Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Story of a life spent showing the world ‘new possibilities and new ideas…’
West-based inventor, entrepreneur and tycoon Sir James Dyson has just released a fascinating autobiography. Richard Bache discovers more about what drives one of the region’s most famous people
IF any barbers in north Wiltshire have been mystified about why their profits dipped in the early 2010s, the answer might just lie in the pages of Sir James Dyson’s newly-released autobiography.
For inside the top secret Dyson laboratories in Malmesbury, dozens of engineers – and Sir James – had stopped getting their hair cut.
This wasn’t some sort of Movember-style charity challenge, but speaks to the obsession with handson experimentation and research that has helped Dyson become one of the biggest technology firms in the world.
As the firm was developing its Supersonic hairdryer – ultimately released in 2016 – it wasn’t enough to employ trichologists and cornering the market in ethically-sourced hair tresses to experiment with.
No, for Sir James and some of the other male engineers trying to perfect the hairdryer, they simply had to grow their own hair to a length where using a hairdryer themselves was a necessity (not something that was as much of a challenge for the growing number of female engineers at Dyson).
As with all technology development projects, the threat of industrial espionage was rife and work was carried out on the hush-hush, so there must have been quite a few wives, girlfriends and significant others who were also somewhat baffled by their loved ones’ sudden change in appearance.
It is this preoccupation with experimentation and failure that has driven Sir James, now 74, to become one of Britain’s richest men and one of the more prolific inventors in history.
After all, it wasn’t until he had made the small matter of 5,127 prototypes of his first cyclonic vacuum cleaner that he was satisfied he had developed something genuinely mould-breaking.
His new autobiography, Invention: A Life, gives a detailed insight into his design and engineering philosophies, why failure is a good thing, what drives him, the innovators who inspired him and the things that continue to frustrate him.
It is those engineers, designers and inventors who persuade a sceptical public to buy a new product that they didn’t know they wanted that appear to be Sir James’s personal heroes.
In the book, Sir James writes: “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.”
As well as Ford, other names that crop up time and time again in the book as inspirations to Sir James are jet engine inventor Sir Frank Whittle;
Mini designer Alec Issigonis; Akio Morita, creator of the Sony Walkman; and legendary Swiss-French architect/designer Le Corbusier.
Given his role in developing not only his world-famous vacuum cleaners, hand-driers, air purifiers and hair-straighteners, but also his earlier invention of the Ballbarrow and work on Bath-based Rotork’s Sea Truck, it is likely that future generations of designers and engineers will mention Dyson’s name with similar reverence.
Today, however, Sir James cuts a somewhat polarising figure.
Admiration for his achievements as an inventor and businessman comes up against prejudices old and new.
Some people will never warm to those of vast wealth (estimated at £16 billion by the Sunday Times Rich List), added to which being a prominent voice on either side of the highlycharged Brexit debate automatically puts one at odds with either 48 or 52 per cent of the population.
There were dozens of reasons to vote either for or against Brexit in 2016, and Sir James doesn’t shy away from discussing his in the book.
His personal experience of expensive litigation with European Union institutions that he believed were susceptible to lobbying from (mostly) German rival manufacturers of household goods was one reason.
As was Dyson’s successful long-term record of manufacturing in Malaysia and Singapore and thriving despite facing import duties when selling in Europe.
Put bluntly, he views the fastgrowing giant consumer markets of Asia as being more important than Europe.
He says: “The more time we spent in Singapore and Malaysia and then the Philippines, the more we became an Asian company that just happened to be owned by British people.
“While I’m proud to be English, started Dyson in rural England and
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’ SIR JAMES DYSON
continue to employ thousands of people there, I have never thought of trading on flag-waving.”
Hence why Dyson’s manufacturing is carried out in the Far East – the proximity to both markets and, crucially, component suppliers, plus access to highly-skilled engineering workforces, being compelling reasons for Sir James.
He admits that moving manufacturing from Malmesbury to Malaysia in 2000 was a controversial decision, particularly given the number of redundancies it caused.
But he says that the company now employs far more people in Wiltshire than it did then, most of them in highly-skilled roles, and the company wouldn’t have grown as it has without making the move.
It is very unlikely indeed that he regrets the decision, and the current supply chain crisis in the UK is not likely to change his mind.
In fact, his admiration for dynamic Asian economies, in particular Singapore, is made clear throughout the book. He contrasts the speed of decision-making and support from government that the South East Asian city-state offers the manufacturing sector to the plodding nature of the British planning system and successive governments of all stripes, in his view, barely concealing their contempt for any type of factory.
It is, he argues, a peculiarly British trait that the country that gave the world the industrial revolution has lost its appetite for manufacturing – as though it is below supposedly educated people.
Sir James writes: “As soon as
Dyson became successful, people in Britain asked when I was going to sell the company, as if I was only lowering myself temporarily in the dim and grubby world of uncreative manufacturing.
“Once I had made my first million, it was surely time for me to get away from the sweat, grime and grim routine of factory life and to become a reclusive landowner …cleaning the moat around my house.”
The old adage of the first million being the hardest to make certainly rings true here.
Maybe the hero of the entire book is Sir James’s wife, Deirdre, who displays rare understanding and the patience of several saints in happily accepting a man who not only makes 5,000-plus prototypes of a vacuum cleaner at home, but accrues massive debt while constantly re-mortgaging the family home before ultimately finding success.
Although Sir James and Deirdre now own vast swathes of English farmland, the Dodington Park mansion in South Gloucestershire and homes around the world, the book details that for the first 30 years of their marriage they were often essentially penniless.
As late as 1992, the Dysons were having to sign over their house to a very understanding bank manager at the Corn Street branch of Lloyds in Bristol to secure the £600,000 funding for him to start making his own vacuum cleaners rather than licensing designs to third parties.
It is safe to say it was an investment that paid off…
It is the lot of an inventor and entrepreneur – particularly one willing to embrace failure – that not all investments or ideas will pan out.
In the past five years alone, almost £500 million was lost on trying to revolutionise the electric car market and £20 million was spent answering Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plea to help out with a national effort to build more ventilators in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
Both chapters make fascinating reading.
One major investment that is appearing to pay off is the 36,000 acres of farmland Sir James owns.
Through his Dyson Farming operation, he is seeking to bring his passion for innovation and doing things differently to the agricultural sector.
In a manner that will be all too familiar to any West Country farmer, it didn’t take Sir James long, though, to realise how skewed the food market was in favour of supermarkets and processors.
But unlike most farmers, he might just have the resources to perhaps fight back against the power of supermarkets.
In the chapter on farming, he writes about the frustration with farmers taking on all the risk and making massive investments to grow a crop, only for middle-men and retailers to take most of the profit.
The majority of his farm holdings are in Lincolnshire and Norfolk – he is Britain’s biggest pea grower – but it may surprise some that shoppers can already buy West Country beef and lamb directly from Dyson Farming’s website.
The herd at one of his farms near Bath – at Freshford to the south of the city – provides Taste of the West award-winning meat that is sold online, while also supplying the canteens at Dyson’s campuses at Malmesbury and nearby Hullavington.
It will come as little surprise that technology features heavily in Sir James’s vision for the future of agriculture and while no farm will ever be quite as spotless as his high-tech labs, he appears to have little truck with the rusting paraphernalia that is not an uncommon sight on most farms.
He says: “Farming is a visceral form of manufacturing with much to teach us. As in making anything on a large and repetitive scale, however, all the basics have to be right.
“There is no reason why a farm, its equipment, tracks, ditches and yards should be messy, muddy or untidy. We should always maintain high standards.”
One area where Sir James has consistently argued Britain’s standards aren’t high enough is in educating sufficient engineers.
Dyson has now launched its own degree programmes at its Malmesbury campus and funds extensive research at numerous top universities, including Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Bath, Imperial and his own alma mater, the Royal College of Art.
Yet still we fall further behind fastgrowing economies, such as China, India, South Korea and Singapore in educating people with the technical skills to thrive in the 21st century global economy.
Although Dyson has moved its headquarters to Singapore – to a grandiose former power station that was most recently used as one of Asia’s biggest nightclubs – he writes that Wiltshire remains fundamental to the company.
He writes: “We continue to invest heavily in Dyson’s operations in the UK, as well as our educational initiatives, both through loyalty and because I do believe Britain produces, while not nearly enough of them, some of the most inventive and enquiring minds anywhere in the world.
“With the addition of Hullavington and the Dyson Institute, our Wiltshire campus has grown significantly. It will continue to do so.”
Precisely what products are in the future pipeline at Dyson, of course, remain a secret – but if, for instance, the gyms of north Wiltshire notice an uptick in business, perhaps, just maybe, it is engineers at Dyson trying to lose a few pounds to get selected for its nascent space programme…
James Dyson’s Invention: A Life is published by Simon and Schuster and costs £25.