I like reading about James Dyson.
Here is a snip from "The Austrailan", a Rupert Murdoc paper. In fact his first paper. He used to load them on to the plane here himself at our local airport and has a family property here. Recently seen with Trump.
It says:
"Still, I was surprised to read that despite his enormous success (he now owns more farming land than the Queen), Dyson has continued to encounter a continuing snobbishness in England about his engineering and manufacturing pathway: “It has become so powerful that there is some pride in not knowing anything about engineering. It’s the C.P. Snow analogy,” he adds, referring to the famous 1959 essay, ‘The Two Cultures’ in which the great British scientist lamented the great cultural divide between science and the arts. “In my view it has got worse since. People don’t go into engineering partly because they think it’s difficult but more so because it’s frowned upon … "there was a recent survey which showed engineers are regarded as being even below being a vicar in status,” he says and laughs when I add that journalists come even lower. What is even worse, he adds, is the notion that manufacturing is “dirty, a bit beneath the curve" ...
James Dyson has continued to encounter a continuing snobbishness in England about his engineering and manufacturing pathway."
“When I say at a cocktail party that I’m a manufacturer and not an engineer, people would turn away because they’re not interested and knew nothing about it. I used to do it deliberately and my wife would get very cross with me: ‘You’re doing that to provoke them” she’d say. Football is in their brains but not manufacturing.”...
"When I ask him if he thinks it’s societal, a peculiarly British class thing, he nods: “I think it’s [an attitude] true historically and probably still true today.”
Dyson’s book is, in some ways, more of an ode to failure than success, an exhortation to young people about taking risks, being resilient and picking yourself up off the floor when things go wrong and having the courage to commit, risk and jump in when things go right.
But it is also a love letter to his much loved, if much-maligned, discipline of engineering – even though Dyson himself is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art and was trained in design, not in engineering.
“I’m an ordinary person. I didn’t even do science at school and yet here I am developing new technology. I don’t want young people to be put off by what their education has been, or what people have told them they are, because actually, they can do whatever they want to do, provided they are motivated,” he says.
“I have spent my life wishing more young people did engineering rather than going to media studies,” adding a ‘sorry’ with a laugh when he catches the look on my face. “Instead of talking about problems, I want young people to solve them. And they can. And they will. I wrote the book partly because of that and partly because the first students at our university will graduate this summer, in September … it’s a milestone for us and seeing how brilliantly they’ve done I thought it would be nice if people heard about the wonderful things they’ve done and are capable of.”
