Against the Odds - James Dyson

[Saluki]

Dyson wrote another autobiography about 20 years after this one.  This one ends where he invented the washing machine with two drums, which failed commercially because it was too expensive, but he didn't know it at the time. I've owned a Dyson vacuum and I really like the originality, so hearing the origin story is fascinating.  He wasn't really a scientist.  He studies\d furniture and interior design at an art school and later moved to industrial design.  Besides the vacuum that he's famous for, he previously invented the BallBarrow (a wheel barrow with a ball for a wheel) and a "truck ship" which can be used to land without a dock and carry cargo like vehicles.  Several were purchased by the Egyptian military and used in a surprise attack on Israel a few months later.  Because of its design it was incredibly fast and sat low in the water.  When Dyson asked if they wanted him to make any changes to it, they said no.  They said they put a man in it and had him sail it at full speed while they tried to shoot him with AK-47s and they couldn't hit him, so they were very happy with it. 

 

I'm very impressed with how dogged he was in getting his inventions out there even though he was screwed over by everyone.  Employees, business partners, competitors, distributors, all took advantage of him and he ended up in court numerous times to defend his patents or get paid what he was owed.  Some of the stories are very interesting because of the variant perception that he has, but also his knack for getting to the root of problems when people over complicate them.  When someone asked Munger why, after reading Barron's for 50 years, he went all in on Tenneco.  He replied "it was cheap."   Dyson had the same epiphany when he was forced out of his own company and was sitting around doing housework and disappointed in how bad the vacuum worked.  It loses suction as soon as the bag starts to get stuff in it, so he tried to figure out a way to make a vacuum cleaner without a bag. 

 

Here's an example of people overthinking the simple stuff.  A reporter asked him this question when the Vacuum was gaining notoriety: 

 

"The area where the dust collects is transparent, thus parading all our detritus on the outside, and turning the classic design inside out. Is this some post-modernist nod to the architectural style pioneered by Richard Rodgers at the Pompidou Center, where the air-conditioning and escalators, the very guts, are made into a self-referential design feature?"

 

"No", I replied.  "It's so you can see when it's full."

 

Eventually he learns from his mistakes and demands money up front for signing a deal, and guaranteed minimum payments etc.  So things work out in the end. This book had been sitting on my shelf for a while so I thought I should read it before getting rid of it by placing it in the free little library nook by my house.  I probably should check out the other book he published and see what he's up to.  

 

[schin]

@Saluki - It's a really hard to find book to find. It's worth something.  You should keep it.

[DooDiligence]

Art can lead to engineering, and vice versa.