Casey
11-15-2002, 05:16 PM
quote:The Great Inventor
November 13, 2002
(CBS) Lots of people talk and dream about changing the world. Dean Kamen is actually doing it. His latest creation, a personal transportation vehicle called the Segway, may be the most revolutionary leap since the automobile. His next invention may prove to be even more important. Dan Rather reports.
Kamen loves to work: "I’m somebody who is absorbed by work," he says. "And some people, I think, misunderstand that, and think that's a problem, or I don't get a chance to have fun. To me, life is a blur of my activities, I mean it's only a job if you'd rather be doing something else.”
Kamen lives in a magnificent home in the hills of New Hampshire, a home he shares with the machines he so worships.
Kamen believes in machines, and their ability to solve the world's problems. While still in his twenties, he designed and built some medical marvels, like the auto-syringe, which gives a patient an exact dose of medicine at exactly the right time, and a portable, self-serve kidney dialysis machine. He made millions from those devices.
From his company headquarters in Manchester, he then developed a new machine called the Ibot, which “allows a disabled person, a person who cannot walk to basically do all the ordinary things that you take for granted that they can't do even in a wheelchair, like go up a curb,” says Kamen.
Using a complex array of gyroscopes, computers and a battery-powered motor, the Ibot can jump curbs and climb and descend stairs. When the gyroscopes are tied in with computers, the vehicle becomes self-balancing, the way a toddler learns to balance himself on his feet. It can stand up on its wheels, elevating the user to eye-level with the rest of the world.
It’s expected to be available next year, at an estimated cost of $25,000 per unit. The self-balancing technology led Kamen to his next invention: the Segway human transporter
Segways have been ubiquitous in the last year. It has appeared on TV, and at motor races, where the Michelin company, which makes the tires, uses it in the pit areas. It is not yet available for sale to consumers, police in some major cities have been experimenting with it, as have postal workers.
”I don't want you to think that I’m naive enough to think we can start at the end position of putting Segways in all the big and polluted and congested cities of the world. We're a little, tiny business. We need to figure out how to sustain ourselves,” says Kamen.
It is not so tiny a business. This streamlined assembly plant in Bedford, New Hampshire is poised to turn out as many as three thousand Segways a day. The Segway uses computer-linked gyroscopes and an electric motor to glide the rider across the ground. It can go about 12 miles an hour, depending on the computer setting. Lean forward and you go forward; Lean back and you go back.
”Today, 3.2 billion people live in cities,” says Kamen. “More than half the human population lives in cities. If we could give them an attractive, productive alternative to using great big vehicles to get around at speeds of seven or eight miles an hour, which is the average speed of a taxicab in the 20 largest cities on the planet. It would by itself be a huge, huge solution to the congestion and pollution and energy demand problems the world is facing today.
But will those congested cities embrace the Segway, and allow its use on sidewalks? In Boston, where both the Police Department and postal workers have been experimenting with Segways, transportation commissioner Andrea d'Amato says that while she admires the technology she can't see the Segway coexisting with pedestrians here.
”Our streets are narrow, and our sidewalks are narrower. So, we would be a very difficult city in which to have these types of vehicles on our sidewalks,” she says.
In Philadelphia, streets commissioner William Johnson, an engineer, is also wary of allowing Segways on sidewalks: “It makes a big difference if you've got one or two devices on a sidewalk or 10,000 on a sidewalk where you've got a lot of pedestrians, lots of opportunity for conflict. Our concern would be safety.”
”I would never want to make the claim that this device cannot or in fact will not eventually be involved in accidents,” says Kamen. “So the question becomes: When does good judgment say how safe is safe?”
Apparently, it's safe enough for Atlanta, where the city's so-called ambassadors have been using Segways to help direct tourists, and police have been patrolling Hartsdale Airport. City Planning Director Tom Wayandt sees the Segway as the means for Atlanta’s mostly suburban population to get to mass transit stations without using their cars.
Says Wayandt: ”We could triple the distance that people are willing to come, willing to travel, to get to transit. It makes the option of using transit much more real for this community. And gives us an alternative to the single passenger automobile for work trips, for pleasure trips, for trips to the ballgame. It won't eliminate cars, but it gives us an option we've never really considered before at all.”
But in San Francisco, no one is rolling out the welcome wagon for Segway. Pedestrian rights advocate Michael Smith and his supporters fear the Segway will become the SUV of sidewalks.
”They're hazardous, they're dangerous. They've basically shoved them down our throats,” says Smith. ”Segway is a well-funded company. They have supposedly spent $100 million on development. They've also spent a great deal of money lobbying almost every state in the united states now to pass legislation allowing these devices.”
Many people say they are concerned about liability over accidents involving Segways.
”I would say to you that the legal system in the United States is broken,” says Kamen. “I think there is a lot of opportunity to improve the lives of a lot of people that have been substantially impeded by people not being willing to take appropriate chances in changing the wall we all live.”
In Chicago, Director David Mosena, a former Transit Authority chief, tries to put opposition to the Segway into historical perspective.
A hundred years ago, he says, “There were all kinds of questions about, ‘Well how do we integrate (cars) into the horse and buggy era?’ And if you listened to those who were only driven by the horse and buggy thinking, you probably would have said, ‘Forget about it.’ But if you take a minute, and you think and you look at the positive aspects and you test it out, I'm not saying it's perfect. I don't know how it will work. But I would love to see it tried.”
Kamen's Next Big Project
Selling the Segway is Kamen’s priority now. Segway's marketing chief, Gary Bridge, says the company is targeting the consumer and the military and industrial markets in Europe and Asia, where there are fewer regulatory hurdles than in the U.S. Dan Rather reports.
"We're very, very interested in the consumer market in Europe, because you have a denser population. And you have, as you've seen, bike trails everywhere, sidewalks that connect to bike trails, a tradition of walking, taking bikes on trains, intermodule, so all of the infrastructure is here that we look for," he says.
Kamen isn’t completely focused on work. While in London recently, he loved the London taxis so much, he bought two and had them shipped to the airport in Manchester, N.H., where they are parked next to his personal jet. It is big stuff for a kid from the working-class New York suburbs. Is that how he keeps score?
"I work hard so I can work on what I think are important solutions to important problems," he says. "And you want to have a lot of money because it gives you the independence and the leverage and the capability to work on important problems. And if you succeed at solving those problems, oh, by the way, you can make a lot of money."
His latest project has been creating a machine that can produce clean water cheaply.
"In the emerging world, in the under-developed world, a gallon of water is so precious that without it, you're going to die," he says. "In some places, the average amount of time per day spent looking for water that's safe for their kids by women is four hours. And they carry this stuff, which weighs 62 pounds per cubic foot, four or five miles. And if it didn't turn out to be the right stuff, or they put their hands in it and contaminated it, they spend the next day or two burying the babies."
Kamen began experimenting with a Stirling engine. The Stirling engine is named after its designer, Robert Stirling, a 19th Century Scottish minister. Basically, it is non-polluting device that plays heat against cold to create energy. It is a closed box with two chambers, one filled with gas.
When the gas chamber is heated from the outside, with anything from burning wood chips to charcoal, the gas expands, creating pressure. That pressure drives a piston from the hot chamber into the cool chamber. In Kamen's design, that mechanical power achieves two goals: it creates electrical power, 300 continuous watts – enough to run a few electrical devices - and, as a bonus, creates enough heat to distill contaminated water, making it drinkable.
Rather and Kamen tested a prototype using water from the polluted Merrimack River near Kamen’s plant. Afterwards, Rather drank some of the water. He was fine.
Kamen dreams of using his device all over the world. Rather asked Kamen if that is a realistic goal. He replies, "Most of the invention that's required to go from the idea to reality, I believe, we've mastered. And we can do this."
"We can do this" could be Kamen's motto. He wants young people to feel as passionately about what is do-able as he does, a curious desire from someone who, by his own admission, was a terrible student. He got bad grades in school.
In school, he says, "I would fixate on something. So, when they'd ask me a question, I wasn't paying attention, because I was thinking about something else. So I'd be accused of daydreaming, which I guess I was doing. But I guess it had a negative connotation. I still daydream. And now, maybe, I like my dreams."
Ironically, Kamen's biggest dream is encouraging kids to stay in school and redirect their goals through an organization called FIRST: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
"Look at the role models they see. They see everybody like them as a young adult is either an entertainer or a sports figure," says Kamen. "Who goes out and says, 'While you have a better probability of winning the state lottery than making a nickel in sports, oh, by the way, last year two million exciting technical jobs went unfilled in this country because you weren't there to take that job. And it pays you 10 times as much as flipping burgers, and it's fun, and it's exciting, and you get to create things and build things and help make the world a better place and help make yourself a better living.' Who tells them this?"
Kamen does.
This year, 800 middle and high schools, most in the United States, formed teams and entered the annual first competition. Each team is sent an identical package of parts, containing motors, gears, pulleys and the like. A real-life engineer, volunteering his time, is assigned to each team. They must design and build a working robot that can accomplish a specific task.
For this year, the task was scooping up volleyballs and depositing them in a bin. Teams compete in regional playoffs, and the survivors come each spring to the finals in Disney World, where the festival has all the trappings of a rock concert or sporting event. The prizes include more than $1 million in scholarships.
Rather asked Kamen how he wants to be remembered.
"I would like to know that I left the world a better place than I found it. And no matter how much I take out of it -- as you point out, I have lots of toys -- I'd like to think that no matter how much I take out of it, I put more in. With 10 billion people on this planet, all trying to have food and water and power, and a standard of living, the only way we're going to do that is if most of those people are contributors and not recipients. These people need to become an educated group that can add to the real value of this world."
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