It is not every day that one is in the presence of the greatest fortune in the United Kingdom. Sir James Dyson (born 75 years ago in Cromer, southern England) is a Knight of the Order of the British Empire and has a net worth of around €25 billion. This places him very close to the top of the world mesocratic rankings prepared by magazines such as Bloomberg either Forbes. Theirs, moreover, is money generated largely through creative and industrial activity, not financial speculation or sleight of hand.
Because Dyson, as he himself highlights, is an engineer and inventor. He is one from birth, because, as he adds, he remembers “always” rummaging through the back room of objects of all kinds “to discover how they worked.” One of the first objects that aroused his fascination were “motorcycles, which were pieces of pure engineering, designed to explicitly show what they do, unlike cars, which often opt for a much more ornamental design.” . That intuitive idea that the best design is the one that displays his cards with honesty and elegance becomes one of the constants that permeates his work.
Dyson claims that he managed to amass his fortune by “failing again and again.” Of course, what he calls failures were rather fruitless attempts that served as springboards to continue trying. 5,127 prototypes in the case of his crucial invention, the G-Force, the bagless cyclonic vacuum cleaner to which he dedicated the four most intense years of his life and which began to be marketed in 1986, despite the boycott of many British retailers who had encountered in the replacement of bags a market niche that they were not willing to give up easily. The G-Force first triumphed in Japan, a country that does not understand union inertia, and then spread throughout the world.
Today, the wide range of Dyson vacuum cleaners, with and without cord, with a futuristic design and equipped with a hygienic emptying system, sell alone despite costing more than 300 euros. On this solid rock, one of the inventions with the greatest transformative impact of the final stretch of the 20th century in the opinion of colleagues such as the industrial designer William Welch, Sir James began to build an overwhelming catalog of objects with the Dyson seal. Washing machines, hand and hair dryers, fans, air purifiers, headphones and even a prototype of an electric car that, in the words of the inventor himself, “in the end will never see the light of day, because although it was a technically impeccable design, we understood that would not be competitive.”
Dyson now insists that his main quality, even above inventiveness, is “perseverance”: not even in the moments when everything seemed to fall apart did he give up “keeping trying.” The veteran engineer receives a small group of international journalists at a royal estate in the Parisian neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the banks of the Seine. We cross beautiful patios and rooms in reverent silence until we reach the large study where Sir James is waiting for us, wearing a gray turtleneck sweater, sitting on an exquisite modular sofa next to an electric fireplace. He wants to talk about the book he published a few months ago, Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure, a chronicle of a lifetime dedicated to failing “big time”, without reluctance or prejudice, but is also willing to answer questions about anything else. He remembers his studies in furniture and interior architecture at the Royal College of Art, between 1966 and 1970, as “the opportunity to immerse yourself in a fascinating London.” That of the first Pink Floyd concerts, “the exuberance and color” of clothing stores like Kleptomania, on Carnaby Street, fashion designers like Ossie Clark and, above all, what today considers its main intellectual and aesthetic influence, the painter David Hockney: “I was training for a profession, design, which at that time did not even have a name, although references of modernity and excellence such as the Bauhaus already existed. Hockney is the most brilliant of the contemporary artists who passed through our school. His main quality, beyond talent, is that he is a tireless researcher. He instilled in me the idea that art and industrial design are, in essence, creative activities, and that functionality and beauty cannot be disconnected.”
For Dyson, it is a source of pride that several of its creations have been exhibited in museums, as is the case with the DC02 vacuum cleaner, which has been part of the MOMA permanent collection since 1994, or the G-Force itself, one of the 12 objects “worthy of preservation” that the London Design Museum gathered in a charity exhibition in 2016. This accolade from the art world confirms the designer in his intuition that useful objects can be beautiful. Dyson looks back and comes to paradoxical conclusions: “Experience has no value. We cannot rely on the past to help us solve the problems posed by the present.” The only recipe is to continue failing to get closer, step by step, to success: “I continue going to the studio every morning, I try to surround myself with talent and youth, with collaborators with fresh ideas and without prejudices. I have preserved my independence, my right to continue working without depending on my business partners or the financial or marketing departments. Those who work with me know perfectly well what my criteria are: I will bring you an object designed in the laboratory without creative interference of any kind and then I will ask you to help me sell it.”
This way of doing things implies, as he himself recognizes, the payment of painful tolls, such as the aforementioned cancellation, in 2019, of the design project for an electric car that intended to compete with Tesla: “I managed to bring together more than 500 people working on a prototype that was going to be effective, but not efficient. At a certain point, we found that large companies were willing to produce at a loss to gain significant market share, something we could not afford. So I canceled the project. It was a very painful decision from a business and creative point of view, but no effort falls completely on deaf ears: all that technological learning can be applied to other projects and much of the talent we recruited stayed in the company.”
Failure is fertile, Dyson tells us again and again. It is the fuel of innovation. And innovation “is the only thing that really matters.” Sir James explains that part of his efforts are in sustainability (“energy saving is the great contemporary challenge, and the future of our societies will depend largely on how we solve it”) and in projects such as your network of organic farms or the Dyson Foundation, which he runs in collaboration with his wife, the painter Deirdre Hindmarsh. The inventor presents himself as an enthusiast of his profession for whom life consists of always keeping busy: “If I am not something,” he explains vehemently, “he is a businessman. Write that down, because I like it to be clear.” Hockney’s disciples, like him, only know how to make money by failing.
You can follow ICON on Facebook, x, instagramor subscribe here to the Newsletter.
#Failing #James #Dyson #UKs #biggest #fortune #turning #vacuum #cleaners #coveted #objects #desire