10 Questions for James Dyson

Having made vacuum cleaners, hand dryers and fans, you’ve now made a vacuum mop. Why would anybody pay $330 for a mop?
The problem with mopping is you have to get out a vacuum and then you get out the bucket and mop, two quite big processes. What we’ve done is to have it all in one with this cordless, very powerful electric motor we’ve been developing over the past 15 years. It’s four times faster than any other electric motor and very light. I hate the word innovation, but it’s a breakthrough.

All your products are about air dynamics. When do you decide, O.K., I’ve gone as far as I can go with this idea?
There is airflow in almost everything around us. Understanding the dynamics, the fluid dynamics, and how to be clever with airflow is a really, really fascinating subject.

Yet you’re not interested in wind power.
If you cover the whole of Britain in windmills, you’ll generate less than 15% of its current energy requirements. I’m keen on nuclear. Of course, it’s got to be safe.

You’re a billionaire. What gets you up in the morning?
I love solving the insoluble problem, trying to make sense of tests that you’re watching, looking for the thing that tells you something. All our engineers build their own prototypes and test them. We don’t use technicians, because it’s in the building — which is a sort of mundane thing to do — that you start to really understand what you’re doing. And they test them. That’s the creative bit: watching the failures.

You’ve said you like hiring inexperienced engineers. Why?
I prefer to get people who are — and this is a horrid thing to say but — unsullied. I want people to think they’re pioneering something. I want us all to be fresh, know nothing and be willing to experiment on something new. I’m very keen on wrong thinking.

Were you surprised by the success of your vacuum?
A vacuum cleaner is a pretty tedious commodity product. That’s what attracted me to it. It enormously surprised me that people wanted to see the dirt. It was a bit like a German lavatory, you know, where you can see what you’ve done.

Does it frustrate you that people are captivated by digital innovation and not engineering?
Well, it does upset me, mildly. The problem is, I suppose, that politicians and society don’t debate engineering issues like how to generate our energy needs or whether we should have a car industry. If you treat engineering matters like that, engineering has no importance to parents, or universities, or students. You create about 90,000 engineers a year in the U.S. China’s churning out 3.6 million. In Singapore 40% of all graduates are engineers.

How have you managed to stave off cheap copycats?
We haven’t. We’ve had 650 lawsuits against Chinese companies and importers around the world of copies of our fans. We’ve stopped 450 of them so far, and now we’re battling with the last 200. This is a really important point: judges think that if you allow people to copy things, you’re creating competition. In my view, you’re stifling it. All you get is products that look the same. Mimicry is anticompetitive.

And how’s that corporate-espionage lawsuit against Bosch going?
I’d love to say a lot, but I’m not allowed. What is clear to us is that they put a mole in our research labs to get details of our new motor.

You’re not a fan of Harry Potter — is it the broom?
I hated fantasy as a child, and I still hate it. And I don’t like science fiction. I think it’s a sort of science substitute. It’s a pity because science reality is so interesting.