He risks little with the possibility of gaining much. He meets me, he thinks to himself, 'here is a bright kid, let's employ him.' And he does.

He was a man who was not interested in experts.

There had to be Buckminster Fuller, and Brunel. If I was to push further there had to be new fathers. But they had to be overcome before I could move forward.

It is why a man called Jeremy Fry became so important to me, and Sir Hugh Casson, and Anthony Hunt. External figures had to count for a father. My father was dead, and his achievement, anyway, was as a classicist. It is what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls the Anxiety of Influence, and the need for a figure to be 'slain' was paramount in the creation of originality - and genius. For Isambard there was that doubled-edged Oedipal desire both to impress and to outdo his father.

His father had been an engineer of almost equally gargantuan vision, building the first tunnel under the Thames and planning one under the Channel, too. There was in Brunel, a level of conditioning.Some of Dyson's heroes include Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Buckminster Fuller, and Jeremy Fry (his mentor).He never lost faith but it took years even after that to convince others he had something revolutionary Dyson was in debt and it took years and thousands of failures but he eventually had his breakthrough with the Dyson Dual Cyclone.

Against the Odds by James Dyson