YCEO - ISSUE 6

Business / CEO Profile 9
A man determined to restore engineering
and technical innovation to high esteem
in British society
Sir James Dyson, (born May 2, 1947, Cromer, Norfolk, Eng.)
is a British inventor, industrial designer, and entrepreneur
who successfully manufactured innovative household
appliances and became a determined campaigner to
restore engineering and technical innovation to high
esteem in British society.
Dyson attended the Gresham’s schools in rural Holt, North
Norfolk. After graduation he went to London, where he
attended the Byam Shaw School of Art for a year (1965–66)
before studying furniture and interior design at the Royal
College of Art (1966–70). In 1974 Dyson founded his own
company to produce the Ballbarrow, a plastic wheelbarrow-like bin that rolled
on a load-spreading ball instead of a narrow wheel.
In 1978 Dyson, having grown impatient with clogged air filters in his Ballbarrow
factory, built a cyclone particle collector similar to devices used in larger
industrial plants, such as sawmills. He worked for the next five years, testing more
than 5,000 prototypes, before he produced a satisfactory model that swirled
incoming dirty air around a cylindrical container, where the dust was separated
by centrifugal force and settled by gravity while the purified air escaped out
the top. Makers of traditional bag-type vacuum cleaners showed no interest in
Dyson’s bagless device, arousing in him a lasting antipathy toward conventional
businesses. He sold the cleaner, known as the G-Force, to a company in Japan,
where it became a commercial success and won a design prize in 1991. In 1993
Dyson opened a plant in North Wiltshire, and within two years his Dual Cyclone
model became the top-selling vacuum cleaner in Britain. Dyson’s elegant and
practical appliances went on to win many design awards and were exhibited in
art and design museums around the world. He followed up the vacuum cleaner
line with other products.
Dyson’s design and commercial success lent authority to his quest to revive the
spirit of invention in Britain. In 1997 he published Against the Odds (cowritten
with Giles Coren), an autobiographical account of his persistence in the face
of discouragement. The following year he was made a Commander of the
Order of the British Empire. In 2002 the James Dyson Foundation was established
with the aim of encouraging young people to enter engineering through the
awarding of prizes and grants. In 2009 the Conservative Party invited Dyson to
propose policies to encourage innovation, and he replied in March 2010 with
Ingenious Britain: Making the UK the Leading High Tech Exporter in Europe, a
report that suggested, among other ideas, more freedom for universities to
design unconventional engineering curricula and more collaboration between
universities and technology companies.
Dyson’s weatlh today stands at £3.2 Million | $5 Billion | €4.4 Billion. (Forbes)
Adapted from britannica.com