If you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think.

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.

Nobody wants the expenditure of a lease on a factory which lasts 21 years. You can't plan 21 years ahead.

As an engineer I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.

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

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

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