TIME Magazine on-line has the new article about IT/Ginger, a.k.a. Segway.

http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...186660,00.html

Sunday, Dec. 02, 2001
Reinventing the Wheel

Here "it" is: the inside story of the secret invention that so many are
buzzing about. Could this thing really change the world?

BY JOHN HEILEMANN

"Come to me!"

On a quiet Sunday morning in Silicon Valley, I am standing atop a machine
code-named Ginger--a machine that may be the most eagerly awaited and
wildly, if inadvertently, hyped high-tech product since the Apple Macintosh.
Fifty feet away, Ginger's diminutive inventor, Dean Kamen, is offering
instruction on how to use it, which in this case means waving his hands and
barking out orders.

"Just lean forward," Kamen commands, so I do, and instantly I start rolling
across the concrete right at him.

"Now, stop," Kamen says. How? This thing has no brakes. "Just think about
stopping." Staring into the middle distance, I conjure an image of a red
stop sign--and just like that, Ginger and I come to a halt.

"Now think about backing up." Once again, I follow instructions, and soon I
glide in reverse to where I started. With a twist of the wrist, I pirouette
in place, and no matter which way I lean or how hard, Ginger refuses to let
me fall over. What's going on here is all perfectly explicable--the machine
is sensing and reacting to subtle shifts in my balance--but for the moment I
am slack-jawed, baffled. It was Arthur C. Clarke who famously observed that
"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." By
that standard, Ginger is advanced indeed.

Since last January it has also been the tech world's most-speculated-about
secret. That was when a book proposal about Ginger, a.k.a. "IT," got leaked
to the website Inside.com. Kamen had been working on Ginger for more than a
decade, and although the author (with whom the inventor is no longer
collaborating) never revealed what Ginger was, his precis included
over-the-top assessments from some of Silicon Valley's mightiest kingpins.
As big a deal as the PC, said Steve Jobs; maybe bigger than the Internet,
said John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape, Amazon.com and now
Ginger.

In a heartbeat, hundreds of stories full of fevered theorizing gushed forth
in the press. Ginger was a hydrogen-powered hovercraft. Or a magnetic
antigravity device. Or, closer to the mark, a souped-up scooter. Even the
reprobates at South Park got into the act, spoofing Ginger in a recent
episode--the details of which, sadly, are unprintable in a family magazine.

This week the guessing game comes to an end as Kamen unveils his baby under
its official name: Segway. Given the buildup, some are bound to be
disappointed. ("It won't beam you to Mars or turn lead into gold," shrugs
Kamen. "So sue me.") But there is no denying that the Segway is an
engineering marvel. Developed at a cost of more than $100 million, Kamen's
vehicle is a complex bundle of hardware and software that mimics the human
body's ability to maintain its balance. Not only does it have no brakes, it
also has no engine, no throttle, no gearshift and no steering wheel. And it
can carry the average rider for a full day, nonstop, on only five cents'
worth of electricity.

The commercial ambitions of Kamen and his team are as advanced as their
technical virtuosity. By stealing a slice of the $300 billion-plus
transportation industry, Doerr predicts, the Segway Co. will be the fastest
outfit in history to reach $1 billion in sales. To get there, the firm has
erected a 77,000-sq.-ft. factory a few miles from its Manchester, N.H.,
headquarters that will be capable of churning out 40,000 Segways a month by
the end of next year.

Kamen's aspirations are even grander than that. He believes the Segway "will
be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy." He imagines them
everywhere: in parks and at Disneyland, on battlefields and factory floors,
but especially on downtown sidewalks from Seattle to Shanghai. "Cars are
great for going long distances," Kamen says, "but it makes no sense at all
for people in cities to use a 4,000-lb. piece of metal to haul their 150-lb.
asses around town." In the future he envisions, cars will be banished from
urban centers to make room for millions of "empowered
pedestrians"--empowered, naturally, by Kamen's brainchild.

Kamen's dream of a Segway-saturated world won't come true overnight. In
fact, ordinary folks won't be able to buy the machines for at least a year,
when a consumer model is expected to go on sale for about $3,000. For now,
the first customers to test the Segway will be deep-pocketed institutions
such as the U.S. Postal Service and General Electric, the National Parks
Service and Amazon.com--institutions capable of shelling out about $8,000
apiece for industrial-strength models. And Kamen's dreamworld won't arrive
at all unless he and his team can navigate the array of obstacles that are
sure to be thrown up by competitors and ever cautious regulators.

For the past three months, Kamen has allowed TIME behind the veil of secrecy
as he and his team grappled with the questions that they will
confront--about everything from safety and pricing to the challenges of
launching a product with the country at war and the economy in recession.
Some of their answers were smooth and assured; others less polished. But one
thing was clear. As Kamen sees it, all these issues will quickly fade if the
question most people ask about the Segway is "How do I get one?"

Fred and Ginger

The world of technology has never been short of eccentrics and obsessives,
of rich, brilliant oddballs with strange habits and stranger hobbies. But
even in this crowd, Dean Kamen stands out. The 50-year-old son of a
comic-book artist, he is a college dropout, a self-taught physicist and
mechanical engineer with a handful of honorary doctorates, a
multimillionaire who wears the same outfit for every occasion: blue jeans, a
blue work shirt and a pair of Timberland boots. With the accent of his
native Long Island, he speaks slowly, passionately--and endlessly. "If you
ask Dean the time," Doerr chides, "he'll first explain the theory of general
relativity, then how to build an atomic clock, and then, maybe, he'll tell
you what time it is."

A bachelor, Kamen lives near Manchester in a hexagonally shaped,
32,000-sq.-ft. house he designed. Outside, there's a giant wind turbine to
generate power and a fully lighted baseball diamond; in the basement, a
foundry and a machine shop. Kamen's vehicles include a Hummer, a Porsche and
two helicopters--both of which he helped design and one of which he uses to
commute to work each day. He also owns an island off the coast of
Connecticut. He calls it North Dumpling, and he considers it a sovereign
state. It has a flag, a navy, a currency (one bill has the value of pi) and
a mutual nonaggression pact with the U.S., signed by Kamen and the first
President Bush (as a joke, we think).

But if Kamen's personality is half Willy Wonka, the other half is closer to
Thomas Edison. While he was still struggling in college, Kamen invented the
first drug-infusion pump, which enabled doctors to deliver steady, reliable
doses to patients. In the years that followed, he invented the first
portable insulin pump, the first portable dialysis machine and an array of
heart stents, one of which now resides inside Vice President Dick Cheney.
This string of successes established Kamen's reputation, made him wealthy
and turned DEKA Research--the R.-and-D. lab he founded nearly 20 years ago,
in which he and 200 engineers work along the banks of the Merrimack
River--into a kind of Mecca for medical-device design.

The seeds of Ginger were planted at DEKA by what had previously been Kamen's
best-known project: the IBOT wheelchair. Developed for and funded by Johnson
& Johnson, the IBOT is Kamen's bid to "give the disabled the same kind of
mobility the rest of us take for granted"--a six-wheel machine that goes up
and down curbs, cruises effortlessly through sand or gravel, and even climbs
stairs. More amazing still, the IBOT features something called standing
mode, in which it rises up on its wheels and lifts its occupant to eye level
while maintaining balance with such stability that it can't be knocked over
even by a violent shove. Kamen gets annoyed when the IBOT is called a
wheelchair. It is, he says, "the world's most sophisticated robot."

As Kamen and his team were working on the IBOT, it dawned on them that they
were onto something bigger. "We realized we could build a device using very
similar technology that could impact how everybody gets around," he says.
The IBot was also the source of Ginger's mysterious code name. "Watching the
IBOT, we used to say, 'Look at that light, graceful robot, dancing up the
stairs'--so we started referring to it as Fred Upstairs, after Fred
Astaire," Kamen recalls. "After we built Fred, it was only natural to name
its smaller partner Ginger."

-continued-