An Idea That Sucks. Brilliant.

c. 11,000 BC: an unknown early human in East Africa’s Rift Valley realizes that, no matter how good it might taste, eating the scum on the floor of his cave is totally gross. Anthropologists term this moment “the dawn of floor-cleaning consciousness”.

2560 BC: an estimated 15,000 Hebrew slaves die cleaning the floors of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

44 BC: in the first major conflict of the nascent Roman Empire, Mark Antony and Octavian fall out over who is responsible for cleaning Julius Caesar’s blood from the floor of the Roman Forum. “Not it, called it,” Octavian famously declares.

c. 400-800 AD: as the Dark Ages fall across Europe, an order of monks in Ireland preserve the remaining storehouse of ancient floor-cleaning knowledge. The "Chant" is born.

1868 AD: Chicago inventor Ives W. McGaffey devises the first cleaner using vacuum principles. The “Whirlwind” is a modest success, but McGaffey abandons the idea to work on another invention: an electric-powered milk bucket that can read cows’ minds.

1901 AD: Hubert Cecil Booth, a British engineer, received a British patent for a vacuum cleaner on August 30th 1901 and took the form of a large, horse-drawn, petrol-driven unit. Did more damage than it was worth.

1978 AD (the year I was born!): James Dyson was vacuuming his house when he realized his top-of-the-line machine was losing suction and getting clogged. An industrial designer by training, Dyson went to work reengineering vacuum cleaner technology to fix this problem. But that wasn’t his only challenge. Fifteen years and more than 5,000 prototypes later, he launched the Dyson Limited–a new era in vaccum technology was born.

So what? What does all that mean?

Over 100 years after the first vaccum technology was engineered, James Dyson, with NO backing from any investor after many attempts to get funding, stepped out to challenge what had always been accepted in vaccum technology. He wanted to take an established good idea and make it suck...literally.

However, He has a hard road ahead of him because one major obstacle stands in his way–YOU. Creative ideas are everywhere. I can think of a million of them...and I have. In our quest to find the latest and greatest idea, sometimes we get ahead of our time. It's always great to dream and strategize for the future. Don't forget who you're targeting and how much consumer acceptance is available.

Oh, almost forgot...

2157 AD: the final living human is sucked into the four-acre dustbin of the Dyson, completing the robots’ conquest of Earth. Now that would suck.