James Dyson

#1James Dyson had bought an expensive Hoover vacuum, and something about it bothered him. The dust bag wasn't even full, but the suction was already fading.

#2When he looked more closely, the reason was pretty clear. Fine dust was clogging the tiny pores in the bag. The more dirt the machine collected, the harder it became for air to move through it.

#3Dyson had seen that sort of problem before. At the factory where his Ballbarrow was being powder-coated, filters kept clogging with particles too.

#4Then he saw something different at a nearby timber mill: a huge industrial cyclone separator. Instead of catching dust in a filter, it spun the air fast enough to throw particles out of the airflow.

#5Dyson had already used the same basic idea to deal with the filtration problem at his factory.

#6So he tried shrinking it.

#7Back home, he took the bag off the Hoover, made a rough cyclone out of cardboard, and attached it to the machine.

#8He switched it on.

#9The dust separated from the air.

#10It wasn't remotely ready to sell. But that crude setup had given him something important.

#11The principle worked.

#12Getting from that cardboard experiment to a vacuum you could actually use at home would eventually take 5,127 prototypes.

#13That number can make the story sound simpler than it was. Build one. Fail. Build another. Fail again.

#14Keep going until prototype 5,127 finally rewards all that persistence.

#15But that's not really how Dyson was working.

#16At first, he tried to calculate his way to the right cyclone. He even went back to an old mathematics teacher for help and looked at several serious formulas.

#17The problem was, they didn't agree.

#18So Dyson changed the method.

#19He started building the answer instead.

#20One variable at a time. The cyclone's length. The angle. Where the air entered. Where it left. How the airflow moved.

#21Then he'd test it. If the result got better, that told him something. If it got worse, that told him something too.

#22And every solved problem seemed to uncover another one. Fine dust was one thing. Hair and fluff were another. An industrial cyclone didn't have to swallow the mix of debris sitting on a living-room floor.

#23Dyson later said the hair-and-fluff problem brought him especially close to giving up.

#24So those 5,127 prototypes weren't 5,127 copies of the same mistake.

#25They were a long series of attempts to find out which part of the design was still wrong.

#26The machine was changing.

#27Life at home wasn't getting any easier.

#28Dyson worked near home, spending his days around dust, broken parts, and experimental machines. He'd come back and tell his wife, Deirdre Dyson, what had happened.

#29A lot of those reports weren't good. A prototype had broken. A test had failed. Sometimes Dyson got angry when a model refused to behave.

#30His son Jake later remembered materials breaking in the workshop and his father's frustration when things went wrong.

#31Meanwhile, normal family life kept moving. Their third child was born while Dyson was still near the beginning of the prototype count. By the time that count reached into the thousands, the family was watching every penny.

#32Deirdre taught art to bring in extra money. She was an artist herself, and Dyson later said she understood what it meant to spend a long time making something. A painting could take her a year.

#33That didn't make the bills disappear.

#34The financial pressure kept building.

#35And Dyson was starting to question himself too.

#36Once you know prototype 5,127 worked, it's tempting to imagine Dyson always knew there would be a 5,127.

#37He didn't.

#38The longer the hardest problems refused to go away, the more he doubted himself. That's how he later described it.

#39But he wasn't guessing in total darkness either. The big industrial cyclone had worked. His crude cardboard version had separated dust too.

#40So when another prototype failed, there was still another possibility besides the whole idea is wrong.

#41Maybe this shape was wrong. Maybe the angle was wrong. Maybe the airflow was wrong. Maybe the fine dust problem was solved, but the hair problem wasn't.

#42He could doubt himself and still have something specific worth testing next.

#43After roughly five years, the technology finally worked well enough.

#44You might expect that to be the end of the hard part.

#45It wasn't.

#46Now he had to find someone willing to make it.

#47Dyson wasn't planning to turn his surname into a giant appliance brand.

#48There was a much easier option.

#49License the invention.

#50Established vacuum companies already had factories. They had distribution. They had retailers. They had brands customers already knew.

#51Dyson could invent. They could make and sell.

#52That was the plan.

#53So he took the technology to manufacturers.

#54Deals kept falling apart.

#55There wasn't one single reason. Some companies doubted that consumers wanted a vacuum without a bag. Some negotiations stopped for other commercial or strategic reasons.

#56And then there was the bag itself.

#57The bag made money.

#58A vacuum wasn't necessarily a one-time sale. Customers kept coming back for replacement bags.

#59Years later, in Dyson's patent litigation with Hoover, the court heard expert evidence that replacement bags generated substantial profits for vacuum makers and gave them a strong disincentive to switch technologies.

#60To Dyson, the bag was a technical problem.

#61To an established vacuum company, it could also be part of a perfectly functioning business model.

#62That doesn't mean every rejection was a scheme to protect bag sales. There was a simpler question hanging over the whole thing too.

#63If our current vacuums are already selling, why rebuild the product around somebody else's idea?

#64Dyson still didn't have the strongest possible answer.

#65Consumers hadn't answered yet.

#66Then an opportunity came from Japan.

#67A company called Apex became interested in Dyson's technology, and Dyson went to Japan to keep refining the machine.

#68The result was the G-Force.

#69Bright pink. Very expensive. Nothing like a conventional vacuum cleaner.

#70And people bought it.

#71It won a design award, and Dyson began receiving royalties.

#72This wasn't a clean breakthrough. He was frustrated with parts of the licensing arrangement and didn't have the control he wanted over how the product developed.

#73Still, something had changed.

#74Until then, he'd mostly been hearing manufacturers predict that consumers wouldn't want a bagless cyclone vacuum.

#75In Japan, actual consumers put money down for one.

#76That mattered.

#77It was real evidence that the strange-looking machine could be a product, not just an invention.

#78Dyson kept trying to license the technology elsewhere.

#79The years kept passing.

#80Eventually, the man who had been trying to avoid becoming a manufacturer had to consider exactly that.

#81Dyson wasn't entering manufacturing for the first time.

#82Before the vacuum, he'd created the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow that used a large ball instead of a conventional wheel so it could move more easily over soft ground.

#83He'd helped build a company around it and actually made the product.

#84Then came debt, investors, arguments over the direction of the business—and eventually Dyson was pushed out of the company he'd helped create.

#85That history made his licensing strategy much easier to understand.

#86Invent the technology. Let an established company manufacture it. Let them sell it. Go back to inventing.

#87Except the plan kept failing.

#88At some point, the choices became fairly stark.

#89Drop the invention. Keep waiting for somebody to take it.

#90Or,

#91become a manufacturer again.

#92Dyson chose the last one.

#93Making the vacuum himself meant raising serious money.

#94A factory. Components. Tooling. People. Inventory.

#95Dyson borrowed heavily, putting family assets at risk.

#96And Deirdre was part of that decision too. She'd listened to years of stories about failed tests. She'd taught art while the prototype count climbed into the thousands.

#97Now the two of them were facing paperwork that put their home and assets behind an attempt to manufacture a vacuum that established companies hadn't wanted to make.

#98Deirdre signed.

#99In 1993, Dyson's first mass-produced vacuum, the DC01, went into production.

#100For years, Dyson had been asking somebody else to build his machine.

#101Now his own company was building it.

#102There was just one more basic problem.

#103Who was going to sell it?

#104Retailers already had vacuum cleaners. Hoover. Electrolux. Names customers recognized.

#105Why take one of those out to make room for a Dyson nobody knew?

#106A buyer for a mail-order catalogue essentially put that problem to Dyson.

#107His answer was that the catalogue was boring.

#108The buyer thought Dyson was cheeky.

#109But he took the product.

#110Then more openings started to appear.

#111And now the decision moved away from manufacturers making predictions about consumers.

#112Consumers could choose for themselves.

#113They bought the bagless vacuum.

#114Dyson also did something the industry hadn't expected: he let people see the dirt. The clear bin showed exactly what the machine had picked up.

#115There had been concern that nobody would want to look at the dust from their own home. Instead, the transparent bin became visible proof of what the vacuum was doing.

#116The DC01 sold fast.

#117Within roughly 18 months, Dyson had become Britain's best-selling vacuum cleaner.

#118Not long before that, he'd been looking for a company willing to manufacture his invention.

#119Now he needed more production capacity because customers were buying so many of them.

#120Then the story turned around again.

#121At the beginning, Dyson wanted something pretty simple.

#122He wanted an established vacuum company like Hoover to take the technology.

#123That future never came.

#124So he built the machine himself. Consumers bought it. And established companies began entering the bagless market.

#125One of them was Hoover.

#126Hoover introduced the Triple Vortex, its first bagless vacuum.

#127This time Dyson wasn't asking Hoover to use his technology.

#128He sued Hoover.

#129Dyson argued that the Triple Vortex infringed his cyclone patent.

#130In 2000, a British court found the Dyson patent valid and concluded that Hoover's product infringed it.

#131Hoover had represented the established vacuum industry for generations. It was exactly the sort of company Dyson had once hoped would open the door to his invention.

#132Years later, the two sides finally met over bagless technology.

#133Just not at a licensing table.

#134In court.

#135At the beginning, James Dyson had been outside the vacuum industry, knocking on the door.

#136Will somebody make this?

#137Years later,

#138one of the companies that had been on the other side of that door had entered the bagless market Dyson had helped prove could work.

#139In 1907, a 60-year-old janitor named James Spangler, whose asthma was aggravated by dust, put together a portable electric vacuum using a fan motor, a rotating brush, and a cloth bag.

#140The machine worked.

#141The business struggled.

#142The man who acquired the invention and turned it into a much bigger business was William Hoover.

#143Which leaves a strange question.

#144If Spangler made the machine, how did somebody else's surname—Hoover—end up becoming a verb for vacuuming in Britain?