An award-winning Irish engineer is working in the top secret part of electronics firm Dyson and helping to invent new products, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
PATRICK MOLONEY was the neighbourhood child who would pull things apart to see how they worked. Now a Dyson engineer, a favourite part of his job is being paid to do what he loved most as a kid.
“We tend to buy in various bits and pieces – competitors’ machines – and take them apart to see how they work and what they’re doing,” he says.
Dismantling costly electronic devices would be too expensive an indulgence for most individuals, he says, which makes it extra fun as the day job.
Moloney works on the secretive New Product Innovation team at Dyson in the UK, one of just two Irish engineers in a company actively seeking more Irish talent as it enters a hiring drive to double its engineering team to 700. A Dyson spokeswoman says the company is particularly interested in talking to Irish applicants, as engineering graduates here tend to be of a high standard.
Moloney went to Dyson as a 2004 winner in Ireland of the company’s annual James Dyson Awards for product innovation (entries for this year’s award close on July 1st).
He always knew he wanted to be an engineer, and always was a bit of an inventor and entrepreneur. Even in school he “had lots of small companies”, he says. Why? “I was very interested in money,” he laughs.
At age 15, he started to manufacture and sell crib sets. He took one apart and figured out a way to manufacture them more efficiently.
“I was turning out a crib set every 20 to 30 minutes” and making good money off of them. “It gave me the first taste of the power of numbers,” he says.
His second business was making glass ornaments, buying in cheap, plain glass ornaments and then adding some paint – “added value”. They did well too.
Then he heard inventor James Dyson speak in Ireland. “Since I was small, I was always interested in what he was doing. I liked the American dream aspect of the company,” he says. “I was quite inspired by him.”
So he enrolled to study product design at Carlow Institute of Technology. Moloney says he always planned to enter the Dyson Award competition in his final year. The award comprises a national competition, with winning projects going forward to vie for what is now a £20,0000 (€24,000) international prize.
While he enjoyed the creative challenge, Moloney says he entered because he knew he needed as many extras on his CV as possible. In 2004, there weren’t enough design engineering jobs in Ireland and he knew competition would be tough for good positions.
His final year project became his award entry. “It was a novel way of casting a limb,” he says. Most casts are made as they have been for decades, using layers of plaster and fabric. He wanted to rethink that idea, to come up with something that was more versatile and more robust – something, for example, that could be worn in a shower and get wet without being damaged or destroyed over the long weeks that a person tends to have to wear a cast.
He came up with the concept of a plastic sleeve that could be fitted around the limb and then filled with lightweight foam to create comfortable but rigid protection, “like a twin-walled sock with foam”.
But there was more to the project than that. Why couldn’t a cast be designed to actively aid the healing process? “It could also stimulate the muscle and add to muscle bulk,” says Moloney. “It had a unit that provided stimulus to the muscle like a Slendertone machine.”
Winning the award “was great exposure”, he says. He was immediately approached by a number of companies interested in looking at the idea for commercialisation, though lack of money and time meant he did not ultimately patent and market the cast, he says.
He was also approached by Apple with a job offer. And then, Dyson offered him a job interview on the back of the award. He opted for Dyson.
He had been preparing for a long summer sending out CVs and never imagined he’d get such a response, much less a job straight into Dyson from college.
Initially the job was an apprenticeship that would give him diverse experience in a range of technology and design areas. But he has remained with the company for the five years since he graduated.
His job now involves working in the most secret part of Dyson, as an engineer experimenting with new ideas and thinking about potential applications for products that might not reach market for at least three to five years or more. “It’s the most creative end, and you get to dabble in so many areas,” he says.
He’s worked on most of Dyson’s key products: the cyclone vacuum, the Airblade hand dryer and, more recently, the Air Multiplier bladeless fan launched last year.
The company gives engineers, lots of room to tinker with things and pursue what might at first seem crazy ideas, he says. Several products have come about entirely by accident, including the Airblade.
“Originally we were trying to think of what you could do with high velocity sheets of air. And the Airblade was stumbled on by accident.”
And out of that process came the idea for the fan, as well.
How do you keep a secret for the many years it might take to develop a new product like the fan?
“Well, there’s a lot of trust involved. We take keeping secrets very seriously. The fan, for example, took over five years to develop. And I did have early prototypes in the house.”
That meant his wife also had to sign nondisclosure agreements and maintain the secrecy around the products. But Moloney says the upside was that she too gets to see lots of new technologies in the making.
Moloney is worried other students might miss out by never considering a future in engineering. He’s disappointed that engineering in Britain and Ireland “has a very sort of dull image” which might deter students from considering it as a career.
“We need to try to break that image,” he says. “We need to make sure that invention and ideas are kept in Ireland and the UK. And engineering is a very good way of getting money into the economy.”
James Dyson Award: www.jamesdysonaward.org. Karlin Lillington will be on the judging panel for this year’s Irish competition
