Blades begone, new Dyson fan goes with the flow

A cooling fan without blades! Nothing for children to stick their little fingers into. No big wobbly rotating lump to vibrate it until it falls over. What a great idea, but how on earth does it work?

Inventor James Dyson launched just such a device this week. It works by taking the flow of air from a standard centrifugal pump the sort of thing you'll find in any Dyson vacuum cleaner, or car turbo pump for that matter and directing that intense and narrow jet at you. And the magic: any narrow jet of air rapidly becomes a wide gentle breeze within two feet of the jet.

There's a big ring of plastic through which the Dyson air seems to come, but (as the company makes clear) the wind you feel is mostly coming from all around the fan. That circle of plastic is, honestly, mostly just for show. You could probably generate a very similar wind with just a nozzle but it would be pretty unpleasant close up.

So the Dyson fan generates a circle of intense wind, which blows extra air from both outside the circular nozzle ("entrainment"), and from inside the circle ("inducement"). Dyson calls this an "air multiplier" effect.

The company almost manages to sell this device without mentioning safety, well, very nearly. The inventor himself says: "I've always been disappointed by fans. Their spinning blades chop up the airflow, causing annoying buffeting. They're hard to clean. And children always want to poke their fingers through the grill. So we've developed a new type of fan that doesn't use blades."

And that brief hint about children is as close as he comes to pointing out that yes, if you stuck your hand into the blades, it would really, really hurt. He doesn't say that because commercial fans have a safety grille to protect you, and even hinting that this might not work would be inviting legal retribution.

The main advantage is probability stability: "Because its motor is at its base, the Dyson Air Multiplier fan can be tilted with a touch, unlike a conventional top-heavy fan, which needs to be positioned with two hands and can topple easily," says the launch blurb.

But there's also hygiene: "With its simple loop the Dyson Air Multiplier fan is quickly wiped clean with a cloth. Fans with blades are nigh on impossible to clean, with dust and dirt building up inside the cage. The same dust and dirt is then billowed into your face when the fan is switched on."

So that leaves noise. Most house fans are pretty quiet, and Dyson isn't claiming that the turbo fan is any quieter. But they do have a comparison between a standard fan (with blades) and their own model, which emphasizes the "lack of buffeting" with the microphone really close to the machine. You can hear that here.

The Dyson Air Multiplier fan comes in three sizes, and costs from £199 - and is available for preorder 13th October at dyson.co.uk and selected design stores*. There's a "store finder" on the Dyson web site.

*London: The Conran Shop, Harrods, COEXISTENCE, Design Museum Shop, Boffi Ltd The Exchange, Ferrious