James Dyson has made hoovering (vacumn cleaning) interesting. A feat until then thought impossible. With his Dual Cyclone cleaner one can see the dust and detritus billowing around inside, and quite fascinating it is too.

The cyclone has become both a commercial success and a style icon, its stripped down design and clean lines very much in tune with the no-frills 1990s. It has made its inventor a wealthy man and has stimulated the industry as a whole to up its standards, where the smaller models hitherto could just about suck the coke out of a straw.

However, as Mr Dyson outlines in his autobiography (written with journalist Giles Goren) Against The Odds (Orion Business Books, £11.70) it wasn't all plain sailing, he had to overcome debt crises, indifference, law suits and the antipathy of the established players to bring the world a better domestic cleaning appliance.

Mr Dyson's first foray into the world of business was in the early 1970s with a boat, called Sea Truck, which was designed to be a work-horse - a floating truck - on water. It was a valuable lesson for him as he found out the need to have a clear marketing strategy and that businessmen are naturally suspicious of scruffy people with long hair and paisley shirts, whatever their product. Having served his apprenticeship and itching to design, develop and own a revolutionary new product of his own, Mr Dyson embarked on another venture which brought the world the ballbarrow. A design which took the wheelbarrow out of the stone age and into the epoch of the suburban gardener.

Basically, Mr Dyson replaced the wheel with a ball and redesigned the whole thing so it wouldn't be such a pain to manoeuvre through doorways, mud and across lawns.

The enterprise was a success but efforts to break into the US market ended in a welter of lawsuits over patents and the desertion of his marketing manger to his rivals. The company he had founded with his brother in law was wrested away from him in a very bitter dispute as according to Mr Dyson, his partners didn't have the imagination to see its (and his) potential.

However, he learned some good lessons such as never go into business with a relative (he didn't speak to his sister for ten years after his ousting), always employ lawyers who know the local score, make sure that patents are registered in your own name and never take you eye of the ball.

Armed with this knowledge Mr Dyson set about his biggest task to date: to bring the world a vacumn cleaner like no other. A bagless one, following a flash of inspiration and having jury rigged one at home with cardboard and prove it worked (Mr Dyson comes from a long English line of pottering in the garden shed rather than working in a state-of-the-art lab) he set out to convince the world that it should welcome the cyclone.

All the lessons he had learned on his other ventures stood him in good stead. His belief in his product meant that he built another 5,126 prototypes before finally arriving at the right one. His single-mindedness meant that despite all the rejections he kept going, and his ultimate fate in the fact that money wasn't everything meant that he never allowed the mounting tide of debt to swamp him.

There are encounters with mangers of the big players - Hoover, Electrolux et al - who laughed in his face, the domestic appliance equivalent of turning down The Beatles. A deal with Amway ends in legal tears but Mr Dyson keeps on going. And we know what happens: he gets to provide the world with the Dual Cyclone. Mr Dyson writes in a breezy style, with all the self-deprecating charm of the truly successful English inventor. The book is mercifully short on detail about his childhood and teenage years and instead plunges into what a business autobiography should be about: doing deals and being done by them. It is an interesting account of how one man and some excellent ideas can triumph in the face of corporate bloody-mindedness cultural hostility to entrepreneurship and the idea that public wants what the public gets. This is a very engaging book, with none of the pomposity associated with those who have made a lot of money and therefore feel they have the right to bore the public to tears.

However, a true mark of his success will come when the ancient refrain on adolescents and tidiness is changed to: "For the last time will you go upstairs an bloody Dyson your room."