Segway
Dean Kamen's self-balancing two-wheeler, unveiled in December 2001 after months of speculation about a secret invention code-named Ginger. It cost about $5,000, sold roughly 140,000 units before production ended in 2020, and found its place with tour groups, police and security guards.
The Segway came out of a wheelchair. Dean Kamen's company DEKA had developed the iBOT, a self-balancing wheelchair that was shown to the public on Dateline NBC in June 1999, and the following month Kamen founded a separate New Hampshire company, Segway, to find non-medical uses for the technology. The name is a homophone of "segue." Before anyone had seen the product, news of a book proposal about it set off months of speculation. Its code name was Ginger. Venture capitalist John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet, Steve Jobs was quoted calling it "as big a deal as the PC," and South Park devoted an episode to mocking the hype before the device was released. Fortune later recalled that Time had described it as the most hyped high-tech product since the Apple Macintosh.
It was unveiled on December 3, 2001, in Bryant Park in New York, on ABC's Good Morning America. The original models had three speed settings, the fastest of them 10 miles per hour, and were steered with a twist grip. The first units were delivered in early 2002, to commercial customers before consumers. It cost $5,000 when it debuted, which Fortune called "as much as a decent used car." Kamen predicted the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy," and the company's sales target was 40,000 units a year. By 2003 it had sold 6,000. By September 2006, when every unit sold up to that point was recalled over a software glitch that could make it reverse, the total was about 23,500.
It never replaced the car. Segways ended up with tour groups, private security and police, and in the comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Kevin James kept falling off one. Kamen's company was sold in December 2009 to a group led by British businessman Jimi Heselden, who died in a Segway accident the following year. The Chinese company Ninebot acquired it in 2015. Production of the original Segway ended on July 15, 2020, with 21 employees laid off at the plant in Bedford, New Hampshire. About 140,000 had been sold in all.
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