If I wanted to show off my wealth I think I’d have
bought a yacht five times the size of Nahlin, but that’s just not me.
In fact, the name, Nahlin, comes from a Native American word meaning ‘fleet of foot’, and at the front sits a figurehead depicting a Native American wearing a feathered headdress. “The boat is well travelled, and I like to think we have reflected a number of its travels in the way she looks.
“There is no cutting-edge technology, no arrogance, no bravado. She has a lovely personality and, despite the name, is never in a hurry.”
You will surely struggle to find someone who doesn’t regard James Dyson as one of the good guys of modern business. The entrepreneur has always gone about his craft as someone looking to solve rather mundane, modest, everyday problems, usually in the home; yet his success is taken with a sense of real humility.
His pathway from graduate also-ran to one of the richest manmade Brits of all time, has come about through effort, endeavour, and no small amount of repetition, as the 5,127 flawed designs en route to the eventual successful launch of his Dyson vacuum cleaner proves.
“I’ve never been a huge fan of the phrase ‘good things come to those who wait’,” he says.“Perhaps ‘good things come to those who persist and persist and refuse to back down’ is closer to the mark! That’s certainly been the way I have gone about pushing forward with ideas I believe in, and I suppose I’ve been that way for most of my life.”
Dyson came up with the first of, literally, thousands of prototypes, by combining the concept of cyclonic separation – effectively ensuring there was no reduction in suction even when hoovering up – with the usefulness of an airtight storage pocket that replaced the hoover bag concept.
When the inventor took the idea to the UK’s leading hoover brands though, his advances where promptly quashed. “I didn’t really realise it at the time, but I was a threat to the norm,” he says. “When you have large brands who have cornered the market, as well as having had the foresight to upsell their suction concept – notably by introducing hoover bags and creating a market worth £100million a year by itself – you’re going to get short shrift.”
The industrial design path he thus began to tread in the eighties, with the evolution of the Dyson G-Force cleaner and, eventually, the creation of the Dyson company as a manufacturing force in its own right (after his invention was rejected by all the major manufacturers), has taken him to iconic status.
“A lot of invention is going with an idea you believe in and sticking to it,” he says – a fact no better referenced than in the way he has worked the now famous Dyson ball design into his vacuum
cleaners, something that was first incorporated into his Ballbarrow, way back in the seventies.
The idea of being a disruptor went against much of what Dyson had been brought up to be, and even now as one of the most successful business minds on the planet, he carries with him the humility to help others, rather than himself.
“If I wanted to show off my wealth I think I’d have bought a yacht five times the size of Nahlin, but that’s just not me. It would also be something of a contradiction for someone who had devoted his life to helping clean the environment, to be the same guy pumping industrial quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere!
“My time on the yacht is really just about winding down and seeing a different side of things, and that makes me feel very happy indeed.”
The inventor’s colossal wealth is a world away from anything he could possibly have dreamt when he first gazed out from Cromer’s coastline and way in the distance across the North Sea towards Norway’s icy fjords; and even now, the money is insignificant to him. “Invention is never about profit, it’s about practicality and convenience.
“Many inventors have created products that are gamechangers, yet go to the grave with little more than what they arrived with in the world. I have certainly been lucky in being able to create something meaningful that has given me a comfortable lifestyle, but that was never what I set out to do.”
ONBOARD | WINTER 2023 | 25
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