Dean Kamen Won't Be Satisfied Until He Reinvents Us All

The creator of the Segway is one of the most successful and admired inventors in the world. He leads a team of 300 scientists and engineers devoted to making things that better mankind. But he's not done

By Rena Marie Pacella Posted 06.05.2009 at 9:18 am 20 Comments

Letdown: The Segway has yet to transform personal mobility. Courtesy Segway inc.

No one ever said inventing was easy. And make no mistake, that's what the man who created the Segway is doing here. He's working on refining the invention that will trump all others, that will establish his legacy long after he's gone. Except this invention isn't made of gears and gyroscopes. What Kamen is doing is trying to reinvent our entire culture. And the brains of these high-school students is where he's going to start.

You might be interested to know a few things about Dean Kamen. You might like to know that while he barely eked out his high-school diploma, as a teenager he had already turned his parents' basement into a machine shop and was making 60 grand a year rigging sound and light shows at museums and hotels around New York City. (He's an ADHD dyslexic, that classic driven-innovator double threat.) You might like to know that he's a creature of habit, offloading pesky daily decision-making by wearing the same uniform of Levi's jeans, denim button-down shirt and work boots every day for nearly 30 years and eating at the same middling Italian chain restaurant almost every night. It might intrigue you to learn that he is a pop-culture conscientious objector, a man who has watched Star Wars dozens of times and every other movie exactly never. And that in his garage resides the 14th Tesla electric Roadster to roll off the factory floor, with a license plate that says "FIRST," plus a Porsche coupe and a military-grade Hummer. In another garage are his two Enstrom helicopters, a three-seat piston-engine model he'll sometimes take for a three-minute commute to his office and a turbo-powered 480 for longer jaunts, like when he decides to head over to North Dumpling, his private three-acre island in Long Island Sound that in 1987 he declared (only half-jokingly) an independent and sovereign nation.

You might be interested to know all that, but, according to Kamen, you shouldn't be.

"Have you looked out the window lately? Read the news? The world is a mess!" he says. "We're obsessing over distractions and pastimes while the world unwinds itself!" Kamen is sitting in his office, across from a chair that's painted to look as if Einstein were seated on it. Above him hangs an aerial photo of his lighthouse home on North Dumpling, the image emblazoned with a characteristically provocative boast: "The only 100% Science Literate Society. America could learn a lot from its neighbor."

Deka's Luke Arm: The most advanced prosthetic in the world courtesy DEKA

Kamen is not entirely averse to the propagation of the Dean Kamen mythology. Indeed, if he's going to rally the troops necessary to rescue this country from its descent into moral complacency and moronic doldrums, attaining rock-star status would be a wise tactical move. He'd just like to control the message. So here is what he would like you to know about him, something he deems a worthy investment of your mental energy: that every one of his inventions — the wearable drug-infusion pump he devised in 1973 at age 22, the Segway scooter, his water purifier for impoverished communities — has been designed for the betterment of mankind. And that in 1982 he built from nothing a company of inventors-for-hire called Deka Research, with the express mandate that they only invent products that make the world better. It's also worth knowing that Kamen's definition of better is not flexible: Better means giving humanity what it needs, not what it wants. Once we've provided the basic necessities (water, power, health care) for the nearly seven billion people on the planet, Kamen explains, then we can go back to chasing a quick buck.

"I don't think Wilbur and Orville and Thomas Edison set out as their primary goal to figure out how, in the shortest period of time possible, to make the most money," says Kamen as he wanders through the cavernous top floor of a newly acquired, gutted industrial space a quarter-mile upstream from Deka, number nine in his collection of abandoned textile-mill buildings. "They set out to make a machine that could fly, or make night safe by making light."

Of course, Kamen makes money — a great deal of it, actually. But, he asserts, "making money is a consequence of good invention, not a motivation for invention." And that's how he runs his Manchester research outpost. Beholden to no stockholders and no bottom line, he has fashioned an inventor's paradise, where the laws of physics and thermodynamics are the only ones that matter, the laws of economics banished to some less evolved place and time. Deka is a strange, cultish world of really, really smart do-gooders who have the will and the capacity to build life-altering machines, and they couldn't care less if the rest of the country thinks they're crazy. It's an extension of Kamen himself.

"Deka is a masterpiece," says bioengineer Jason Demers, who has worked with Kamen for 15 years. "One person can do only so much. But when you get 300 people to think like you — and with your strengths — well, that's when you can get a whole lot done."

Now if Kamen could only get the rest of the world to run like Deka.

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