Patrick G. Mahoney
Contributing Editor

James Dyson’s so-called overnight sensation, the Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner, was anything but. In his book, Against the Odds, the British designer, whose bagless machine turned an industry on its ear, details a grueling, yearslong battle to prove his revolutionary design and bring it to market.

The interesting thing: Dyson never trained as an engineer. His background is in industrial design and styling.

In 1979, Dyson began work on a radical design for a vacuum cleaner in the stables behind his house. Up to then, his stint as an inventor was limited to the development of a new kind of wheelbarrow (the Ballbarrow), a high-speed landing craft (the Sea Truck), and as he puts it, "a couple of castles in the air." For the next 12 years, despite increasing debt, he tried unsuccessfully to interest manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic in what he called his cyclonic vacuum cleaner.

As a last resort, he began production on his own in 1992. Ten years later, after hundreds of prototypes, thousands of modifications, and millions of tests, one in four British households owned a Dyson. The company was selling a million vacuum cleaners a year in 24 countries and turning over $300 million annually. Total worldwide sales exceeded $10 billion.

Dyson’s training in industrial design is apparent in his vacuum cleaner. He claims it works better and, of equal importance to him, looks better than any of his competitors’ machines. The former art student hardly seemed the sort to topple industrial giants like Hoover and Electrolux. Still, Dyson’s design kicked the venerable bag-type machine to the curb, replacing it with a cyclone that spins at the speed of sound, in a chamber that can’t clog.

The Dyson vacuum’s outer cyclone rotates at 200 mph, removing debris and most of the dust while an inner cyclone rotating at 924 mph drives fine dust and even particles of cigarette smoke out of the air. Produced in pastel pink, the Dual Cyclone was a smash in Japan, winning the 1991 International Design Fair prize in Tokyo.

The board of Kirk-Dyson, the company that manufactured Ballbarrow, was hostile to the cyclonic concept. So Dyson set out to "make the damn thing myself " in a drafty coach house with no water, heating, phone, gas, or electricity. He built 5,127 prototypes before his Dual Cyclone went into production. For three years, he worked alone, "crawl[ing] into the house every night covered in dust after a long day in the coach house, exhausted and depressed because that day’s cyclone had not worked. . . In view of the fact that I was making only one change at a time, and working alone, I think that [building] a decent working prototype in four years was actually quite speedy work."