Invention

Introduction

In 1983, after four years of building and testing 5,127 handmade prototypes of my cyclonic vacuum, I finally cracked it.

Dyson is the ultimate story of dogged determination. Over five thousand prototypes to ultimately get a working one.

But when you have set yourself an objective that, if reached, might pioneer a better solution to existing technologies and products, you become engaged, hooked, and even one-track-minded.

This is the flow state that Edwin Land always talks about. Great feats are only done when you become ultra focused for a long period of contiguous work. It’s why, often, picking a harder problem is actually the easier path.

Folklore depicts invention as a flash of brilliance. That eureka moment! But it rarely is, I’m afraid. It is more about accepting failure to be able to achieve that moment of ultimate success.

We say this over and over, but determination is the most valuable attribute. Marc Randolph says it, Paul Graham says it, and now James Dyson is saying the same.

Research is about conducting experiments, accepting and even enjoying failure, but going on, following a theory garnered from observing the science. Invention is often more about endurance and patient observation than brain waves.

Enduring is everything.

Early Life

The first thing I knew I was good at, and something that I had taught myself as a teenage schoolboy, was long-distance running. Once through the pain barrier, I found I had the determination to keep on running.

[sic]

Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier: when everyone else feels exhausted, that is the opportunity to accelerate, whatever the pain, and win the race. Stamina and determination, with creativity, are needed to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties.

Early signs that James had an unusually high pain tolerance. This would serve him well.

I chose to play the bassoon at the age of nine because I hadn’t heard of it, because it was different and promised another challenge.

He always pursues differentiation for its own sake. This is a very wise philosophy in life.

I discovered my father being violently sick. Before I could say anything, he said, “Don’t tell Mummy.” It was typical of him not to want to cause alarm. I felt immense love and compassion for him as we made our way back to our family. Dad died the following year, in 1956, when he was only forty.

This is the most formative experience in his young life.

He had said goodbye, holding a small leather suitcase as we waved from the back door. He set off to Holt station and caught the train that steamed him to London. That was the last time I saw him. His brave cheerfulness chokes me every time I recall the scene. It is impossible to imagine my father’s emotions as he waved goodbye knowing that he might be on his way to London to die. Sixty years have not softened these memories, nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his three children growing up and marrying wonderful people. How he would have relished playing with his grandchildren, of whom there are seven. This was all the more poignant when I observed one of my own grandchildren, Mick, at the age I was when my father died. Mick is loving, bright as a button, and self-possessed, yet still at that age took his ruffled, soft toy puppy to bed with him. He was far too vulnerable to lose his father. I realize how much I missed mine as I watch Mick playing ping-pong with his creative and loving father, Ian.

I’ve read this passage probably ten times, and it still moves me as deeply as the first reading. Incredible writing.

Ever since, a part of me has been making up for that painfully unjust separation from my father and for the years he lost. Perhaps I had to learn quickly to make decisions for myself, to be self-reliant, and be willing to take risks.

It’s amazing how many entrepreneurs either lose their fathers early in life or have terrible relationships with them. Maybe they’re just making the best of a bad situation, but there does seem to be a pattern, especially among young men.

My father had taught me to sail. I watched him do carpentry. I taught myself to make model airplanes, to start their engines, fly them, and to repair my bicycle. Doing things with my hands, often as an autodidact and with an almost total absence of fear, became second nature. Learning by making things was as important as learning by the academic route. Visceral experience is a powerful teacher.

The lasting legacy his father leaves him will ultimately be the tool that helps Dyson become a multi billionaire.

Dierdre

Reading this book it’s very clear that Dyson would not have succeeded without his wife Dierdre’s support. She plays such a vital role, for so long, that she needs her own dedicated section.

We were far too poor and, as married life is tough on a grant, we both took part-time jobs to buy food and pay the rent. We ran up huge debt that rose to the astronomic level of £10,000 (roughly $13,000), the equivalent of £50,000 ($70,000) today. It was only paid off when I was forty-eight, by which time it had reached £650,000 ($900,000).

It’s hard to overstate how poor they were, constantly, and for how long! Only paying it off at 48 years old is wild.

Until quite recently, Deirdre has had to put up with a perpetual lack of funds. She made clothes for herself and sometimes for our children. To save money, we grew our own vegetables before it was “green” to do so. Craziest of all, during the first thirty years of our marriage, she agreed unselfishly, and so typically of her, to keep putting her signature to endless bank guarantee forms in front of solicitors, signing away all our possessions.

Every entrepreneur needs a partner like Dierdre. Truly selfless and unwaveringly supportive.

She said we could bet on my inventive streak. And so we did. For me, though, risk has long been an antidote to inertia. I felt that then. As an artist, Deirdre appreciated what a “project” or idea was about. It is something you get caught up in. You have to do it, believe in it, and trust in a successful outcome.

This, in my opinion, is the only good reason to become an entrepreneur. It’s a project that you just absolutely feel you must do, deep in your bones.

British Culture

A large part of this book is a commentary on how British culture looks down on manufacturing as ‘grubby’. I think if the UK is ever going to come back as a true first world power, this attitude needs to change, and dramatically so. I apologize for having such a long section here, but I swear a full third of his book is talking about the numerous ways in which the UK is simply anti-business. I’d skip this section if you’re not a fan of politics.

Since the Victorian era, science had been overshadowed in schools by humanities and especially by the teaching of Greek and Latin. Where German and American schools valued science and technology, we in Britain tended to look down on these subjects, and on industry, as somehow grubby, or, if not grubby, then somehow uncultured and even anti-intellectual.

This is a large part of the reason he founds his own school.

These netherworlds were unsuited to sniffy middle-class graduates. This perception that making things was somehow dirty and selling was unseemly underlined much of what was wrong with the British economy when I started work at the beginning of the 1970s.

Hopefully this attitude is starting to change, but given how often he says this, it must have been a constant source of frustration as he grew up in the 70s.

Anything to do with politics, the military, the law, the established Church, the arts, and, above all, making money from money with as little effort as possible, was good. Making anything by hand and, far worse, by machinery in factories was very bad form indeed.

His thesis is that this came from teh attitude of the olden day aristocracy who never had to work a day in their lives. People should naturally want to be aristocratic, and thus working was to be looked down upon.

When I was at school, one of the worst things teachers could say to you, as some did to me, about a lack of academic progress was, “You’ll end up working in a factory.” Boys who struggled academically were exiled to the Technical Drawing shed. That was the culture.

It’s very similar to how, when I was growing up, my teachers would often say if you don’t do your job well you’ll be a garbageman! I later found out that most garbagemen make more than most teachers.

[F]actories in Britain were only available on twenty-one-year leases at a time when inflation and interest rates were very high. Even when you are established and need extra manufacturing capacity quickly, the procedures and politics of planning permission can threaten to drag you down, or prompt you to set up elsewhere in the world where decisions are made more quickly.

At every turn, Britain is begging factories to leave. Yikes.

The thing that really struck home with American consumers was that I said I’ d made 5,127 prototypes of the vacuum cleaner. Americans like entrepreneurs and they particularly liked the fact that I had made and developed the vacuum cleaner myself. I wasn’t a salesman-entrepreneur, I was an inventor-entrepreneur. We took off quickly in America.

Contrast this with the general attitude America had for Dyson. Americans generally value perseverance.

And, despite what local and national press and media said back home, we were not going to Southeast Asia for cheap labor. If we had wanted that, we would have joined the rush that was under way back then to China. In England, we were pushed by the inflexibility of the labor market, the twenty-one-year commitment to factory leases, problems with planning, and the sheer time it took to build a new factory. We had only one supplier left in the U.K., for hoses, whereas all our other suppliers were in Asia. When our volume reached a certain level, the U.K. hose manufacturer did not want to make any more. He would have to have taken on more labor and a new factory, neither of which he was willing to do. I do not entirely blame him, as the risks he would run by committing to twenty-one-year factory leases and not being able to flex his labor force were too great.

Congrats, England. You got your wish! The greatest modern British entrepreneur just left for greener pastures.

Three hundred autonomous robots working on automated lines produced a Dyson Digital Motor every 2.6 seconds. They run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with just an hour off for weekly maintenance. They test the motors as they make them. There are no human operators here.

This is absolutely remarkable - very much like Tesla and SpaceX, the actually innovation is from the machine that makes the machine.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that I should be attacked in some quarters of the British media who liked to suggest I was moving Dyson’s headquarters purely to lower outgoings, including tax. This just wasn’t true. Both personally and corporately, and according to the Sunday Times, I am one of Britain’s largest taxpayers, but the company also pays taxes all over the world. Establishing the headquarters of Dyson in Singapore did not change where and how the revenue and profits of the company are taxed, and we still pay more tax in Britain than in any other country. Cost was also not a factor; in fact, Singapore is one of the most expensive countries in the world.

Yeah it’s not the expense; it’s the incompetent policies set by the government.

I said “Yes, I would love to” and committed £12 million ($16 million) to the project.

[sic]

He told me that Bath Council, the very people telling us to demolish it, had applied for listed status two years earlier.

[sic]

At this point, we had a great design, but strangely Bath City Council backtracked and told us that we would have to share the site with Bath Spa University. I said the site wasn’t big enough. The council then asked for sealed bids for the whole site. Who would offer to pay the most? We lost to Bath Spa University, which then dropped out six months later, leaving us back in the frame. We really were being given the runaround.

[sic]

After we had spent £4 million ($5.5 million) on the project and invested a great deal of time and emotional energy, the end came for me when I went to see the Blair government’s education secretary, Ed Balls, at the House of Commons. I wanted to know if the government was still serious about the Bath academy. He said no. At least we knew.

Example 1 - absolutely moronic government policies. Why are we joking around and wasting millions of dollars? Government people are never serious people. They don’t hold the consequences for over spending; the citizens they represent do instead. These people fundamentally operate in la-la land.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson called me on March 13, 2020, saying he needed fifty thousand ventilators in six weeks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

[sic]

The teams were highly driven. They were diverted from developing commercial projects, which were delayed as a result. We only ever thought the ventilator would cost us money—rather than make it—but we did it for the right reasons as part of the national effort at this time of crisis. I wasn’t surprised by the way the teams responded: this is how we work and what we do. The teams did all of this at the height of the pandemic, working all hours, away from their families. It was selfless and showed just what engineers can achieve together in a short time.

[sic]

One element of this project that made it hard to manage was the ever-changing specification. We were designing and making the ventilator at the request of, and under an order from, the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street. A civil servant there provided the specification. As far as I am aware, he was neither a clinician nor was he connected with the medical equipment approvals arm of the health service department.

[sic]

It took the Cabinet Office several weeks to admit to us that our efforts were not needed. We decided to voluntarily bear all the £20 million ($27 million) in costs. The Cabinet Office had come to us asking for the all-but-impossible: to design, develop, and produce a huge order of ventilators from scratch in a matter of weeks. They kept making radical changes to what they wanted and then because of the change in medical thinking didn’t need or want it after all. They brought in an army of consultants who in my view earned their expensive keep by putting their oar in and creating unnecessary obstacles and delays. What I have observed in Britain is that those in the civil service have a deep distrust, bordering on hatred, for those in the private sector. This is strange since their salaries are paid for by the wealth-creating private sector taxpayers, the very people they despise. Their salaries are guaranteed whether they perform well or badly, and their jobs are secure in recessions. This sense of security may account for their contemptuous attitude toward the private sector, whereas in private enterprise, we only get paid, and have a job, when delivering something of value that someone else is prepared to pay for. We have a measure for what we do and are servants to the customer on the private side, whereas in stark contrast, civil servants need no customer and are servants to nobody.

Example 2 - if this is how patriotism is rewarded, then why would anyone be a patriot? Absolutely rage-inducing.

Design

I signed up to study furniture design, but soon found that it was possible to change courses and to steer a line between and through them, meeting fascinating people and learning much along the way. The RCA’s thinking was radical. At the time it went against the grain for an engineer to be a designer as well. You didn’t switch professions. Designers were mostly thought of as consultants, or those, in my imagination, who didn’t get their hands dirty and who were concerned with looks rather than function. They were remote from engineers in white lab coats who gave structure to things and made them work. I loved my time at the RCA not least because of its lively and inventive cross-disciplinary approach. Here, as I progressed, I realized that art and science, inventing and making, thinking and doing could be one and the same. I dared to dream that I could be engineer, designer, and manufacturer at the same time.

This is incredibly revolutionary - at the time, designers were highly specialized roles that were ultimately just advisors telling customers how to do things. But they themselves had basically no agency.

I had made up my mind that what I really wanted to be was a manufacturer. I wanted to make new things—things that might seem strange—and not things you make because you know they will sell. The ultimate challenge, I suppose, was to design, make, and sell inventive and wholly new products. To do this, you need to be more than a designer or engineer. You need control over the whole process just as my exemplars Soichiro Honda, André Citroën, and Akio Morita (creator of the Sony Walkman) had.

I really want to read the Akio Morita book now. So many incredible entrepreneurs were inspired by him.

I had observed that designers work on what manufacturers and clients ask them to design and this held no appeal.

Exactly - you need to control the entire process, end to end.

I worked on the production line for a fortnight to understand the process and check that it made good sense from a technical point of view, but I also did it because I enjoyed it. I like making things, and to be a good manufacturer, you really have to.

If you want to own the entire vertical, you need to understand every part of it. Starting with the manufacturing.

Inventions, no matter how ingenious and exciting, are of little use unless they can be translated through engineering and design into products that stimulate or meet a need and can sell.

This is very much Elon’s philosophy - lab experiments are all well and good, but the real ingenuity comes from translating a lab experiment into a scalable, mass-producable product that the world can enjoy.

Innovation

At Dyson, we don’t particularly value experience. Experience tells you what you ought to do and what you’d do best to avoid. It tells you how things should be done when we are much more interested in how things shouldn’t be done. If you want to pioneer and invent new technology you need to step into the unknown and, in that realm, experience can be a hindrance.

Dyson is a true pioneer - very much in the way Steve Jobs and Edwin Land were. This is very much the opposite of a pure execution play.

Jeremy Fry taught me not to try to pressure people into buying but to ask them lots of questions about what they did, how they worked, and what they might expect of a new product. Equally, I learned that most people don’t really know exactly what they want, or if they do it’s only from what they know, what is available or possible at the time. As Henry Ford said, famously, if he had asked American farmers what they wanted in terms of future transport, they would have answered “faster horses.” You need to show them new possibilities, new ideas, and new products and explain these as lucidly as possible. You also need to listen to your customers, aiming to improve products wherever necessary and simply for improvement’s sake. Dyson advertising focuses on how our products are engineered and how they work, rather than on gimmicks and snappy sales lines.

This is true with any sufficiently new technology. People can’t think outside of the technology of their era, so if you give them a blank canvas and ask them to “go wild” and design anything, they basically have nothing to say. It takes a dreamer to pull the ideal vision out and manifest it.

That type of “focus group–led” designing may work in the short term, but not for long. Just before the launch of the Mini car, Austin Morris did a focus group where nobody wanted this tiny car with small wheels. So Morris cut the production lines down to one. When the public saw the car on the streets, they were enthusiastic, leaving the company scrambling to meet demand. Austin Morris never caught up, missing out on serious profits.

Pretty much Steve Jobs and Edwin Land’s philosphy.

…an invention might be a brilliant idea yet either unsuited or irrelevant to the market it needs to sell in. A design might be considered ahead of its time and, sometimes because of this, even ridiculous.

Very similar to a startup idea as well. If everyone thinks it’s a good idea, it’s likely actually bad because it’s not advanced enough.

Rather like the way some sharks have to keep moving to stay alive, innovative engineering-led manufacturers need continuous innovation to stay competitive. Striving for new and better products is often what defines such companies. At Dyson, we never stand still. In a quarter of a century, we have gone from making a revolutionary vacuum cleaner to prototypes of a radical electric car. Invention tends to compound invention and companies need to be set up for this.

The minute you are satisfied, you begin a slow process of dying. Ingvar Kamprad, Ikea’s founder, swears by this philosophy - never be satisfied, and always seek to get better.

What these pieces of our history demonstrate is that it is hard for other people to understand or get excited by a new idea. This requires self-reliance and faith on the part of the inventor.

This is precisely why persistence is so important. In the beginning, you are the only one who believes. If you falter, the world will have its way.

Vertical Integration

Obviously at Dyson we cannot make absolutely everything on our own, but we can work with suppliers so that they are in tune with us, with our manufacturing standards and our values.

Very much the Toyota way. You want to be in control of every aspect of quality, so if you cannot find a sufficiently high quality component from a vendor, you must design it yourself.

We design our own components. We don’t buy them off the shelf.

And they do.

The BallBarrow

The more I used it, the more I realized that nobody had really thought about these problems or bothered to fix them, for a very long time. In fact, they had barely changed since the Roman design.

[sic]

I wanted to change all this, to rethink the wheelbarrow from scratch.

His first major invention is this ‘ballbarrow’ - rather than a wheelbarrow, where the weight is on the wheel which causes it to easily sink into the ground, having a wider ball would distribute it. It’d make it easier to go over small rocks and make an overall more comfortable experience for the weilder.

The Ballbarrow did, however, win a British Design Council kite mark. At the time, this triangular black-and-white badge attached to a product was a sign of officially approved good design. Even then, the Design Council sent me a letter saying that I had only just got it. Apparently, the committee was concerned with the color of the plastic ball. Red, it seems, was wrong for gardens, which are green, although don’t tell the roses that.

From the earliest days, he had an eye for design. He knew how to make his products stand out on the shelf. Of course, British propriety would scoff at that but who cares?

The Ballbarrow was designed to stand out in a line of old-fashioned rivals on display in garden centers or in the pages of sales catalogs. I still like to add touches of color to highlight the technology or to draw attention to switches and release catches of Dyson products, so that color has a functional element as well as visual appeal.

Exactly.

We did a photo shoot one day at Dodington Park, near Bristol. This is the late eighteenth-century house designed by James Wyatt and built for the Codrington family, who first came that way in the sixteenth century and had owned the estate ever since. We could never have guessed then that a quarter of a century later Dodington Park would be our family home.

An absolutely wild ride for him and his family.

Out of the blue, we were approached by British Aerospace, manufacturers of small missiles. They wanted a missile carrier with Ballbarrow ball wheels, as these would roll over soft sand without sinking into it. The problem, though, was that some military shells explode, scattering quite strong needles, which puncture vehicles’ tires. British Aerospace wanted a puncture-proof ball wheel.

This was a huge hit product - and he developed it just following his own intuition.

I was also putting into practice ideas I’ d learned directly from Jeremy Fry and indirectly from Alec Issigonis: Don’t copy the opposition. Don’t worry about market research.

This is the type of entrepreneur I admire the most. I am most definitely not this type of visionary though, which is probably why I feel a slight bit of jealousy.

The problem, though, was that I wasn’t following my own star, and this proved to be the very reason why my first company, Kirk-Dyson, was not the success it could have been.

[sic]

…when I had wanted to do the Ballbarrow and my brother-in-law generously offered to part-fund it, I had rather stupidly assigned the patent of the Ballbarrow not to myself but to the company.

[sic]

As we borrowed more by bringing in new investors, my percentage share of the company fell. The business grew to an annual turnover of £600,000 ($830,000). It captured more than half the U.K. garden wheelbarrow market, but even so, we didn’t make any money.

[sic]

I couldn’t have been more surprised when in February 1979 my fellow shareholders booted me out. There was no apparent reason for this. I later discovered that the son of the other major shareholder had taken over the running of the business. I had lost five years of work by not valuing my creation. I had failed to protect the one thing that was most valuable to me. If I had kept control, I could have done what I wanted and avoided a big interest bill. I learned, very much the hard way, that I should have held on to the Ballbarrow patent and licensed the company.

This experience would shape him for the rest of his life. All of his hard work was stolen from him. This happens to a lot of entrepreneurs - it happened to Les Schwab as well. It’s going to teach him a very, very hard lesson in business. Never again will Dyson ever risk losing his company. It’s why Dyson will never be public.

From now on, though, I was determined not to let go of my own inventions, patents, and companies. Today, Dyson is a global company. I own it, and this really matters to me. It remains a private company. Without shareholders to hold the company back, we are free to make long-term and radical decisions. I have no interest in going public with Dyson because I know that this would spell the end of the company’s freedom to innovate in the way it does.

It’s now, in his own words, a family heirloom. And he will never sell it, to anyone.

Vaccuums

Here was a field—the vacuum cleaner industry—where there had been no innovation for years, so the market ought to be ripe for something new. And, because houses need cleaning throughout the year, a vacuum cleaner is not, like my Ballbarrow, a seasonal product. It is also recession-proof since every household needs one. It seemed to tick all the boxes.

Like so many, his second would be far bigger than his first.

For the following fifteen years I lived in debt. This might not sound encouraging to young inventors with an entrepreneurial spirit, yet if you believe you can achieve something—whether as a long-distance runner or maker of a new type of vacuum cleaner—then you have to give the project 100 percent of your creative energy. You have to believe that you’ll get there in the end. You need determination, patience, and willpower. Never for a moment, though, had I thought, I know, one day I’ll set up a business making and selling vacuum cleaners and if it takes me fifteen years to make a profit, then that’s the way to go.

This is the level of determination needed to make a dream a reality. No exit plans. No optionality. No bullshit. Conviction and determination.

I took the old one out, opened the end, tipped the contents into the dustbin, and sealed the end of the empty bag with Scotch tape. Back it went into the flying saucer. Still no suction. I got into the car to go and buy some new bags. With a new bag installed, suction returned. I wanted to know the difference between a new bag and an old empty bag.

Basically the way vaccuum bags were designed at the time, if the pores of the bag were even slightly clogged, there would never be any suction. This meant that even a slightly used bag could, potentially, act as if it were full. Naturally, this is an incredibly lucrative design for the vaccuum cleaner manufacturers. Kind of like how printers make all their money on the ink.

What if I could develop a much smaller version and replace the clogging bag in a vacuum cleaner? I had tried to interest my fellow directors and shareholders at the Ballbarrow company in the concept of a cyclonic and bagless vacuum cleaner to solve the clogging and loss of suction problems. No such luck. If it was such a great idea, they said, Hoover or Electrolux would have been making it already.

And anytime you think you have a better idea, the typical response of “why didn’t competitors already do this” pops up. Maybe because they weren’t incentivized to do so?

One of the important principles I applied was changing only one thing at a time and to see what difference that one change made. People think that a breakthrough is arrived at by a spark of brilliance or even a eureka thought in the shower. I wish it were for me. Eureka moments are very rare. More likely, you start off by testing a particular setup, and by making one change at a time, you start to understand what works and what fails.

This is almost exactly what Marc Randolph said word for word.

Hoover wanted me to sign a piece of paper saying anything that came out of a discussion with them belonged to them. I didn’t sign, and that was the end of my collaboration with Hoover. They did, though, send their European vice president, Mike Rutter, to appear in 1995 on the BBC’s Money Programme to say that Hoover regretted not buying my invention because they would have “put it on the shelf,” ensuring that it never saw the light of day. Charming.

Ouch. At least they were honest!

I learned that none of them was interested in doing something new and different. They were more interested in defending the vacuum cleaner bag market, worth more than $500 million in Europe alone at the time.

And now you know why they never ‘fixed’ their design.

Patents

Amway had not only canceled our agreement but it had now copied my technology. This was pretty exasperating, even more so when Iona then negotiated my license deal down due to Amway’s copy. We agreed to share costs to fight Amway in court. When you have developed a new technology or created a radically different product, have beaten the skeptics, established awareness, and battled to create a market for it, to discover a similar product from a company that had canceled a licence agreement is sickening. You feel outraged by the personal theft and helpless.

It seems like there isn’t a single innovator I read about that doesn’t have their invention blatantly copied and stolen, regardless of patent laws. If it can happen to Dyson and Polaroid, it can happen to you. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a better business model out there.

We embarked on the lengthy lawsuit, taking on two very large U.S. companies with huge resources, Amway and Bissell. Amway had teamed up with Bissell to make its version of the vacuum cleaner. Bissell is based in the same city as Amway and had been a vacuum cleaner and carpet sweeper manufacturer for many years, known in the U.K. as Bex Bissell. Since I had explained the technology and knowhow to Bissell during the license agreement with Amway, as well as handing over all the drawings, we had to sue Bissell for their part in the Amway version.

Come on, America. Be better.

I twice took cases before the European Court of Human Rights to have patent renewal fees declared illegal, on the basis that nonpayment of the renewal fee, essentially a massive income to the government, results in the creator losing their rights. This loss does not happen to any other creator of art. Twice the case was lost on the basis that the fees were reasonable, presumably according to the European Patent Offices! Yet when I was a penniless inventor, I was shelling out tens of thousands of pounds every year on renewal fees in just a few countries, which I struggled to pay on borrowed money and so often had to surrender patents.

I don’t blame him one bit for having these opinions on patents.

My share amounted to $1 million. More importantly than this, I could regain my life. The black cloud that had hung over our family life for all too many years was lifted. We weren’t rich—in fact, the award didn’t even cover my share of legal costs—but at least the costs had stopped. Instead of worrying whether or not we were going to be bankrupt, we could now think of our future.

Notably, even though it was exhorbitantly expensive, his wife supported his fighting these cases through and through until the end.

At school you can be expelled if you copy someone else’s work. In the commercial world, it is allowed, even encouraged, under the guise of “competition.” The senior British patent judge, Lord Justice Robin Jacob, argued (Apple vs. Samsung, 2013) that this kind of copying should be encouraged. He was wrong. Copying reduces choice for consumers, rather than encouraging different products working in different ways and achieving different objectives. Plagiarism is lazy, while avoiding the costs of developing and introducing new technology. Patents exist to allow the inventor to commercialize an invention without being copied for twenty years from the date of filing the patent, which in practice means ten to fifteen years of production. If the inventor didn’t have that opportunity to make a return on his efforts, why would anyone invest in researching new and better ways of doing things?

His opinions basically mirror Edwin Land almost exactly.

This altered the principle by which an invention should be owned by the “first to invent” rather than the “first to apply for a patent,” which is the current ludicrous position. An inventor should hold the patent and not a plagiarist who sees it and files first, as sometimes happens today.

I can definitely see this. The problem is people being granted patents for random shit, especially in software, and becoming patent trolls. It’s a hard balance.

Betting the House

He returned a week later to say, “We’ll lend you £400,000, but you’ve got to sign over your house.”

Life is going to find so many ways to test your conviction.

Deirdre and I discussed the awful gamble we were taking. We stood to lose everything we had. It didn’t bear thinking about and we had no idea what we would do if we failed. It was our last chance to make our invention work, to show faith in what we had done. It was extraordinary that Deirdre went along with this last roll of the dice.

Once again, kudos to Deirdre.

When I dared to ask Mike Page why he had lent me the money later, he said, “Well, you had fought a five-year lawsuit in America, so I could see you had determination, and I went home to my wife and told her that you were doing a vacuum cleaner without a bag, and what did she think of that? She thought it was brilliant not to have a bag.” And that was that, although what we didn’t know at the time was that Lloyds had turned his request down. He had to appeal to the ombudsman in the bank’s head office in Cardiff, who for some reason agreed with him. Sadly, it is not often that banks or bank managers receive praise for the risks they take.

This is almost exactly what happens to Joe Coulombe as he’s starting Trader Joe’s.

Experts

I was also told that no one would want to see dust sucked up by a cleaner inside a transparent container. Simple market research confirmed this. However, Pete, Simeon, and I enjoyed seeing the dirt we had extracted in all its gory detail, so we ignored the market research. Curiously, and aside from the fact that the new cleaner was powerful and with constant suction, this is exactly what customers did like to see. They were fascinated by the sight of just how much dirt they had cleaned up.

If there’s one theme in this book, besides perseverance, it’s not listening to experts. He says this in so many different ways, but the heart of it is just try it for yourself and see. Jeremy Fry, his mentor, was also extremely skeptical of experts.

Quality

First and foremost, Dyson is a luxury brand company. So the pursuit of quality for its own sake is the primary goal.

From the DC01 onward, our first-generation vacuum cleaners used a proprietary Japanese 1400 W electric motor, while our competitors boasted of 2000 W and even 2400 W motors. However, we had no loss of suction, therefore we wasted none of our power, whereas the competitors lost suction and wasted so much of their power through clogged bags. For me, lightness—lean engineering and material efficiency—is a guiding principle. Using less material means using less energy in the process of making things. It also means lighter products that need less energy to power them and are easier to handle and more pleasurable to use.

Dyson vaccuums use less power than their competitors.

The thicker the plastic, the more of it you need. The more of it you need, the more electricity you need to melt and mold it. We had a standoff with our plastic material suppliers who insisted we needed moldings 2.5–3.5 mm thick in order to push the plastic through the cavity of the mold. This is what their mold-filling computer programs predicted. We designed and made one of our clear bins with a 1mm-thick wall. Lo and behold, unlike the plastic supplier’s computer program, it worked.

They have less plastic.

The turbine speed we initially aimed for was 120,000 rpm, or four times faster than existing high-speed vacuum motors. We would reduce the diameter of the turbine to 40 mm instead of the conventional 140 mm because of the centrifugal forces generated at such a high rate of revs.

[sic]

Embarking on making our own new-technology, high-speed motor at this stage in our existence was a leap of faith. At least one board member was against our proposal. His view was that competing with established motor manufacturers was too risky and too expensive. To us, the risk was surely worth it.

They have faster motors. Today, Dyson has the fastest motors of anyone on the market. Their motors are so good that people often ask Dyson why won’t they please sell them to other companies, but he wants to remain focused.

In case you are wondering, our motors now use an altitude meter, so that they can adjust their performance depending on their height above sea level. The motor will work just as well in Mexico City as it will in the shallow Zuiderzee Works in the Netherlands. It is so accurate, it can determine whether it is sitting on a table or lying on the floor.

Now that is true engineering precision.

As Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

[sic]

We were to make our own early vacuum cleaners redundant—although old models kept and will keep working—as we researched and developed new technologies and materials.

And every single year, they try to outdo themselves. No innovator’s dilemma here - they are relentlessly trying to make themselves obsolete. In the same way Michael Dell tries to.

The price we sold it at when it finally launched in 2000, although high at £1,099.99 ($1,500), was too low to make a profit. We started trying to reduce the cost of production, rather unsuccessfully. The marketing team said to me, “If you make it £200 cheaper, you will sell a lot more.” So we made it £200 ($275) cheaper and sold exactly the same number at £899.99 as we had at £1,099 and ended up losing even more money. I had made a classic mistake. It might sound counterintuitive, but I should have increased the price.

Remember - you want to pick and choose your customers. If you’re entering the luxury game, price signaling is everything.

We wanted to display our product how we thought it ought to be displayed. This is not a criticism of retailers who know their business well and who have to display many companies’ products and do so to maximize their sales. The result, though, can be a plethora of signs and discount tickets, offers, and credit terms, with each manufacturer jostling for a good position. It was a relief in our Paris gallery to be able to have a sense of calmness with no signs and just one product on a pedestal.

If you truly want to control the experience end to end, you must have your own stores.

They are canvases on which to display and demonstrate our technology in exactly the way we want to. The first Apple Store, some years later, in SoHo, New York, was the same format, with a French limestone floor, mezzanines, stainless steel and glass bridges, and products on white plinths, with no writing.

Dyson, Jobs, and Land - they all think very similarly.

Giggles

Japan really was another world then. When I first went to the Apex office, the girls pointed at my nose: “You have a nose like Eiffel Tower.” This, I learned, was a compliment, although it seemed such a bizarre thing to say, especially when first meeting someone.

LOL.

I dropped into the Chippenham branch of Rumbelows. They had a lineup of gleaming new vacuum cleaners, but the DC01 on display was full of black dust. It looked disgusting. I asked a sales assistant why it was so dirty. “Oh,” she said, “it’s because we clean the shop with it. It’s the best of the vacuum cleaners.” So I asked, “Which vacuum cleaner do you recommend to customers?” “Panasonic.” Why? “Because I’ve got one at home.”

Incredible.

A young woman dressed in a Scottish Power uniform did her best to sell us a Hoover. I asked her, why a Hoover? “Well, it’s the best vacuum cleaner.” I asked her, in a nice way of course, if she was really from Scottish Power. “No,” she replied, “I’m from Hoover.”

I love it.

I started to tell the minister all the things that were wrong about politics, when he suddenly said, “Shut the fuck up, Dyson. What’s your turnover?” Refreshing for an Old Etonian and government minister. “About £3.5 [almost $5] million,” I said. He responded, “I want it up to £50 [almost $70] million within twelve months. What help do you need?”

Now here is a politician I can get behind.

I grew my hair so that I could learn by doing. Many of the male engineers also took to growing their hair long, keeping up with female colleagues, but couldn’t tell their partners why. As usual with us, this was a secret project.

This is as they’re developing a Dyson hair dryer - one that will harm the hair less by using more air and less heat.

In the late 1990s, a Belgian court banned us from talking about vacuum cleaner bags. I didn’t realize they could do this, and I would have thought it was illegal. But Belgium had tight comparative advertising laws and our European competitors ganged up to sue us, arguing that we shouldn’t say that we didn’t have a bag as this gave Dyson a comparative advantage. While this seems absurd, the court found us guilty. We produced an advertisement, shot by the photographer Don McCullin, with the word “bagless” blanked out repeatedly and a line that read “Sorry, but the Belgian court won’t let you know what everyone has a right to know.” This got the media interested. We were able to tell them the story of how European manufacturers, as a group, were trying to silence competition.

If you have a high quality product, the only way your competitors can win is by dirty tactics like this. But in the long run, customers always go for quality. So while you may suffer short term set backs, it’ll only strengthen the brand.

Once the regulations came into effect, many vacuum cleaners sold around Europe quickly started sporting a green A-grade label for energy consumption and efficiency, as conferred by the European Commission test criteria. However, when you got them home and started using them, their bags and filters started clogging up with dust. Our subsequent testing showed that the efficiency of some of these would fall as low as a G-grade while “in use.”

Some manufacturers went even further and engineered their way around the cap on motor wattage, which came into effect at the same time. They used electronics to ensure their machines used a low motor wattage when empty and in a test state, but ramped up just as soon as the product was used in real life—thus appearing more efficient than they were.

This is the same strategy Volkswagon took - tamped down on emissions while being tested, and immediately afterwards go back to business as usual in real world conditions. Horrendous.

Conclusion

Many wise friends advised me to sell in the early days when a few attractive offers came in. I suspect they feared that I might lose it all or they felt that I had achieved all that I needed to achieve. A family business has most of its wealth tied up in the business, so continuing to keep it as a family business is both a risk and a responsibility. But I like living on a knife edge, competing and building the business. I am passionate about developing new technology and working with a wonderful and creative team around me. If we fail, “better drowned than duffers.”

Much like Marc Randolph says, if you are going to be an entrepreneur, you must be comfortable walking on that knife’s edge. Because you’re going to be there, constantly. In Idea Man, Paul Allen’s mom calls Bill Gates an “edge walker”. This is who you have to be risk-wise to survive in this industry.

It is hard to be pioneering because you don’t know whether or not you are going to succeed. You will stumble and have to pick yourself back up believing that you will succeed. It is scary—I am scared all the time. Fear, though, can be a good thing as it pumps the adrenaline and motivates. As athletes will confirm.

This is precisely why startups are hard. He has the perfect attitude. We’re going to try doing something impossible, and if we fail - well, better to have failed than never tried.

I have great faith that science and technology can solve problems, from more sustainable and efficient products to the production of better food and a more sustainable world. It is technological and scientific breakthroughs, far more than messages of doom, that will lead to this world. We need to go forward optimistically into the future as if into the light, with bright new ideas, rather than the darkness and end to human ingenuity portrayed by doomsayers. After the event, a revolutionary new idea can look so obvious—surely no one could have doubted it? At their conception, though, new ideas are not blindingly obvious. They are fragile things in need of encouragement and nurturing against doubting Thomases, know-it-alls, and so-called experts. Just as Frank Whittle discovered, it is easy for people to say no, to dismiss new ideas, and be sticks-in-the-mud, pessimists, or even cynics. It is much harder to see how something unexpected might be a success.

Fuck the pessimists. It’s the optimists who drive our species forward.

Post Script

There are two rather wonderful post scripts to the book - one written by his eldest son, and the other by his wife.

As for what he taught me, my siblings, and all those working with him, it can be summed up best as “I can do that.” It doesn’t matter if the challenge is making something entirely new, replumbing a house, or taking on a powerful multinational—he just gets on and does it. He has no fear. This is the thing we need to uphold in the culture of Dyson: the no-fear culture, the need to be adventurous.

I love that he’s passing down the key lesson his own father has taught him. Anything is achievable. Just set your mind to it and get to work.

I do the crossword secretly every day because if he sees me doing it, he immediately begins, too, and tries to complete it first. He never allowed the children to beat him at tennis, which induced tears and frustration.

This is too funny. So maniacally competitive that he doesn’t even let his young children beat him.

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This was an absolutley fantastic read through and through. I am thoroughly a Dyson fan and will absolutely only by Dyson products in whatever category they serve going forward. Air purifiers, hair dryers, vaccuum cleaners, you name it.