Sir James Dyson, the man behind the ballbarrow and the bagless vacuum cleaner, unveiled his latest gizmo yesterday. But it was the innards of the DC31, a handheld vacuum cleaner, that the entrepreneur wanted to talk about.

Dyson, the Wiltshire-based company he founded, has developed a digital electric motor that it says will confine its clunkier and less powerful cousin, the traditional electric motor found in many appliances, to history.

“No one’s made an electric motor faster”, Sir James said yesterday. “A dentist’s drill is the only exception, but you have to change it every couple of months.”

The motor of the new cleaner, which works in short, rechargeable battery-powered bursts, is of a similar type to that found in Dyson’s Airblade hand-dryers, found in hotels and offices. But this is a smaller version, suitable for handheld devices that do not need to be pushed along the floor like conventional vacuum cleaners.

The company says the new cleaner is twice as powerful as its nearest rival in terms of suction. The trouble with the carbon brushes used in conventional motors, Sir James enthused, is that they disintegrate into dust, which clogs the motor.

So while a rival cleaner may be more powerful in wattage terms and it will be able to work for longer without being recharged, Sir James is convinced that his product will clean houses faster and so use less energy.

This has been a hot topic in the world of electrical appliances. Dyson — which is aiming to sell more than a million of the new cleaners, priced between £100 and £129, in the next year — has said that capping the wattage of appliances is the only effective way to cut carbon emissions.

This brought it into conflict with the rest of the industry, which favoured improved labelling. Dyson evidently hopes to gain advantage by building leaner and more environmentally friendly machines.

The debate is one that Sir James, an eloquent champion of enterprise and innovation, will relish. The inventor, who conducted much of his early research in a shed, hopes to set up an engineering college in Bath, though he has been thwarted by planning restrictions.

Despite having built a business worth £500 million a year in sales, he shows no sign of making an exit. “For me, the creation of technology, the engineering, is what we do. That’s absolutely at the heart of it — and also bringing it to market. We have got to do all that to know what to do next.”

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