Engineering the future
Release date: Friday, 25 June 2010
An award-winning Irish engineer is working in the top secret part of electronics firm Dyson and helping to invent new products.
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.”
To read the rest of the article please visit The Irish Times.