Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

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.

Failure is so much more interesting because you learn from it. That's what we should be teaching children at school, that being successful the first time, there's nothing in it. There's no interest, you learn nothing actually.

Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.

Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.

Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.

Cordless vacuums are designed for quick jobs, but you need enough power to do the job; you don't want the power waning over time.