Word: segways
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Kamen's aspirations are even grander than that. He believes the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy." He imagines them everywhere: in parks and at Disneyland, on battlefields and factory floors, but especially on downtown sidewalks from Seattle to Shanghai. "Cars are great for going long distances," Kamen says, "but it makes no sense at all for people in cities to use a 4,000-lb. piece of metal to haul their 150-lb. asses around town." In the future he envisions, cars will be banished from urban centers to make...
...Kamen's dream of a Segway-saturated world won't come true overnight. In fact, ordinary folks won't be able to buy the machines for at least a year, when a consumer model is expected to go on sale for about $3,000. For now, the first customers to test the Segway will be deep-pocketed institutions such as the U.S. Postal Service and General Electric, the National Parks Service and Amazon.com--institutions capable of shelling out about $8,000 apiece for industrial-strength models. And Kamen's dreamworld won't arrive at all unless he and his team...
...challenges of launching a product with the country at war and the economy in recession. Some of their answers were smooth and assured; others less polished. But one thing was clear. As Kamen sees it, all these issues will quickly fade if the question most people ask about the Segway...
...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. Instead, in the words of Vern Loucks, the former chairman of Baxter International and a Segway board member, "it's like skiing without the snow...
...Exactly how the Segway achieves this effect isn't easy to explain; Kamen's first stab at it involves a blizzard of equations. Eventually, though, he offers this: "When you walk, you're really in what's called a controlled fall. You off-balance yourself, putting one foot in front of the other and falling onto them over and over again. In the same way, when you use a Segway, there's a gyroscope that acts like your inner ear, a computer that acts like your brain, motors that act like your muscles, wheels that act like your feet. Suddenly...