About his water purifier...
Our machine takes out bio-agents from shallow water without using chemicals like chlorine. It takes out ions and heavy metals and chemicals like arsenic from deep water without activated charcoal. It takes out salt water from the ocean without osmosis. It has no chemicals, it has no filters, it has no membranes, no consumables of any kind. It takes any input of water — you don't even have to pretest it — and what comes out is pure, distilled water. It meets the U.S. pharmacopoeia standard for water that can be injected. It's astounding. And it takes one-third the power of a handheld dryer to make a thousand liters of water a day, which, based on the World Health Organization's standards, is enough for a village of 100 people. And if you've got a few hundred people, you put a couple of machines in.
What he plans to do with the purifier...
I will not [lose focus] of the primary goal: to alleviate the number one source of health problems and disease on this planet, which is water-borne pathogens... it may be that the fastest way to do that isn't through a non-profit, but to do a for-profit piece and then double-use the knowledge, the technology and the tooling. If we need to do that, and it speeds things up, not slows them down, we'll do that.
On how his generator works...
My engine runs like your refrigerator runs. When's the last time you did some maintenance work on the compressor of your refrigerator? [The refrigerator] is a sealed system. You put electricity into that compressor, the bottom end gets hot and gets blown away, and the top end, because you've put electricity in and it's pumping, gets cold, and you cool down the refrigerator. So let's see, electricity into a sealed system, one end gets cold the other gets hot. Take that sealed system, and make [the bottom] end hot with your methane, and keep [the other] end cold, by cooling it with water — electricity comes out. So we're essentially running your refrigerator backwards, with a sealed system that makes about as much noise a your refrigerator, and will last as many years without maintenance. And it runs on any fuel. Anything that makes the bottom of that sucker hot, will give you electricity.
On a recent trial-run of the generator....
We put two of these machines to test it in two villages, 75 kilometers apart, last year in Bangladesh. And I thought, "Wow, it's going to run on cow dung, there will be all sorts of issues. We'll send engineers, and if we can get any data..." Any data? Those machines ran flawlessly around the clock. Each village went from never seeing electricity, never having a light bulb at night, to being fully electrified. They're small villages. But they were fully electrified for nearly half year each. And the only fuel — there's no infrastructure for that either — that went into each of these boxes was [methane gas from] cow dung. A pit next to the box and the most basic bio-digester you've ever seen... the pipe comes out of it and into our engine, and it made electricity. And since the power was made locally, we had no transmission lines, and we had no infrastructure issues. And it created in each village three entrepreneurs. It not only wasn't sapping an economy, it was creating an economy. There was a guy now selling dung. If you annualized his 24-week income, he would have made $360 selling something that would not have had value. There was the guy running the generator. He was making a nice living. [And a third entrepreneur, selling things like light bulbs]
On whether there's a commercial market for the power generator...
There probably is. Again, my rule is the same. If it's go and do that, but it's a distraction from the focus, I won't go there. But if it's, "Hey, how are we going to get the money to tool these things up?" there's enough people that want a small quiet machine like this that'll run year after year.
On how he thinks his machines can best aid the poor...
Here's a piece of technology that should empower people from the bottom up to make self-sustaining, new forms of infrastructure. And I think the lesson here is that technology, 50 years ago, was all mega-technology. Big Blue and mainframes... Ma Bell had pieces of copper wire running from everybody's ear to everybody else's ear. It took 100 years to do it. It was big centralized power companies, nuclear power plants. Transmissions lines. Big, centralized phone companies.... And then look what happened. Communications is now point of use. You carry a cell phone. Computing — you carry a PC. I think in the next decade or two, as the rest of the developing world stands on the shoulders of what we've created over the last few hundred years of the industrial revolution ... they don't have to go through the painstaking evolution of all those tasks.
There really are just two basic needs to help people out of misery and poverty: water and electricity. So what if you could make point of use water with a little machine, instead of [depending on] municipalities? What if you could make point of use electricity, instead of waiting for the equivalent of Con Edison to build a massive infrastructure and transmission lines? Let's build technologies that scale down to deliver point of use water, point of use power, that don't have to get more granular than the village.
When Kamen unveiled Segway in December 2001, he told TIME that as cities get more and more crowded, they will increasingly ban cars from their congested downtown districts. Segways, he predicted, would ease that transition and prove so wildly popular that they would quickly fill the pavements of congested cities. None of that seems to be likely to happen any time soon. Here's what he had to say about his previous predictions and how he regards the ups and downs of invention...
On his vision for cities...
Cities need cars in the middle of 10 million people like a fish needs a bicycle. I told you that five years ago, and I'll tell you that again. But these cities are too big to just go walking. So what do you do in highly dense, pedestrian urban environment to bring technology that will make it green and easy and simple and fun to get around? And particularly at a time when the price of fuel is getting outrageous, when the environmental impact is becoming unsustainable, when people are looking for better ways to make their downtown to be a green environment, a fun environment. The reason I moved to a city is I wanted high density. I don't want to be spread out from everybody else here by stinking, smelly, noisy vehicles in the middle of a city. I love cars and trucks. I love airplanes too. But you learn that you leave an airplane at the airport. You leave your car at the end of that nice trip on the highway. I don't taxi my airplane into downtown Manchester if I fly across the United States.
So you get in a car driving 60 miles an hour for 10 miles, and then when you get to the edge of a highly dense pedestrian-friendly environment, let's stop bring cars into that last couple of square miles.
On the fact that Segways have only found niche markets...
You know, computers were in a niche market for the first few years... cars were a niche when they were first made, airplanes were a niche when they were first made. Every new technology starts out that way.
Even though we said the neat thing about the Segway is that it doesn't require any new physical infrastructure — we can just exist on your sidewalks. You don't need to build airports, you don't need to put down steel rails, you don't have to build new highways, we get around on two little points like your tippy-toes, and we can get around on your downtown, on your sidewalks. So while we correctly asserted that you don't need new physical infrastructure, I don't think we fully appreciated how much change in the mental infrastructure would be required before people started to think it really is just unproductive and in some ways irresponsible to be moving around downtown, short distances, averaging 5 or 6 or 10 miles an hour, in a 2,000-lb. machine, with 200 horsepower, spewing out toxic waste. It doesn't make sense. But it takes a while for that to be accepted. I still think it will be accepted.
You might say to me, "It won't be Segway, someone will come out with a better technology." And I'd say to you, you know, I'm almost rooting for the entrepreneurs. Maybe they will. So I'm not prepared to tell you in 10 years Segways will be the predominant alternative to walking. But if it's too far to walk or you need to go three or four times faster than walking, which is as fast as you can go in a downtown, I can't say it will be a Segway. But one thing I bet you right now, anything you wanna bet, there is no chance that we will still have 10 or 15 years from now the majority of our society, in developed parts of the world, in big cities, consuming fuel, creeping along, sucking up each other's exhaust at 6 miles an hour, when 3 billion people live in cities. That is not going to be the way we live.
On when he believes Segways will make significant inroads into the consumer market...
It will take more time than we had thought to get wholesale adoption, but unfortunately, when you look at history, that's true of the light bulb, it's true of electricity. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, and the next morning everybody read about it — by candlelight. A lot of good technology goes from indefensible to indispensable because, by pure logic, the day before it was invented, it wasn't invented, and everybody lived a different way. So the day after it's invented, you don't see people saying, "Yesterday my life was a mess, and today, I'm enlightened and I will change everything I do." That's not the way the world works. So there's a an adoption curve, and it's more related to people's ability to assimilate ideas, than to an engineer's or physicist's or an inventor's ability too produce new technology. The more different a new technology is, the more of an invention it is, the more time it's going to take. It's easier to take a small step than a big one. And the Segway, in terms of mobile technology, is a pretty big step.
On how he feels about how long it is taking for Segway to catch on...
People [ask] me why I'm never depressed by this, and it's because I've learned. I built the first wearable [insulin] pumps, and people, including doctors, said, "They'll never let people out of the hospital, walking around getting drugs," and it went from "they'll never allow this to happen" to now its the standard of care. How many diabetics are out there that don't want to make sure they get good control [of their blood sugar] all the time. And it goes, again, from being indefensible to being indispensable.
The metric for me in everything I've ever done is, I get it done and I think, now the world will love it! And then, 10 years later, they love it. But if I was more patient, if I said, "I'm going to build this great water machine or this great power source," and I know if do it just right, and it's perfect, I'll be all excited and finish it, and now I just have to wait till I'm 65 years old before anybody uses it, I wouldn't have the energy to get up in the morning and try. You have to get up believing you're going to push it. And if you don't keep pushing and pushing and pushing, it won't take 10 years, it'll take 50.