James Dyson is an inventor. In 1978 he noticed the air filter in the spray-finishing room at his factory was constantly clogging with powder particles, just like a traditional vacuum cleaner bag clogs with dust. He solved the problem using a method called cyclonic separation, and then set about applying this to the vacuum cleaner itself. It took Dyson 14 years to get his first product into a shop. It wasn’t until 1993 that the ‘Dyson Dual Cyclone’™ appeared. It became the fastest selling vacuum cleaner ever to be made in the UK and was the first breakthrough in technology since the invention of the vacuum cleaner in 1901.
Why?
Dyson likes to make things work better. When some everyday product lets you down, Dyson is the sort of guy who thinks, I could have designed this better myself. But Dyson had to overcome many difficulties. He made 5,127 prototypes of the vacuum cleaner before he got it right. That meant 5,126 ‘failures’. Dyson never gave up. He saw the possibilities of invention and was driven to find the solution.