Meet Dean Kamen the inventor of the Segway and the iBOT -- a motorized wheelchair that climbs stairs. Stephen Colbert took one for a spin. He lives on a island powered by wind & solar and holds over 1,000 patents.
The iBot was revealed in 1999. The IBOT™ is a battery-powered wheelchair built from sensors, microprocessors and gyroscopes that can climb stairs and stand upright on two wheels, empowering handicapped people to see and move at eye-level.
Kamen was already being paid for his ideas as a teenager; he built light and sound systems for local bands and museums. He was earning $60,000 -more than both of his parents- before even graduating high school.
Kamen went to college at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but dropped out in 1976 before graduating because of his invention of an insulin pump called AutoSyringe.
He sold this invention to the health care company, Baxter International making him a millionaire.
That's a pretty fast start, I mean, aside from children who just inherent millions of dollars, for a self-made millionaire it's pretty impressive.
I dropped out of college to work at Facebook for a few years before going back and finishing my degree in Geography but perhaps it would have paid off to invest in the list of inventions I've created but never followed up with.
World Health Organization stats show there's are 900 million people worldwide without a supply of clean drinking water and 3.5 million people die every year due to diseases in unsanitary water they drink. Despite the fact that over two-thirds of our planet's surface is covered with water, only 1% of it is potable.
Dean decided to tackle this problem with the invention of the Slingshot - a vapor distillation system powered by a Stirling engine. It's about the size of a mini fridge and can run off any combustable fuel even animal dung.
Credit: Coca-Cola's Site
The Slingshot uses less electricity than a hair dryer and can purify water from any source whether that's ocean salt water, sewage, urine, polluted groundwater and more. One device can produce clean drinking water for up to 100 people a day.
Slingshot was successfully tested for a month in a village in Honduras 2006. While the initial devices cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Kamen is hoping that in the future there will be increased economies of scale to drive down the cost to $2,000 each.
Meantime, he struck up a deal with Coca-Cola: Kamen would build a better soda fountain for Coca-Cola and in return Coke is using their global distribution network to distribute the Slingshot to water-scarce countries.
Coke got together with 10 international organizations and started distributing the Slingshot in 2013 as part of their Ekocenter kiosks.
These kiosks are solar powered shipping containers that provide impoverished communities with safe drinking water, internet access and items like mosquito repellant as well as first-aid kits (and of course Coke for sale).
By 2017 there are 150 Ekocenters in 8 countries, most of them run sustainably by women entrepreneurs, providing 78.1 million liters of clean drinking water.
A Multimillionaire With A Conscience
In an interview with Tech Crunch, Kamen talked about the conversations he has with the youth:
"You asked what keeps me up at night. There will be a never ending set of potential catastrophes that confront humanity and the way we will avoid succumbing to those catastrophes is well-educated kids that have the appropriate perspective and judgment as to how to use that education and their technology for good."
Covid rocked the nation with countless jobs lost, economy plunges, and stores everywhere requiring face masks to buy groceries or shop at any retail establishment.
Dean and the airplane maker Boeing gave New Hampshire more than half a million face masks.
Boeing's 737-700 aircraft flew around 540,000 medical-grade face masks from China to Manchester-Boston Regional airport, as part of a deal Kamen coordinated, who brought 91,000 pounds of personal protective equipment to the state the previous weekend.
Kamen got the face masks from manufacturers in China through his company DEKA Research and Development, Corp.
Kamen's Secret Bat Cave
Credit: Spectrum.ieee
Like Batman, Dean Kamen has his own secret layer, a private island he owns off the coast of Connecticut (though officially in New York state) called North Dumpling Island.
Dean has a charred, yellowing copy of North Dumpling’s ancient constitution, a nearly verbatim match with the U.S. Constitution, and his own currency which is more of a joke, measured in units of Pi (3.14159).
Kamen's island is a success story for Zero-Net energy - it's completely sustainable using renewable energy.
Using a combination of wind and solar energy and heavy usage of LED lights, the island works independently of regional electrical grids. There is even a lighthouse, a replica of Stonehenge, and a “navy” consisting of one amphibious vehicle.
Photo: Kevin Cooley
No one knows who built this replication of Stonehenge, it was there when Kamen bought the island. The official vehicle of Dean Kamen’s island nation is, you guessed it, a Segway.
The rockstar inventor flies around in a souped-up Enstrom 480 helicopter between North Dumpling and his main residence, a majestic house in Manchester, N.H., near his Deka Research and Development Corp. in a row of refurbished mill buildings.
Credit: Spectrum
To coordinate the different sources, Kamen designed an intelligent system that knows, down to an individual solar panel or light source, how much energy is being produced and consumed on the island.
Kamen's LED lights are pretty sweet.They wash over the island in colors which cycle through the rainbow (and they can be set to a disco beat, but that’s another story). Just as amazing is the system’s engineering marvel that lets Kamen control every circuit on his island empire from anywhere in the world.
Photo: Kevin Cooley
The Stirling engine is the backup generator on the island, a 193-year-old design modified by Kamen to meet his needs.
Kamen believes in the future that almost everyone should have some means of locally generating electric power. It’s the only logical solution for an overtaxed, under maintained national grid that’s vulnerable to any disruption, be it an ice storm or a terrorist attack.
I think what I find interesting about Kamen - I mean there are a 1000 interesting things but to hone in on one - is that he is still down to earth, less of a holier-than-thou titan more of a nerd Batman, often dressed in denim.
"It's not about technology it's about people and stories," Kamen said in an appeal to the heart.
He recounts how DARPA approached him asking how is it that when a soldier gets hurt in battle, they get top of the line surgery civilians wouldn't get but if they lose an arm or leg they get the same wooden stick with a hook on the end that was given to them in the Civil War a century ago?
DARPA asked Kamen to build something that could interface between machines and humans, Kamen disbelievingly said (paraphrasing), "I think they were watching too much Terminator films."
Yet 15 months later, Dean Kamen had a working model where a soldier who lost his arm in the services, was able to use a robotic arm to pick up a grape (it's quit amazing) in this Ted Talk:
What do you think Kamen should invent next?
. . .
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