James Dyson: Last of the great inventors

This, published by Blueprint in September 1984, is the first interview James Dyson ever gave

Here’s the introductory section from the profile. The full PDF version can be downloaded from the link at the end

The 20th-century has its celebrated artists, designers, scientists and technologists; it has, too, its celebrated architects and engineers. But the 20th-century inventor is not held in high regard. The watchmaker James Watt and his steam engine, the barber Richard Arkwright and his throstle-spinning jenny, the jeweller Robert Fulton and his steamship – these were geniuses of the 18th century, whose ideas were applied in the 19th century. Who, though, can name a serious biography of a major modern inventor?

The explanation is obvious. The successful inventor combines a number of skills in what is bound to be a rather idiosyncratic way. By contrast, the 20th-century divides skills up systematically. Thus it is permissible to be an artistic genius (Picasso) or a scientific giant (Einstein). But to be an inventor is to be a crank, or one of those Victorian individualists whose remote-operated hats are the subject of many a lavatory reading book: it is to be satirised by Philip Garner and hawked through Exchange & Mart (Blueprint No 3, December 1983). Today there is a mass of small failed inventors around and no giant to lead them.

In terms of financial reward there is only one job worse than inventing things and selling them to manufacturers and that is writing instruction manuals. It has taken engineers 100 years to be accepted by money men in Britain; designers have been half a century being accepted by accountants and marketing men; one day ergonomists may triumph with corporations and in the meantime nobody can take architects straight. But when you’re an inventor everybody shafts you. I remember hearing on LBC the poor inventor of a rather unattractive but apparently popular game being interviewed at length on how his manufacturer had stolen his idea and had then ripped him off so repeatedly that his family was driven into destitution.

Well, James Dyson, a man whose parents were classicists and teachers, who trained in fine art, furniture and interior design and who has since “picked up” (his words) enough engineering to invent new wheelbarrows, vacuum cleaners, wheelchairs and seaborne assault craft – he has had his share of rip-offs too.

Dyson, 37 going on 24, is is, however, riding high. Disappointed with the UK distributors of his cyclonic, Brighton-rock pink, baroque vacuum cleaner, he and his entrepreneur partner Jeremy Fry have signed a deal to have the machine sold in the USA. Meanwhile, aided by a £20,000 cheque from Action Research for the Crippled Child, the two have developed a Snowdon wheelchair design far enough for their handiwork to be undergoing secret tests in France; and Dyson’s elephantine Wheelboat, which rides up on the sea on vast rubber wheels, is nearing completion.

Prototypes Ltd, Dyson and Fry’s workshop and studios in Bath, prospers. A few miles away, at Bathford, Dyson’s palatial Bathstone house boasts a swimming pool which he excavated himself and which has weathered two summers. Even the bathroom plumbing, his illustrator wife Deirdre jokes, goes right some of the time.

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To open and download a PDF of the FULL article from Blueprint, click on this James Dyson: Last of the great inventors link.