Word: ginger
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 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...
...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...
...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...
...With Ginger, as with the IBOT, Kamen explains, "the big idea is to put a human being into a system where the machine acts as an extension of your body." On first inspection, balancing on Ginger seems only slightly more feasible than balancing on a barbell. But what Kamen is talking about is the way Ginger does the balancing for you. Lean forward, go forward; lean back, go back; turn by twisting your wrist. The experience is the same going uphill, downhill or across any kind of terrain - even ice. It is nothing like riding a bike or a motorcycle...