Interview: James Dyson

Twenty years after he launched his business—now a multinational enterprise with nearly 4,000 employees and $1.5 billion in annual sales—Dyson, at 65, still radiates a nuclear inventor’s heat. He’s the Jobs and Wozniak of home appliances, equal parts designer, engineer, and marketer. Before alighting on the design for his first bagless vacuum in 1983, he spent five years in his coach house on a farm in the Cotswolds, building 5,127 prototypes. When Dyson talks about that time, he mostly recounts his failures—and lavishes praise on his wife, Deirdre, an artist who supported him through his obscurity. “A painting can take a year, so she understood the primeval need to have a project, and that it might take a rather long time.” Even now, as a knighted billionaire, Dyson is still trying to prove to the world that his devices are game-changers. He’s not satisfied to come up with products that are incrementally better. With every release, he insists on atomizing entire categories through simple, lethally effective innovation.

Wired