Word: ginger
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...FRED AND GINGER...
Some call it Ginger. Others refer to it as It. Some lucky enough to have seen it have hailed it as an invention that could have an impact on the world every bit as large as the car and the personal computer. Visit TIME.com to see a 3-D model, then tell us what you think. Will this revolutionize the way we move around town, or is this just a very cool and very expensive scooter? Go to time.com/segway...