In 1978, James Dyson had an idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner that maintained suction. He was frustrated with what was considered to be a top-of-the-line model, which he said frequently clogged and lost cleaning power as soon as it filled with dust.
Dyson worked on his idea full-time, and after five years of work and 5,127 failed prototypes, he created the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner — the now-famous Dyson, which has since become a consumer electronics brand reaching sales of $9.6 billion in 2023. But those early years came at a cost: He was borrowing heavily from the bank to make ends meet and had accumulated over $1