5 minute read
James Dyson interview
by immags
James Dyson on his home county of Norfolk, a passion for invention and the need for persistence You will surely struggle to find someone who doesn’t regard James Dyson as one of the good guys of modern business. The Cromerborn entrepreneur has always gone about his craft as someone looking to solve rather mundane, modest, everyday problems, usually in the home; yet his success is taken with a sense of real humility. His pathway from graduate also-ran to one of the richest manmade Brits of all time, has come about through effort, endeavour, and no small amount of repetition, as the 5,127 flawed designs en route to the eventual successful launch of his Dyson vacuum cleaner proves.
“I’ve never been a huge fan of the phrase ‘good things come to those who wait’,” he begins.
“Perhaps ‘good things come to those who persist and persist and refuse to back down’ is closer to the mark! That’s certainly been the way I have gone
about pushing forward with ideas I believe in, and I suppose I’ve been that way for most of my life.”
James Dyson was born in Norfolk in May 1947, to parents Mary and Alec. As a child attending boarding school then art college, there was very little indication of the inventor extraordinaire about to emerge out of the East Anglia mist, yet as with all those who find design or entrepreneurial inspiration out of fulfilling a need, Dyson was inspired to affect change.
“It really began when one day I grew tired of the clumsiness and dustiness of hoovering and hoover bags,” he says.
“I had a machine that had spent months losing power, and the more I fiddled about with this contraption in an attempt to figure out why it was failing to perform, the more I became covered in a film of dust, hair and skin.”
Dyson came up with the first of, literally, thousands of prototypes, which embraced the concept of cyclonic separation – effectively ensuring there was no reduction in suction even when hoovering up – with the usefulness of an airtight storage pocket that replaced the hoover bag concept.
When the inventor took the idea to the UK’s leading vacuum brands though, his advances where promptly quashed. “I didn’t really realise it at the time, but I was a threat to the norm,” he says.
“When you have large brands who have cornered the market, as well as having had the foresight to upsell their suction concept – notably by introducing hoover bags and creating a market worth £100million a year by itself – you’re going to get short shrift.”
The idea of being a disruptor went against much of what Dyson had been brought up to be. A boarding school upbringing at Gresham’s School in Holt provided a foundation in toeing the line and rarely showing individuality or innovation. “I liked my boarding school days, but I knew that as soon as I got out in the real world I was never going to be able to play along to those rules of formality and process.
“That said, there was something of a security I liked in the education system I’d inhabited. I had suffered setbacks as a child and sometimes the thing you search for is consistency and solidity in the way you live your life.”
Dyson’s reference is a nod to his father, Alec, a classics professor at Gresham’s, who died when James was just nine, succumbing to prostate cancer. It was a devastating yet pivotal moment in his life – one that, in the short-term, led him to recoil into a formal way of living; yet in later years, provoked a desire to push new boundaries of discovery and self-reliance.
“I don’t think there are many childhood experiences that don’t shape you in some way,” he says. “Obviously some are more profound than others, but they are all the building blocks of who we are and how we confront the world around us.
When Dyson completed his studies at Gresham’s, he studied for a year at Byam Shaw School of Art, moving on to furniture and interior design at the Royal College of Art, until 1970.
“Fine art was a fair distance from what it appears I was destined to do, but so much about an appreciation of art is also an appreciation of function. It is all about the things that root us in a space and make us feel comfortable in there, so there was something of a linear route towards finding a vocation that strayed from aesthetics to functionality.”
The industrial design path he thus began to tread in the eighties, with the evolution of the Dyson G-Force cleaner and, eventually, the creation of the Dyson company as a manufacturing force in its own right, after his invention was rejected by all the major manufacturers, has taken him to iconic status.
“A lot of invention is going with an idea you believe in and sticking to it,” he says – a fact no better referenced than in the way he has worked the now famous Dyson ball design into his vacuum cleaners, something that was first incorporated into his Ballbarrow, way back in the seventies.
As for the part his homeland has played in this incredible one-man success story, Dyson is grateful for his roots. “Obviously through childhood and education, Norfolk was home. It is a breathless county that, to me, showcased everything from wonderful coastline to market towns to the thrill of the capital being just a couple of hours away.
“It was somewhere that made me feel protected and safe, yet connected and alive; and having travelled the world, I can say there aren’t too many places that hold that sort of generic appeal.”
It’s pleasing to think that what some might describe as ‘sleepy Norfolk’, allied to the skills of one of its best known sons, has contributed to a range of products that have truly revolutionised the lives of consumers the world over – from vacuum cleaners to hand-drying systems (Dyson Airblade), to the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer. His influence has also seen the launch of the James Dyson Foundation and the Dyson Institute of Engineering & Technology.
The inventor’s accumulated wealth of around £7billion is a world away from anything he could possibly have dreamt when inventing took over his life, and even now, the money is insignificant to him. “Invention is never about profit, it’s about practicality and convenience.
“Many inventors have created products that are gamechangers, yet go to the grave with little more than what they arrived with in the world.
“I have certainly been lucky in being able to create something meaningful that has given me a comfortable lifestyle, but that was never what I set out to do.”
