Big shot of the week
SIR JAMES DYSON, 71 INVENTOR AND ENGINEER
Millennials don’t know they’re born, do they? They’ve never had to endure the tedium of fast forwarding a cassette tape, the hassle of driving without power steering or the rows over using an a-Z.
nor, for that matter, the banality of changing a vacuum cleaner bag.
For the latter they can thank sir James Dyson, zany inventor and engineer who has revolutionised the domestic appliances market with his noise-free hairdryer, garden Ballbarrow and, of course, bagless hoover.
He is Britain’s most respected business tycoon and prominent Brexiteer. less irritating than Branson, nicer than lord sugar and certainly better looking.
so revered are his inventions that today he’s as a much a cultural hero as an entrepreneurial one.
His national-treasure status, however, took a battering this week after announcing he would be making his long-awaited electric car in singapore. Traitor! Well, not really. nearly all the research and development will still take place at his Wiltshire headquarters.
He struck upon the idea for his famous vacuum in 1978 while living in the Cotswolds. after noticing his Hoover Junior kept losing suction as the bags clogged, he set about creating his own. He finally cracked it at the 5,197th attempt, five years later.
Resilience was something Dyson was forced to learn at an early age. His quaint, middle class upbringing in norfolk was interrupted when his father, a classics teacher, died of liver cancer when sir James was just nine.
at boarding school, he developed a passion for long-distance running. The satisfaction he got from pushing himself through the pain barrier, he reflects, forged his determination.
He enjoyed drawing too, and after school enrolled in a furniture design course at the Royal College of art, paying his way by taking a night job at a petrol station. His first job was working for engineer Jeremy Fry’s firm Rotork in Bath where he built boats. in 1976, he decided to go it alone and invent the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow with a spherical plastic wheel which gave it better manoeuvrability.
Money was tight in the Dyson household. He and his wife Deirdre, who he had met at college, were growing their own vegetables and making their own clothes. Bailiffs were rarely far from the door.
Drumming up interest in his prototype vacuum wasn’t easy. Manufacturers were unwilling to license something which would damage their lucrative vacuum-bag market, then worth about £400m. The only interest was from his old employers Rotork who in 1983 began selling it through a mail-order catalogue. in a year, they only shifted 500 units. The Japanese were the ones who got it. a reworked version called the G-Force began selling there two years later. it was expensive, about £1,000, but the Japanese know brilliant technology when they see it. soon they were flying off the shelves.
The money enabled Dyson to begin building a model under his own name back in the UK. in June 1993 he opened his research centre and factory in Wiltshire and developed the DCO1. it became the fastest selling vacuum ever to be made here.
DysOn’s products have deservedly brought him vast wealth – around £8bn they say. He resides at Dodington Park, a Grade i listed manor house for which he paid £15m and keeps other properties in the Provence and West london.
There have been a few fall outs along the way. Dyson didn’t speak to his sister for ten years after a row with her husband, with whom he built the Ballbarrow.
Unions don’t like him much after laying off 800 workers in 2002 and shifting production of his vacuums to Malaysia to save on labour costs. Dyson will argue making painful decisions is what’s kept his company competitive in today’s market. He’d eventually like to hand over the reins to the eldest of his three children, Jake.
in the meantime, he’s concentrating on farming. His agricultural firm recently turned its first profit and owns more acres than the Queen after Dyson embarked on a massive land grab in recent years. Hoovering it up, you might say.