Dean Kamen. Credit: DEKA Research

It is a somewhat morbid urban legend that the inventor of the Segway drove off a cliff in a fatal freak accident, but is founded in some truth: the man who purchased the company from inventor/entrepreneur Dean Kamen did indeed pass away in such a manner, a year after acquiring the tech manufacturer and nine years after the creation of the two-wheeled transportation tool. Mr. Kamen being alive and well, with hundreds of patents and plenty of ideas for inventions that particularly help in the medical world, spoke with Chau Tu from Science Friday about his company DEKA Research and Development and his history of prolific invention:

How did you first get interested in engineering?
I think I got started in a much more unusual way than most people I know. I sort of got into it as a kid, because I wanted to make things that weren’t available at the time, and in order to make them, I had to learn some engineering. I learned a little bit of electronics, I learned a little bit about mechanics, and I learned a little bit about how to make things and run machines—a lathe and a mill and a machine shop. I did that long before I academically studied any engineering or math or physics.

When I was in college, I had an older brother in med school who was a pediatric hematologist, and he needed ways to deliver very, very tiny amounts of drugs to very, very tiny babies. The equipment in the hospital was pretty much made for adults. So he asked if I could find a way to make a drug delivery system do what he needed. That was one of my first businesses and projects. [This was the AutoSyringe.]

Did you find it hard to go down the route of becoming an inventor?
I found school very high-pressure, very difficult, very frustrating. I didn’t know how to optimize my ability to learn what they wanted me to learn, on the schedule they wanted me to learn it, and take the tests they wanted me to take.

But if I had to go invent something, I wasn’t under pressure, because I could read that book and read it again and break my pencil and be frustrated but go back and read it again. I could do that without worrying that, on Thursday at 2 o’clock, there would be a test. And I could try to build something, and if it didn’t work, I could try again and try again, and no one was there to give me an F or a D or a C, and nobody was there to tell me, ‘you’re dumb.’ I could work at my own pace and work as hard as I wanted, as long as I wanted, until I made something that did what I wanted. I found school intimidating, and I found trying to do my own stuff engaging and empowering and exciting.

You’re probably best known for inventing the iBot, which was the device that eventually became the Segway. How did this idea come about?
Well, the iBot was a device to help the disabled community get around. I thought that the wheelchair is a very, very inadequate solution to a very, very big problem—which is that when people lose the ability to walk, mobility is only a part of what they give up. A human being is not a sack of potatoes that you can wheel around in a wheelbarrow. A human being has dignity, and a human being wants to look you in the eye, and a human being wants to take books off that high shelf, and see people in a crowd, and be able to use that sink and that stove and that copying machine, and reach over that counter at the mall. I thought, we’ve got to give people back that ability to stand up and balance and get around as full-size adults, not move them around like a sack of potatoes. And so, I said the problem to solve is not about the wheels, it’s about human balance.

We created an iBot, which, like a human, can balance on two little points on the ground—you can do it on your toes, the iBot did it on two wheels. And it really has had a huge impact on the disabled community, giving them independence and freedom and access.

And then we realized able-bodied people would think it’s pretty cool to stand on a two-wheeled device and let the machine do the balancing for them. So we turned the iBot, the medical product, into a Segway for the consumer.

Read the rest of the interview here.