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The commercial ambitions of Kamen and his team are as advanced as their technical virtuosity. By stealing a slice of the $300 billion-plus transportation industry, Doerr predicts, the Segway Co. will be the fastest outfit in history to reach $1 billion in sales. To get there, the firm has erected a 77,000-sq.-ft. factory a few miles from its Manchester, N.H., headquarters that will be capable of churning out 40,000 Segways a month by the end of next year.
Kamen's aspirations are even grander than that. He believes the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy." He imagines them everywhere: in parks and at Disneyland, on battlefields and factory floors, but especially on downtown sidewalks from Seattle to Shanghai. "Cars are great for going long distances," Kamen says, "but it makes no sense at all for people in cities to use a 4,000-lb. piece of metal to haul their 150-lb. asses around town." In the future he envisions, cars will be banished from urban centers to make room for millions of "empowered pedestrians"--empowered, naturally, by Kamen's brainchild.
Kamen's dream of a Segway-saturated world won't come true overnight. In fact, ordinary folks won't be able to buy the machines for at least a year, when a consumer model is expected to go on sale for about $3,000. For now, the first customers to test the Segway will be deep-pocketed institutions such as the U.S. Postal Service and General Electric, the National Parks Service and Amazon.com--institutions capable of shelling out about $8,000 apiece for industrial-strength models. And Kamen's dreamworld won't arrive at all unless he and his team can navigate the array of obstacles that are sure to be thrown up by competitors and ever cautious regulators.
For the past three months, Kamen has allowed TIME behind the veil of secrecy as he and his team grappled with the questions that they will confront--about everything from safety and pricing to the challenges of launching a product with the country at war and the economy in recession. Some of their answers were smooth and assured; others less polished. But one thing was clear. As Kamen sees it, all these issues will quickly fade if the question most people ask about the Segway is "How do I get one?"
FRED AND GINGER
The world of technology has never been short of eccentrics and obsessives, of rich, brilliant oddballs with strange habits and stranger hobbies. But even in this crowd, Dean Kamen stands out. The 50-year-old son of a comic-book artist, he is a college dropout, a self-taught physicist and mechanical engineer with a handful of honorary doctorates, a multimillionaire who wears the same outfit for every occasion: blue jeans, a blue work shirt and a pair of Timberland boots. With the accent of his native Long Island, he speaks slowly, passionately--and endlessly. "If you ask Dean the time," Doerr chides, "he'll first explain the theory of general relativity, then how to build an atomic clock, and then, maybe, he'll tell you what time it is."