Edisonian Empirical Testing

"iv) The Edisonian principle Engineering is a state of mind, or at least a method of working. You can become expert on anything in six months, but steer clear of projects that require too much maths, and stick to empirical things. You can achieve major breakthroughs by a bit of lateral thinking, and this approach will often lead to new inventions being born of each other (just as, for example, the Dual Cyclone came out of the Ballbarrow). Keep testing and retesting and believe only the evidence of your own eyes, not of formulae or of other people's opinions. You may have to fly in the face of public opinion, and market research. They can only tell you what has happened. No research can tell you what is going to happen."

"That is what development is all about. Empirical testing demands that you only ever make one change at a time. It is the Edisonian principle, and it is bloody slow. It is a thing that takes me ages to explain to my graduate employees at Dyson Appliances, but it is so important. They tend to leap in to tests, making dozens of radical changes and then stepping back to test their new masterpiece. How do they know which change has improved it, and which hasn't?"

"I made hundreds of cyclones in the early years, and then thousands of them. Testing all the different styles, I found that the important thing was the entry point, that it should enter peripherally, and at a pure tangent. I tried it with one entry and with two entries, I even made one with 140 entries, just in case it was better, but you only ever got one flow of air. (In the cylinder model, much later, we did actually use two entries, because it is such a squat little thing that you could not get the required cross-sectional area with only one). Then there were questions about the positioning and size and shape of the exit point, and every other part of the thing, and all of them had to be answered by testing. Slow, slow, slow. These things cannot be hurried. When you develop a prototype you have to change only one thing at a time. If you are really going to improve things, and that is what inventing is all about, then you are going to have to be patient. Very patient. I was being so bloody patient that I still had only one cyclone in there. The best was yet to come."

"This is why development is such a slow process. But the British obsession with the quantum leap holds us back. We always want to create something new out of nothing, and without research, and without long hard hours of effort. But there is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap. Ask the Japanese."