1947 Born in Norfolk

1956-65 Attends Gresham school, Holt

1966-70 Studies at Royal College of Art

1974 Invents the Ballbarrow

1975 Wins Design Council award and Duke of Edinburgh prize for his Sea Truck

1983 Produces bagless vacuum cleaner

1993 Opens research centre and factory in Chippenham, Wiltshire

1993-96 External examiner for RCA

1998 Autobiography Against the Odds published (Texere Publishing)

1999 Wins court case against Hoover for patent infringement

2000 Launches new washing machine

2002 Personal fortune estimated at pound;700 million

Because my family were all classicists - my father taught classics and I had a very clever elder brother who was a classics scholar - it was assumed I was a classicist too or, at the very least, an academic. I wasn’t. I found Greek and Latin pointless and boring, and slept through most of the lessons. Design and technology did not exist when I was at school in Norfolk. I could turn out coffee tables in the woodshed or go into the art department, but it was only after I left school that I discovered engineering and practical design and technology.

I arrived at the Royal College of Art aged 20 to study furniture design but transferred to the architectural school because I found dealing with big structures and space more interesting, and that was where I came across Tony Hunt.

I saw very quickly that structures are the most interesting aspect of architecture, particularly modern architecture, and was fascinated to learn how buildings stay up, and how they can be made to stay up differently. It was a particularly interesting time; the large concrete structures of the Sixties were beginning to be replaced by tensile structures. In America, Buckminster Fuller was creating buildings with large span aluminium framed roofs and here Foster and Rogers were heavily into anything other than steel and concrete.

Tony Hunt came to college once a week to teach structural engineering. He had his own engineering practice, working for architects such as Foster and Rogers. He was considered to be the most influential, experimental and ambitious structural engineer of the post-war period, and what made him such a good teacher was that he was a designer as well as an engineer. He could talk with equal enthusiasm about how structures worked, and the aesthetics of structures.

He would sketch on the board good, simple drawings explaining how structures worked, which even with O-level maths I could follow. He was able to synthesise quite a complex thing into simple equations and simple logic.

He was an inspirational teacher. As well as giving lectures, he would walk around the studio to discuss individual projects and his enthusiasm and fascination for what you were trying to create was infectious. He didn’t just look at your project as an engineer to see whether it would stay up or not, he was excited about how you could make it stay up in the unusual or particularly crazy way you wanted to do it.

I produced a strange mushroom-shaped structure made out of light aluminium tubes for Joan Littlewood, the theatrical impresario. She wanted a children’s theatre which could be open in summer and tented in winter. It was about 60ft across and Tony helped me, breaking down the project into simple components. We made a model and got planning permission, but we couldn’t raise the money to build it.

He was the first teacher to really enthuse me. I didn’t enjoy my school days, mainly because I was studying the wrong things. I did no science at all and had a kind of mental block against technology until Tony showed me that engineering could be creative. I had planned to become an architect until he got me interested in engineering. He really changed the direction of my life. I saw that engineering could be the driving force of a building or a product and its raison d’etre.

I went off into industry, at first to work on military boats, and then I invented my Ballbarrow. More than 25 years later, when I needed a factory to produce my dual cyclone vacuum cleaner, I asked Tony to design one for me. We have become great friends. I gave him one of my vacuum cleaners as a thank you for being such an inspirational teacher.

Inventor James Dyson was talkingto Pamela Coleman