Dyson product launches are a curious thing – a mixture of mythmaking self-regard (to get to the main emporium you must first pass a number of white plinths, each with a different age of Dyson vacuum on top, like the evolution of man wallchart, but about suction power), world-class innovation (when it comes to things that suck and blow) and the sight of an elderly gentleman vacuuming on stage to almost total silence.
“Now, with that,” said Dyson, after spending half an hour explaining each part’s function and design in detail, “I’d like to give you a little demonstration...”
I like living on a knife edge. It gets the adrenaline going (James Dyson)
He powered the vacuum up and went to work on the sample surfaces. “Hard floors... a different type of hard floor... and back onto the carpet again... Venetian blinds... I’ve got a nice line of coffee here I’m going to have a go at... and then there’s the furniture...”
Five months earlier, around 2,500 miles away in California, another well-known inventor also showcased a new product. Actually, he showcased two. The first was a new range of trucks. Elon Musk, dressed in jeans, black T-shirt and light jacket, drove the first of his Tesla convoy onto a stage while a crowd whooped maniacally, spotlights flashed and smoke filled the air. He said the new Tesla all-electric Semi would go 0-60 in five seconds (“Whoo!”), that it had a range of 500 miles (“Yeah!”) and cost almost half that of a diesel truck to run. But the best was yet to come – out of the back of one of the trucks sprang Tesla’s new flagship e-car: the Model 2 Roadster, which could do 0-60 in under two seconds and boasted a top speed of more than 250mph, making it the fastest road car in the world. More importantly, it had almost double the range, at 620 miles, of Tesla’s previous flagship car, the Model S. The leap was significant: it would beat most full-tank petrol cars hands down.
On stage, Musk said, “This is a hard-core smackdown to gasoline cars!”
People shouted and screamed and gasped and one man, overcome, cried. The crowd burst through the barriers as Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” came crashing through the speakers. Four months later, exactly one month prior to Dyson’s demonstration, Musk completed the PR offensive by shooting the previous Roadster Model, in fact his own car, into space, via his other company, SpaceX. The car is currently on its way to Mars.
Dyson has a wistful smile, even as he contemplates his own doom
Seen from a distance, there’s not a lot that binds the brash 47-year-old Musk and the professorial Dyson, 71. One has been married three times, twice to the same person, divorced the same number and wants to die on Mars. The other has been married to the same woman for 50 years and presumably would rather stay at Dodington Park, his Georgian estate in South Gloucestershire. One became a billionaire almost overnight after he invented a single piece of payment software (what would later be known as PayPal); for the other, it took decades, countless inventions, an ever-expanding workforce and tens of millions of products sold. Musk worries artificial intelligence will create “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape”. Dyson worries that the V8 vacuum’s head wasn’t quite good enough at picking up dust on hardwood floors. Musk recently went to war with the press and threatened to create a website to rank their honesty. Dyson still gets upset by a poor review in a Japanese consumer magazine, but “mostly because they’re right!”.
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