural renderings of the building, beginning in 1854. “There used to be a statue of a fireman on the roof. I’d like to get it back.” Like his first inventor’s studio, near Bath—a back-yard outbuilding where he famously constructed five thousand one hundred and twenty-seven prototypes of his first cyclonic vacuum cleaner, finally cracking it in 1983—the firehouse originally accommodated horse carriages. “A coach house, exactly,” he said. “So,” a full-circle moment: “returning to a coach house.”

The full circle of Dyson’s career, incorporating an ever-intensifying whirlwind of products and ideas, has itself been cyclonic. Since the early years, when he first appeared on television with his vacuum, explaining that he just thought things should work properly, Dyson has cornered the market on lavishly nifty devices that swirl or blow air, with science-inflected narratives and luxe pricing. He’s also opened a university, championed Brexit, exchanged pointed texts with a Prime Minister, and ventured into farming. His company, which employs more than fourteen thousand people, is still privately owned; Dyson likes independence of all kinds. His son Jake is now chief engineer.

That night, a launch party on all three floors of the old fire station would celebrate Dyson’s latest innovations, including a new, non-air genre: hair-styling products, which he calls “formulations,” infused with the power of mushrooms. Beyond him, a wall-size video showed luscious, coruscating hair and floating fungi. A typical styling product (“I call it, rather rudely, varnish”) is “crystalline in nature,” Dyson said, frowning. The hair “feels crunchy and crispy, and it breaks, and the crystalline things shatter if you move, and there’s no movement and no life, and it doesn’t feel soft and it doesn’t feel shiny.” Not so with his formulations, Dyson Chitosan. “The oyster mushroom happens to have this rather complex macromolecule that has sort of a triodetic form,” Dyson said. “It forms a net around whatever it touches, and it allows it to flex, but the net returns it to what you set it in.” He demonstrated one serum’s distinctive bottle, which emits a precise .22-millilitre blop of goo when the user depresses it. “It sheers in your hands,” he said. “And if I now run that through my hair, then I’ve applied it.” He and a visitor sheered .44 millilitres’ worth and applied it. The hold was subtle, the scent pleasing.

Dyson sat beside a hefty Dyson air purifier that resembled an oscillating zero. “It’s sniffing the air all the time,” he said. “Leaving it on auto is the best thing you can do, because if it just smells something awful”—smoke, formaldehyde, a “smelly candle”—“it switches itself on. So we’re doing the thinking for you.” (Did sales skyrocket during last year’s smoky wildfires? “Yes, thank you very much! I’m sorry about the fires.”) Their new hair dryers think for you, too. “Scalp health is important,” Dyson said. He picked up an orange-and-blue Supersonic Neural. Nearing the scalp, it reduces its heat, “so however hard you try, you can’t overheat your head and damage your skull.” If people insist on thinking for themselves, they can. “There is a lot of sense in the appliance knowing what it should be doing, but you can take over if you think it doesn’t. They don’t have total control over you.” A car’s climate control is better on auto, he said; so, too, with appliances, especially since the advent of A.I. learning. “We’ve got to learn to let ourselves go and let the product do it for us,” he said. “Because it jolly well should be doing it more intelligently. We’re at a crossroads—probably past it, actually—where we think we can provide what you want better than you can.”

Dyson now shares responsibilities with Jake. “He’s doing the headphones, for example”—air-purifying headphones, and non-air-purifying headphones that monitor noise pollution—“and I’m doing beauty, for some reason.” Their farming venture includes a twenty-six-acre greenhouse for strawberries, improved by waste heat from anaerobic digesters. “There are no chemicals involved,” Dyson said. “We release bugs that kill bugs. We send robots up and down with ultraviolet, to kill mold and bacteria. They’re perfect strawberries.” Generally, “I think we should be growing food, being self-sufficient. We want to make it more interesting with robots, drones. We’re picking strawberries with robots. We want to fuse our engineering knowledge with farming knowledge and make great, good, wholesome food.”

At the party, boldly fashionable young guests (spike heels, short shorts, butterflies dyed into hair, a dog-shaped valise, a leather poodle skirt) admired Airwrap stylers, danced in air-purifying headphones, straightened hair samples, drank white wine near images of damaged follicles, ate hors d’œuvres served on spikes, and operated a cordless vacuum that shone green light to reveal invisible dust. Jake discussed headphones; James ran Chitosan through his hair, to whooping. He also showed the fire-station illustration from 1854. “This chap on the top here, with his fireman’s hose,” he said. “If you know anything about his whereabouts, please let me know.” ♦