Six Words: Intervention, Steward, Manufacture, Pilot, Penetrate, Critic
Elon is working on another futuristic transportation project. This one is still secret. I can’t tell you how I know about it. I can’t tell you when it will be announced, but like all of his projects, it will be announced with great fanfare and an unrealistic schedule. And like all of his projects, he will announce that this will change people’s lives.
When I started to write about a transportation project that will change people’s lives, I remembered hearing that before. I couldn’t remember the name of the man who I heard make that claim, but I do remember the name of the device. It is the Segway. I had to look up the name of the inventor. He is Dean Kamen. When I started to read about Dean Kamen I switched gears. Elon’s secret project will have to remain secret a while longer. Instead, I want to share a bit about what I learned about Dean Kamen. You’ll see why he is a man more deserving of recognition – in my opinion.
Dean Kamen was born into a Jewish family on Long Island in 1951. His genius was apparent at an early age. He was earning $60,000 a year before he graduated high school. He attended college, but dropped out. He invented, holds the patent, and manufactured the infusion pump that today automatically administers all kinds of drugs! That is only one of over 1,000 patents that he holds. That insulin pump is one of his interventions in the way we live. The one he is most famous for among the public though, is the Segway. He created pilot models, stewarded it through development and brought it to market. He announced that it would change urban life and minimize the need for automobiles in cities. We know that it has never achieved that level of penetration. Today they’re used as entertainment and for tours around cities. They’re used by security guards in parking lots and in malls. I don’t know all the things that critics have to say about them, but I do know that they are not cheap and they are heavy, so they haven’t replaced cars – or bicycles or scooters. In fact, today the company makes scooters!
In 1989 Kamen founded FIRST which is an organization to build student interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That led to the FIRST Robotics competition, for students from grades K-12. It became a global competition. In 2010 Dean Kamen said that by then over 1,000,000 students had competed and that FIRST is the invention that he is most proud of.
A footnote. FIRST Robotics has competitors in running robotics competitions. The biggest competitor, a friendly competitor, is VEX and VEX was originally a branch of FIRST! Today, Austin ISD junior and senior high schools have a robotics course and compete in VEX Robotic tournaments. My grandson has participated since junior high. He will be a senior in the fall and still competes. At least once his team has made it to the national competition. He is likely to pursue robotics as his field in college. And my daughter, his mother, is a teacher at Bowie high school and is the sponsor of the robotics team.