One of my favorite How I Built This stories of all time is the episode with James Dyson. In that episode, James recounts how it took him nearly eight years to come up with the right prototype for his now-world-famous vacuum cleaner. At the time (this was the 1980s) no one could have imagined how a bagless vacuum cleaner could work.
Fortunately, James Dyson was a self-taught engineer (more of a tinkerer, actually). Anyway, he was broke at the time. His wife’s part-time job as an art teacher was helping to pay the bills. In the back shed, James would tinker day and night.
Finally, after over 5000! attempts, Dyson finally figured out how to build a bagless vacuum cleaner. The rest of the story…well, you know what happened. Today, Dyson is one of the the leading vacuum manufacturers on the planet.
But for eight years, lots of people (his friends) thought he was out of his mind. Who takes eight years to work on a quixotic project that may never see the light of day?
Somehow, Dyson was convinc…
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