“It all started with this,” James Dyson said recently, turning the cork-sized motor in his hand like a jewel. He was sitting in a conference room at his recently opened Soho flagship. A glass wall looked down on the sales floor while an IMAX-grade LED screen played a looped advertisement; the glare lit up Dyson’s circular glasses as he spoke.
That business now spans a worldwide consumer goods enterprise and two gleaming glass campuses in Singapore and Malmesbury, a town in England’s Cotswolds area. There are no statues of Dyson yet, but you get the sense there could be one day. About a decade ago, Dyson raised his already lofty inventor’s profile with the launch of a hairdryer, the Supersonic, whose V9 motor spins at 100,000 revolutions per minute to create gusts of up to 60 miles per hour.
