Business star: James Dyson
Describing himself as Britain’s most successful export since the Beatles, James Dyson has spent his life savings creating a better vacuum cleaner. Now it’s a world bestseller and he’s a billionaire. But, he says, all he cares about is the next big idea
WORDS JOSH SIMS
JAMES DYSON IS JUMPING AROUND the sparse meeting room above his London offices, waving his arms about, scooping and slicing the air. He is talking about negative pressure, viscous sheer, down-force and the anulus – “a word I rather enjoy,” he says, “although it just means this little slot here”.
The mad professorial moment over, he settles again, happy that he has adequately explained how his latest product, a fan, works. Although of course it is not a just a fan but an ‘Air Multiplier’, so called because it sucks in only about five percent of the air it blows out. It is Dyson’s most magical product to date, even more remarkable than the bagless vacuum cleaners that made him famous. “Oh, thank you,” he says, genuinely pleased at this idea.
Dyson might not be so pleased at the reason for this wonder: a somewhat medieval incomprehension at the supernatural way in which it works. Dyson has criticised a national culture in the UK that sees ignorance of science as something to be proud of. Just four percent of teenage girls want to be engineers, while 32 percent want to be models.
The Dyson company has recently begun a huge expansion programme that aims to double its research and development manpower by recruiting some 350 additional engineers this year alone. It’s struggling. “There just aren’t enough engineers and not all of those trained even end up going into engineering,” he says. “The UK produces very good engineers but there are not enough people who want to study scientific subjects.”
He speaks with the passion of the converted. Indeed, Dyson began his education in rural Norfolk on the other side of the divide, studying classics before attending Byam Shaw art school. Echoing his school days – when he was the only volunteer to play bassoon in the school orchestra and knew the loneliness of the long-distance runner – Dyson soon found himself going his own way, and attended the Royal College of Art to study not art, but industrial design. Fewer and fewer people are following in his footsteps.
“There’s a broad cultural misunderstanding of what engineering is about that has been promulgated by successive governments since the war,” Dyson says. “During the Second World War, in five years we invented radar, the atomic bomb, the jet engine and the computer. Industry understood the need for engineering to win the war.”
So what we need, in other words, is a real disaster to motivate inventiveness? “What, like another war?” Dyson suggests with a smile. He is joking, but he does genuinely relish the energy crisis. That civilisation faces ruin thanks to its dependence on fossil fuels Dyson sees as a “wonderful situation. For engineers that’s just a wonderful problem. I’m excited about the crisis because it’s especially inspirational for young people. We need crises to move us forward. They may make life a bit uncomfortable but they are stimulating.”
Dyson himself is a long way from the personal crisis that dogged his efforts to create his now iconic vacuum cleaner. Now the 63-year-old lives comfortably in Wiltshire and London with his designer family, nearly all of whom seem to have been converts to his cause: Dierdre, his wife, is a textiles designer – one likes to think her rug company grew out of the need to supply Dyson with something to test his vacuum cleaners on – while 20-something children Jake and Emily design lighting and childrenswear respectively. Only son Sam, a musician, has yet to be absorbed into the cult. They are mostly too young to have appreciated the self-imposed penury of Dyson’s one-man cleaner crusade.
It need not have been that way. Dyson had a promising career as a jobbing engineer. He worked with local engineering firm Rotork, where he designed a high-speed landing craft. His first solo product was the Ballbarrow in 1974 – a stable wheelbarrow mounted on a ball instead of a wheel, which prevented it from sinking into soft ground under its own weight. That didn’t make any money.
But his road to Damascus was found at home in 1979, frustrated at the lack of gumption in his vacuum cleaner. An idea for an alternative method saw him hand-build some 5,000 different prototypes while under the constant cloud of imminent ruin. He approached the big cleaner manufacturers with the idea but, like EMI rejecting the Beatles, they turned him down, not interested in rocking the boat of the £100 million-a-year market for dust bags. So he went it alone. Years later he was suing some of the same companies for copying the designs they had passed on.
Dyson claims not to feel vindicated by success. Maybe the figures speak for themselves. His operating profit rocketed to £190m last year, a £100m increase on the previous year, with 76 percent of products now exported, over double that of five years ago. Exactly what he is worth himself remains unclear, but suffice it to say that he is a billionaire and in 2008 personally netted £150m in a share deal, £45m of which he gave to his children.
“Certainly the financial struggles were unpleasant. It’s been like having a child in a way. Not everything turns out as you imagine. You get lucky. You learn that making do without money can be quite inspiring, and that making cuts should be seen as creative. But I would have kept going on regardless, penniless and heavily in debt. I was just as happy then with a big overdraft as I am now,” Dyson explains. “I still have struggles, though since we can fund most things that we want to do, they’re different now. Engineering something, the problem solving, is still a wonderful struggle. It’s a life of failure, those attempts to overcome the problems that nobody else has, and I love it. Sure, you need cussedness, obstinacy, stamina. You need to be a particular personality to keep at it.”
Especially, one might add, to keep at it when you don’t have to. Dyson seems to be genuinely oblivious of his wealth and charmingly, infectiously, excited about just making better stuff. He spends £42m a year on researching ideas. He claims to have little involvement in the business side: “I didn’t do what I did to be in business. I don’t think of myself as a businessman, I’m an engineering enthusiast and business is a means to an end and that end is to make products.” And he seems downright puzzled by the idea of building a brand. “It’s something I don’t think about or attempt to do,” he says. “You might not believe that but I don’t understand that whole world of marketing. I hope people buy our products for what they are.”
Indeed, nearly all of his time is still devoted to creating them, as though his company was one huge garden shed for Heath Robinson-types to tinker in, to look for improvements to what he calls those “unloved, unsexy products with a practical application but with shortcomings that cause irritation or anger. Those feelings are often the best prompt to action. I’ve been wiping my hands on my trousers for 50 years, and paper towels are pretty awful as well at drying your hands,” he adds, referring to his whizz-bang Airblade hand-dryer which, for one, actually works, and, two, makes drying your hands rather fun.
If you look really hard too, you may be able to see an unexpected effect with the air flow that might inspire you to develop an Air Multiplier, as Dyson’s team did; just as, 30 years ago, a chance visit to a sawmill – where Dyson saw industrial cyclones used to remove sawdust from the air – gave him the idea for a new kind of vacuum cleaner. Dyson may rarely build a prototype himself these days, “and I do miss that”, but he has replicated his experience creating his cleaner by insisting that each of his engineers build and test their own. “Building it yourself and testing it yourself is how you make interesting observations. You might not find what you were looking for but you may find something else,” he explains. “The gold is in the unexpected.”
Dyson is not saying where he plans to dig for gold next. It remains under wraps which of the 300 inventions (on which he has some 1,300 patents – making his the most patent-rich company in the UK after the 126-year-old Rolls Royce) may be brought to life. Maybe wait at his shoulder and see what annoys him most. The iron: unstable, leaky and dangerous? The toaster that always seems to undercook or burn your bread? The energy-inefficient and ponderous kettle – surely all that steam could be used to run some kind of micro-engine? All might benefit from having the Dyson name on them. Perhaps one day the name will even become the verb, as Hoover’s has done – Hoover the company that once copied Dyson’s bagless cleaner and subsequently lost the patent infringement case Dyson made against it.
“But what’s important is not the name on the side of a Dyson product but that people like to use it,” says the man himself. “It wouldn’t be a thrill for my name to be used generically like that. What is a thrill is that people might enjoy something we’ve created and find that it does a good job.” www.dyson.co.uk
