I've fought court battles over my inventions before.

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.

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.

The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.

When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.