1. History behind the Segway:
To understand the development of the Segway, it is necessary to understand Dean Kamen, his world and the history behind Segway. Since his youth days, Dean Kamen has been true inventor and innovator. Some people have compared him to Archimedes for his creativity and ingenuity. Since he was a college student, he was making $60,000 a year selling his first commercial invention, an electrical apparatus that synchronizes light with sound. At only 20 years of age, he developed an automatic machine to deliver a precise dose of drugs to hospital patients. In 1982, Dean sold the product for $30 million dollars and established DEKA Research (after his name DEan KAmen) in Manchester, NH. During the years, DEKA continued to develop medical devices and selling their patents to large companies to commercialize.
One day, Dean was disturbed watching a man struggle to get his wheelchair over a curb. This episode bother him so much that he started wondering how this world was able to send a man to the moon and could not help this poor man get over the curb. With his notable ingenuity, he found that the problem was not the wheelchair, but this world was not fit for it. He decided that instead of fixing all the streets and curbs it might be better to replace the wheelchair with something better. For this new adventure, he put his team to work on the changing of the wheelchair. A couple of years passed and the team tried many ideas possible, but it was not getting far. Then the idea came in that it would be better to have a self-equilibrium mechanism to help people get over every existing obstacle. As this project gained momentum, DEKA assembled a very important team to work on this project, later named Fred. One time, one of the engineers was playing with Fred and standing on the machine balancing him and moving it with the joystick made Dean think that Fred technology could be used as a vehicle for people who move around. This insight created a new...