The principle here that matters is “personal electric low-skill vehicle”. Segway tried it first, but electric scooters were way cheaper, and the GPS/smartphone technology helped it a lot.
Dean Kamen is so cool to me, because he’s pretty unknown but has had such a positive impact on the world, especially with his STEM outreach to school kids. I got to meet him once briefly after the FRC national championship in 2014, he was going somewhere but still stopped to talk to us briefly and I thanked him and he signed my team hat.
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TBF electric scooters are doing that now. Dude was just ahead of his time.
Also if you take “the way we view cities” literally, they definitely did since they became a popular way for tourists to view a city.
Ahead of his time? It is a different product working with a different (and far older) principle?
The principle here that matters is “personal electric low-skill vehicle”. Segway tried it first, but electric scooters were way cheaper, and the GPS/smartphone technology helped it a lot.
The hype leading up to its reveal was wild.
I remember trying one in a section of a science museum as a kid!
CEO fell off a cliff with his Segway and died
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden#Death
Crucially to the mythology, it was the CEO who recently acquired the company, not the inventor who pioneered it
There’s a great episode of The Dollop about the Segway guy. 565 - Dean Kamen and It.
Dean Kamen is so cool to me, because he’s pretty unknown but has had such a positive impact on the world, especially with his STEM outreach to school kids. I got to meet him once briefly after the FRC national championship in 2014, he was going somewhere but still stopped to talk to us briefly and I thanked him and he signed my team hat.
I wouldn’t recommend you listen to the Dollop episode though, they tend to mercilessly mock their subjects.