48 THE 5,000 FAILURES

James Dyson likes to do things “wrong”.

While vacuuming his home, he became frustrated with the lousy suction of his vacuum cleaner. The bag and filter clogged too quickly, reducing the suction power to a point where he thought it hardly worked at all. Dyson decided enough was enough and he had to do something about it.

Over 15 years, he built 5,126 prototypes before he found the one that worked to his satisfaction. What took him so long? His answer would be that it took him ages to think of “wrong-doing”.

He explains: “When I was doing my vacuum cleaner, I started out trying a conventionally shaped cyclone, the kind you see in textbooks. But we couldn’t separate the carpet fluff and dog hairs and strands of cotton in those cyclones. It formed a ball inside the cleaner or shot out the exit and got into the motor. I tried all sorts of shapes. Nothing worked.

“So then I thought I’d try the wrong shape, the opposite of conical. And it worked. It was wrong-doing rather than wrong-thinking. That’s not easy, because we’re all taught to do things the right way.”

Dyson’s inspiration was a sawmill that was near to where he worked. They used a cyclone to expel waste – a 30-foot or 9.1-metre high cone that spun dust out of the air using centrifugal force. He reasoned that a vacuum cleaner that could separate dust by cyclonic action and spin it out of the airstream would eliminate the need for both bag and filter, and so of course these couldn’t clog. His first production version of a dual cyclone vacuum cleaner featuring constant suction was the DC01, and it sold for £200.

Market research showed that people wouldn’t be happy with a transparent container for the dust, but Dyson and his team decided on more “wrong-doing” and made a transparent container anyway. It turned out to be a distinctive, popular and enduring feature.

The DC01 became the biggest selling vacuum cleaner in the UK in just 18 months.

And the moral is that sometimes it pays to think the unthinkable and do things “wrong”. Could you do something better by doing it wrong?