December 3, 2001

An Inventor Unveils His Mysterious Personal Transportation Device

By AMY HARMON

Dean Kamen, an award-winning inventor in Manchester, N.H., rides the Segway Human Transporter, a two-wheeled battery-powered device. A finely tuned gyroscopic balancing mechanism intuits where its rider wants to go.

t is not a hovercraft, a helicopter backpack or a teleportation pod.

The mystery transportation device being developed by the award-winning inventor Dean Kamen — the subject of continuous fevered speculation since provocative clues and predictions surfaced in media reports last January — is not hydrogen- powered, a favored theory in Internet discussions. Nor does it run on a superefficient Stirling engine (yet).

But if the public's collective yearning for Jetsonian travel technology must remain unrequited this week, at least the speculators will have their curiosity satisfied.

Mr. Kamen plans to demonstrate today a two-wheeled battery-powered device designed for a single standing rider. Its chief novelty lies in the uncanny effect, produced by a finely tuned gyroscopic balancing mechanism, of intuiting where its rider wants to go — and going there.

The device, the Segway Human Transporter, better known by its former code- name, Ginger, can go up to 12 miles an hour and has no brakes. Its speed and direction are controlled solely by the rider's shifting weight and a manual turning mechanism on one of the handlebars.

"You might ask, `How does it work?' " said Mr. Kamen, mounting one of the devices last week on a test track at his company's headquarters in Manchester, N.H. "Think forward," he said, inclining his head ever so slightly and zooming toward a reporter. "Think back," he continued, effortlessly reversing course.

Tilt sensors monitor the rider's center of gravity more than 100 times a second, signaling to the electric motor and wheels which way to turn and how fast.

Mr. Kamen says the much anticipated unveiling comes now because he has had time to file for crucial patents on the technology and is ready to test it publicly.

The United States Postal Service, the National Park Service and the City of Atlanta plan to begin limited field tests of the devices early next year. Amazon.com (news/quote) and several companies that make parts for the Segway, including GE Plastics and Michelin North America, plan to use the devices to try to save money by reducing the time it takes employees to move around corporate campuses and large warehouses.

At an average speed of 8 miles an hour, or three times walking pace, Mr. Kamen says the Segway can go 15 miles on a six- hour charge, for less than a dime's worth of electricity from a standard wall socket.

It is easy to see how the transporter tickled technology industry luminaries like Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer (news/quote), and Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon.com, when Mr. Kamen showed them an early model of the Segway. John Doerr, a partner in the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has invested $38 million in Mr. Kamen's efforts, the largest single investment in the firm's history.

A patent application drawing for "Ginger" or "IT."

The names and positive pronouncements of all three — Mr. Jobs reportedly said the device could be as significant as the development of the personal computer — were invoked in a supposedly secret proposal for a book to be written by Mr. Kamen and Steve Kemper, a journalist. But excerpts of the proposal, which won a $250,000 contract from Harvard Business School Press, were reported in January by Inside .com, which is now defunct.

The leaked proposal, which referred to the Segway cryptically as "It," set off a tidal wave of conjecture that led to several hundred media reports, tens of thousands of Internet postings and the question in the minds of some observers as to whether Mr. Kamen had set out a deliberate strategy to whip up public interest in his creation.

Mr. Kamen says he was mortified by the leak and that his reason for maintaining his silence in the face of so much speculation was to protect his company's intellectual property as it filed hundreds of patent claims. He suggests the level of interest is a sign of the actual hunger for a transportation choice that fills the niche between walking and driving.

The recipient last year of the National Medal of Technology, awarded by President Bill Clinton, Mr. Kamen, 49, has made millions of dollars creating medical devices including the first insulin pump and the first portable kidney dialysis machine.

Typically, Mr. Kamen sticks to research and development with his company, DEKA Research and Development, and licenses his inventions for others to market. But for the Segway, which grew out of his work on a motorized wheelchair that can climb stairs (code-named Fred), Mr. Kamen decided in early 2000 to form his own company to produce and market it.

A college dropout, Mr. Kamen has collected a total of about $90 million for the start-up, Segway, with Credit Suisse First Boston Private Equity and Kleiner Perkins as the lead investors. He retains majority control of the company, whose headquarters are in a complex of former mills about 10 minutes from his hexagonal-shaped home, which has a machine shop in the basement and two helicopters in the garage.

The decision to start the company was based largely on his personal attachment to the idea, Mr. Kamen said. Not one to shrink from sweeping statements, he argues that the Segway could cause cities to be redesigned, help wean the world from oil dependence, compress time and space for pedestrians and raise productivity for corporations and government agencies.

"Nothing has happened at the level of the pedestrian to improve transportation since we invented the sneaker," Mr. Kamen said. "We think if you could integrate the Segway technology into cities it would be a universal win for everybody."

That is a big if. The Segway is meant to be ridden on sidewalks, and many municipalities ban motorized devices on sidewalks. The machines weigh 65 pounds, and although they may be able to zip in and out of elevators and offices, going up and down stairs is a different matter. The device can be put in "follow mode," which helps propel it up and down, but there is still lifting to be done. Each one comes with a computer encoded on-off key protected by 64- bit software encryption to deter thieves or joyriders. But locking the machine to a parking meter or lamppost is far more awkward than doing the same with a bicycle. Next Page