Dyson: 5,127 Cyclone Prototypes, a Pink G-Force and a Shelved $3B Car

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In the late 1970s, James Dyson, who ran a company making a ball-wheeled wheelbarrow noticed his home vacuum losing suction because fine dust clogged the pores of its paper bag. A late-night visit to a sawmill showed him industrial centrifugal separators that spun dust out of the air with no filter at all. He built a cardboard-and-tape cyclone for his own vacuum, and it worked. His board dismissed it, reasoning that Hoover or Electrolux would already have invented it, and Dyson was ousted from the company. The industry ran on a razor-and-blades model, with disposable bags worth half a billion dollars a year in recurring revenue.

From 1979 to 1984, working in a coach house shed on loans and a private investor's money, Dyson built 5,127 prototypes, about three a day. A North American licensing deal collapsed, a similar machine appeared from the same company, and a costly patent suit ended in a settlement. In 1985 the Japanese firm Apex sold his design as the bright pink G-Force for the equivalent of $2,000. He used that revenue to start Dyson in 1991, defied focus groups with a transparent dust bin, and within a year and a half had the best-selling vacuum in the United Kingdom.

• He cut ties with a Welsh plastics manufacturer within two months over quality and opened his own factory in the Cotswolds.
• A secret electric car project, code-named N526, cost $3 billion and employed over 500 people before he canceled it in 2019 as commercially unviable.
• He fought the European Union for years over energy tests run with empty vacuum bags and won a change in the standards.
• In 2019 Dyson moved its global headquarters from the UK to Singapore, drawing political backlash in Britain.
• The Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology pays undergraduates a salary to work on real products three days a week, and one recent cohort was 40 percent female.