Word: gingers
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...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...
...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...
...recipient of the advance, author Steve Kemper, gushed in his book proposal that It--code-named Ginger--would revolutionize personal transportation, urban design and our daily lives. Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs said It could be bigger than the PC. Everyone had a different theory: Ginger was cold fusion, a flying car, a whole...
...patent application he filed in late 2000 for a series of self-balancing "personal mobility vehicles." It's known that Kamen and his colleagues have been working for years on a clean, sealed-combustion Stirling engine that could run on any fuel, including hydrogen. The prevailing theory is that Ginger would combine Stirling technology with a stabilizing system pioneered in Kamen's stair-climbing wheelchair. (The wheelchair's code name, by the way, was Fred. Get it? Fred and Ginger.) The newest clues are the names of two websites registered by Kamen-controlled companies: mystirlingscooter.com and flywheels.com
While the world waits for Ginger, which may or may not be a hydrogen-powered scooter (see next page), two San Francisco designers have built one of their own--or at least a prototype. The elegant carbon-fiber-and-aluminum Scoot combines a wide, scooped-out footrest with rugged, over-size wheels. Scoot folds in half so that the tires and grimy underside are neatly tucked away. And with a hydrogen fuel-cell engine, you will leave the slackers in the dust...