Who Killed The Segway?

Speaker 1 I got the book proposal and just said, wow, check this out. It had this incredible new invention that was going to change the world.

Speaker 1 But the one thing the book proposal didn't tell you was what it was.

Speaker 2 I seem to recall the first thing that really took off was the whole idea of a hoverboard.

Speaker 1 It's a hovercraft. It's a spaceship.
It's a jetpack.

Speaker 4 People were coming up with jetpacks and, you know, inertial thrusters, and imagination is just going crazy.

Speaker 2 This was the biggest story anywhere in the world.

Speaker 1 For that time, it was insane.

Speaker 6 News cameras outside of our buildings and news trucks and reporters trying to interview you.

Speaker 4 So when it does come out, you remember on the Good Morning America.

Speaker 8 All right, are we ready?

Speaker 9 Are you ready?

Speaker 10 I'm ready. Okay.

Speaker 11 I think it's time. All right.

Speaker 13 I think it was behind a curtain and then it came out. It was like this kind of pokey way they did it.

Speaker 7 There it is.

Speaker 15 That's it?

Speaker 9 That can't be it.

Speaker 17 This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Willa Paskin.
In 2001, the first dot-com bubble was bursting and all over Silicon Valley, fortunes were blowing away in the wind.

Speaker 20 Amid this wreckage, a mystery invention called IT arrived. Jeff Bezos said it was revolutionary.

Speaker 16 Steve Jobs said it would be bigger than the PC.

Speaker 17 Legacy Media and the just birthed internet both breathlessly speculated about what it could possibly be.

Speaker 20 But the only reason the world knew about it was because of a leaked secret book proposal.

Speaker 16 And this book proposal getting out was a big problem for the inventor of it.

Speaker 17 It was a big problem for the author trying to write a book about it.

Speaker 16 And it was a big problem for the 25-year-old literary agent who had sold that book.

Speaker 19 That literary agent was Dan Coyce.

Speaker 16 He's now an editor and writer at Slate.

Speaker 19 Hi, Dan.

Speaker 22 Hi, Willa.

Speaker 20 In this episode, you're going to tell us the story of It, the great viral sensation of the pre-social media internet.

Speaker 23 It kicked off an incredible hype cycle that backfired horribly, and I still feel responsible for that.

Speaker 19 The hype turned what might have been this really genuinely great invention into a joke.

Speaker 24 Yeah, everyone was completely fired up about it, and then it turned out to be a scooter.

Speaker 20 So, today, on Decodering,

Speaker 16 did Dan kill the Segway?

Speaker 16 Listen.

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Speaker 14 Rules and restrictions apply.

Speaker 31 You remember the Segue.

Speaker 25 It's that goofy-looking scooter with two big wheels on the bottom and then the handlebar that comes up from the platform in between them.

Speaker 10 You may recognize the Segue from tour groups riding it around your city or from the movie Paul Blart Mall Cop, where it's featured prominently as a joke.

Speaker 26 But that's not how it started.

Speaker 22 It started as a revolutionary invention predicted to rack up a billion dollars in sales faster than any product in history.

Speaker 40 It started as the vision of a genius named Dean Kamen.

Speaker 4 Dean was a great character.

Speaker 42 That's Steve Kemper.

Speaker 37 He's a journalist who profiled Dean Kamen and ended up reporting on the creation of the Segway for a year and a half.

Speaker 4 Dean's quotable, he's independent, he's a little bit crazy.

Speaker 6 Dean was the kind of guy who'd been so bored in high school math that he'd tank a test just to see if he could get exactly like a 57.

Speaker 28 He made a fortune starting when he was just 20, inventing the first drug infusion pump and later the first portable dialysis machine.

Speaker 50 Dean is anti-authoritarian, whimsical, and wealthy.

Speaker 28 After he got rich, he bought a tiny island off the coast of New York named North Dumpling.

Speaker 10 He declared independence from the United States. Somehow he got the first George Bush to sign a mutual non-aggression pact.

Speaker 22 He even wrote a national anthem: North Dumpling, North Dumpling, keep lawyers far from thee,

Speaker 7 and MBAs and bureaucrats, so we may all be free.

Speaker 26 Dean started his own R ⁇ D company, DECA, for Dean Kamen.

Speaker 40 He got scores of incredible engineers to join him way up in Manchester, New Hampshire, promising them total freedom to pursue world-changing technology.

Speaker 49 He was always looking for the most elegant solution to a problem, and his engineers got used to him coming to them with these big, inspiring ideas that they had to figure out how to make.

Speaker 49 The inspiration for the segue came to Dean in an unlikely place.

Speaker 4 Dean got out of the tub and started to slip and windmilled his arms backwards the way you do when you're recovering your balance. And that was his Eureka moment.

Speaker 6 If he could build a machine that could balance like a person does, that could have incredible applications.

Speaker 39 Imagine a wheelchair that can stand up straight or even climb stairs.

Speaker 43 How many lives would that change?

Speaker 37 One of the early proof of concept models for this balancing technology looked sort of like a coffee table on wheels.

Speaker 44 You could place a load on it and the machine would figure out how to balance all by itself. And then one day, one of the engineers jumped on top of it.

Speaker 61 And he leaned back and he leaned forward and it moved.

Speaker 40 Benji Ambrogi is an engineer who worked at DECA for 13 years.

Speaker 61 Your body is the joystick. The more lean you have, the faster it goes and you lean back and it slows down.

Speaker 61 When we stood on it and drove it, it was a complete revelation of like a natural extension of your body.

Speaker 39 The engineer's real project, the product that was going to sell, was the practical stair climbing wheelchair.

Speaker 10 But this magical little contraption you could stand on and ride around, it captured their imagination.

Speaker 28 It became their nights and weekends project.

Speaker 25 In the mid-90s, Dean, who had a serious case of inventor's paranoia, decided to make the whole wheelchair project a secret in order to protect against another company swiping it.

Speaker 31 So it needed a code name.

Speaker 47 One day, the engineers watched as the wheelchair turned in an elegant circle.

Speaker 61 It was beautiful to watch, and it was like dancing.

Speaker 61 And so Fred a stair, and then someone said, Fred upstairs because it's a stair climbing device. Then the project became Fred.

Speaker 31 Fred inspired, in turn, a name for the delightful spin-off tuthe.

Speaker 45 Who dances with Fred?

Speaker 31 Ginger.

Speaker 64 In 1995, Dean sold Fred, the wheelchair, to Johnson ⁇ Johnson and turned his attention to Ginger.

Speaker 49 Ginger became its own secret department at DECA.

Speaker 25 This time, Dean didn't want to sell the idea to some big company and move on.

Speaker 28 No, ginger was too important.

Speaker 34 Ginger could solve the problem of city travel.

Speaker 33 It could reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and free our cities from the scourge of the automobile.

Speaker 49 Ginger could change the world.

Speaker 26 Dean planned to manufacture and sell this product himself.

Speaker 23 Deca filed patent after patent for Ginger's technology.

Speaker 40 Eventually, Dean would lease a 77,000 square foot factory in Manchester that would be able to push out 6,000 gingers a week.

Speaker 42 In the late 1990s, Dean invited that journalist, Steve Kemper, to the secret top-floor offices at DECA where Ginger was being developed.

Speaker 12 Dean made Steve sign a non-disclosure agreement, and he told him that what he was about to show him was the most exciting thing he'd ever done.

Speaker 14 It was a little lab.

Speaker 4 You had to be keycarded in, and it said ginger on the door. And it was, that's where he showed me this little thing, and it was not impressive.

Speaker 4 It was, it was held together with duct tape, and there were jagged edges and little toy wheels on it, like from a wagon or something. But then you got on it, and it was, it was like a mantic carpet.

Speaker 39 Everyone I talked to about ginger remembered how wondrous their first ride on it was.

Speaker 37 Dean counted on that.

Speaker 38 He knew that everyone got this dopey grin once they started zooming around.

Speaker 51 That was when Dean knew he had his hooks in you.

Speaker 4 And then he's trotting alongside you, still pitching. You know, this is ginger and people are going to be gingering to the store, gingering to work, gingering to the subway.
It's going to be a verb.

Speaker 4 It's going to be a new concept, a new verb. It's going to be a new world.

Speaker 51 Steve still remembers what Dean said to him when he hopped off.

Speaker 9 Who's going to want to walk?

Speaker 44 Dean told Steve there ought to be a book about the creation of ginger.

Speaker 4 Then he wanted to pay me to write the book, and I said, no, I'm a journalist, but I'd be glad to write the book if you give me total access and no control from you.

Speaker 4 And I'll do it, you know, on spec until I can find a publisher. And so he agreed with that.

Speaker 4 Basically, I drank the Kool-Aid. He is the most incredible salesman, salesperson you'll ever see in your life, and I saw him sell everybody, and he sold me for sure.

Speaker 26 Now it's 1999.

Speaker 31 As Steve is beginning to report the Ginger book, he realizes it's going to be really hard to find that publisher.

Speaker 6 Typically, when you pitch a book to a publisher, you tell them what the book's about.

Speaker 46 Steve couldn't do that.

Speaker 37 He needed help, so he made a phone call.

Speaker 40 I'm Rafe Segallen.

Speaker 66 I'm a literary agent.

Speaker 23 A literary agent helps writers sell their books to publishers.

Speaker 37 Rafe's been an agent in Bethesda, Maryland, since the 1980s.

Speaker 12 In 1999, Rafe was my boss.

Speaker 40 I was in my mid-20s, working my way through grad school as Rafe's assistant.

Speaker 47 But he was also encouraging me to start finding my own authors to represent.

Speaker 12 Steve Kemper and I had emailed about another book proposal.

Speaker 43 It hadn't worked out, but we liked each other.

Speaker 47 So when Steve started to pitch us on this idea, Rafe included me in the process.

Speaker 68 I remember the three of us were on the call when something like this.

Speaker 69 This guy I'm interviewing and spending time with is developing a product that's going to be the biggest invention since the automobile.

Speaker 68 It's going to change the world.

Speaker 53 I said, okay, sure.

Speaker 52 Tell us more about that.

Speaker 26 I remember this call.

Speaker 25 We were sitting in Rafe's little office in Bethesda.

Speaker 50 We were really skeptical, but Steve, who's normally a pretty level-headed guy, he kept assuring us that this invention was the real thing.

Speaker 63 So, of course, we asked, what is it?

Speaker 27 I can't tell you.

Speaker 33 I said, What?

Speaker 70 I can't tell you what it is all about.

Speaker 70 Well, how do you expect us to get you a book deal if you can't tell us what it is?

Speaker 26 Steve's book seemed both enormously exciting and 100% impossible to sell, but Rafe seemed willing to let me run with it.

Speaker 28 He believed in me. He pushed me to be the book's lead agent.

Speaker 37 And Rafe and I told Steve, keep reporting.

Speaker 22 We'll figure out how to sell this thing somehow.

Speaker 12 By the turn of the millennium, 2000, DECA had been working on Ginger for five years, and Dean was burning through a half million dollars of his own money each month.

Speaker 51 R ⁇ D is expensive, especially when you make your engineers chase every brilliant idea you have.

Speaker 30 Dean Kamen needed cash.

Speaker 23 He had a few investors willing to pony up 30 million or so, but he needed more.

Speaker 47 Luckily for him, 2000 was the year the first internet bubble began to pop.

Speaker 11 The NASDAQ had reached its highest point in March of 2000, and then it's downhill from there.

Speaker 47 Margaret O'Meara is a historian and the author of The Code, A History of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 11 And there, of course, there's a lot of rather gleeful, you know, oh, you guys got too far out over your skis.

Speaker 11 You know, you had all this flashy marketing, you were promising to change the world, and turns out it's really hard to sell dog food on the internet.

Speaker 22 Dean thought the dot-com world was a joke.

Speaker 12 He believed in hardware and products you could touch.

Speaker 39 And now, as the dot-com world was crashing, Silicon Valley investors suddenly wanted products you could touch, too.

Speaker 40 It started with John Doerr, the legendary head of the venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins.

Speaker 67 He's the guy that famously was an early, early investor in Amazon.com.

Speaker 45 Doerr's company invested $38 million in Ginger.

Speaker 37 And before they even cut the check, Doerr started calling his friends, Steve Kemper again.

Speaker 4 And then, of course, he got Steve Jobs in to to see it.

Speaker 4 Bezos came in to see it because he was a friend of Doors.

Speaker 35 So in the fall of 2000, Steve, who thought he was chronicling a simple engineering story, suddenly found himself in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency near SFO airport, watching Jeff Bezos riding around on a ginger, laughing, and Steve Jobs yelling about how the design of the ginger was way too ugly.

Speaker 23 In a very short period of time, Dean Kamen went from mortgaging his house to pay for R ⁇ D to having extremely famous tech investors begging to give him millions of dollars.

Speaker 23 Door predicted that Segway would be valued at $5 billion five years after launch.

Speaker 43 But when would that be?

Speaker 65 Dean's obsession with secrecy was slowing everything down.

Speaker 44 DECA couldn't hire enough engineers because Dean only wanted people who would come to Manchester on faith.

Speaker 43 They couldn't conduct market research because they couldn't tell anyone what the product was.

Speaker 40 At this point, nearly everyone wished Dean would stop being so secretive about Ginger so they could begin to get the project out the door.

Speaker 4 Twice, one of Dean's investors said to Steve Kemper, I think what we really need is a sexy leak.

Speaker 67 But Dean wasn't having it.

Speaker 10 That inventor's paranoia again.

Speaker 26 He was convinced that if Honda or Ford got wind of Ginger, they'd build their own and release it before he could.

Speaker 48 He was holding on tight, but it was about to be an impossible secret to keep.

Speaker 49 By this point, it was December 2000.

Speaker 50 Steve had been reporting at DECA for a year and a half, and he was ready to try and sell the book.

Speaker 48 He wrote up that West Coast meeting with Dean and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos as a sample chapter, carefully leaving out details of what the invention actually was.

Speaker 45 And now it was up to Rafe and me to convince publishers to take the risk of buying a book about a secret technology, even though Steve couldn't tell them what it was, even though he wouldn't even tell us what it was.

Speaker 48 So, we came up with a book proposal.

Speaker 35 I still have it.

Speaker 23 It's really good.

Speaker 40 The first half is a ginned-up series of emails that Steve and I drafted with me playing the doubting Thomas, him convincing me over time that this invention was real and would indeed change the world.

Speaker 73 The second half of the proposal is that sample chapter, that juicy West Coast ambush with all those big names.

Speaker 4 Smoke and mirrors, I just had to make it so enticing

Speaker 4 that instead of an editor saying, well, this is crazy, I don't know what I'm buying, instead make them say, this is crazy, and how do I get in on it?

Speaker 47 By New Year's 2001, we had the entire package ready to go.

Speaker 23 Rafe made the list of editors we'd submit the book to, but the submission was going to come from me.

Speaker 51 I was unbelievably proud that he was entrusting me with something with this much potential.

Speaker 5 I was just so happy. I was just there looking over your shoulder, so to speak, meaning, you know, but even though you were in Hawaii.

Speaker 9 Oh, God.

Speaker 35 Yes, Hawaii.

Speaker 38 We had just moved there.

Speaker 59 My wife had graduated from law school.

Speaker 39 She'd gotten a clerkship with a federal judge in Honolulu.

Speaker 50 And for some reason, Rafe let me keep working for him, even though I was five time zones behind the East Coast.

Speaker 37 So, here I was, an unknown agent on an island in the middle of the Pacific, preparing to send this book proposal about a mystery invention out to editors I'd never met.

Speaker 50 At the last minute, Rafe had come up with the title, IT.

Speaker 44 Like, just the pronoun, it.

Speaker 51 It was so last-minute, we didn't even tell Steve about it.

Speaker 47 I knew what to do.

Speaker 51 I'd seen Rafe do it a hundred hundred times.

Speaker 28 The day after New Year's, like 8 a.m.

Speaker 62 Hawaii time, I made a little list of things to say to editors, and then I dialed a bunch of 212 numbers.

Speaker 31 And when each editor said, sure, I'll take a look, I would email the proposal with a note reminding them how secret it was.

Speaker 49 Please don't share, I said.

Speaker 43 And at the end of the day, after I'd emailed the last editor, I exhaled, I drove downtown, and I met my wife at a bar in Ala Moana for Taco Tuesday.

Speaker 51 All the clerks gossiped gossiped about their judges, but I just drank margaritas and smiled about the secret thing I was doing.

Speaker 52 That night, I heard the office phone ring at like 4 a.m.

Speaker 37 And when I got up the next morning, I already had messages on the answering machine.

Speaker 23 Wow, it was totally happening.

Speaker 64 Most of the responses were from the big trade houses, all those two-on-two numbers.

Speaker 60 But I'd also sent the proposal to an editor named Hollis Heimbach at Harvard Business School Press.

Speaker 42 They're an academic publisher of leadership books, business case studies, stuff like that.

Speaker 13 And I just remember reading it and saying, wow, this is incredible. Now, it didn't reveal what the it was.

Speaker 13 So I remember reading it and thinking, wow, I'd love to publish this. And then thinking, wow, could we ever publish that here?

Speaker 12 The big publishers were interested, but with a caveat.

Speaker 23 Editors wanted to be able to get out of the deal if, once they learned what it was, they didn't think it was cool enough.

Speaker 47 But Harvard Business School Press didn't have those conditions.

Speaker 12 So just a few days after sending out the proposal, we sold it to Hollis Heimbach for $250,000.

Speaker 13 It was on the higher end of what we would pay for a project.

Speaker 13 We were seriously committed to needing to make the book a success.

Speaker 26 I got to work selling foreign rights right away.

Speaker 47 Just like Rafe always did when he made a big deal. I emailed a bunch of our co-agents and foreign rights scouts.

Speaker 51 Rafe and I knew we'd done something kind of remarkable.

Speaker 68 There was a sense of both triumph, but also a sense that if only we could have been more forthcoming about what this really was.

Speaker 53 Boy,

Speaker 76 the sky was the limit.

Speaker 47 My response definitely was $250,000.

Speaker 5 You hadn't done a lot of deals.

Speaker 4 And so I don't know if you remember this, but I got the deal, and that night I went up to the big banquet at Dean's house and I was very excited and

Speaker 4 told Dean about it. He was very excited.
And then like three days later, it all blew up.

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Speaker 78 Imagine you could actually change fundamental law in this country.

Speaker 11 What would you want?

Speaker 79 Hey there, I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Coast of Anicus, Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law.

Speaker 79 And you just heard from writer and historian Jill Lepore, our expert guest, on a recent episode of Amicus.

Speaker 79 Jill provided the vital and timely reminder of the power and promise of constitutional amendment as laid out in her new book, We the People.

Speaker 79 If you are feeling overwhelmed by the Trump regime's lawlessness and horrified by the Supreme Court's complicity, have a listen to our episode, How to Fix Our Broken Constitution.

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Speaker 37 Three days after we sold the book, on January 9th, 2001, Steve Kemper's phone rang.

Speaker 4 A reporter from the Hartford Current called me, started asking me questions about ginger, except she called it it.

Speaker 4 I didn't know what she was talking about. So I said,

Speaker 4 How do you know these things? And she said, Oh, you don't know that your proposal's been leaked?

Speaker 23 A brand new website called Inside.com had posted a blockbuster story.

Speaker 10 Harvard Business School Press paid a quarter million dollars for a book about an incredible invention called IT, but no one knows what it is.

Speaker 51 This was a perfect scoop for Inside.com, which ran juicy industry industry stories that once upon a time only the trades covered.

Speaker 23 Media hires, book deals, Silicon Valley money.

Speaker 35 And it was the perfect time for a story like this.

Speaker 51 The internet bubble was bursting, but here was an invention from an inventor like Thomas Edison or something.

Speaker 38 The story got picked up everywhere.

Speaker 26 People were speculating on CNN, The Washington Post, on the BBC.

Speaker 48 On Good Morning America, this tech commentator Bob Metcalf claimed he'd seen it, and it was bigger than the internet.

Speaker 28 It was one of the first genuinely viral stories on the internet.

Speaker 12 So viral they were talking about it on the news.

Speaker 37 Here's a clip from NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Speaker 8 There's so much speculation I've actually heard that it was maybe a hovercraft or some type of vehicle that wasn't with wheels.

Speaker 81 Oh, you think it might be some sort of anti-gravitational device?

Speaker 23 When Inside.com saw the kind of attention the it story got, they flooded the zone with post after post.

Speaker 42 Soon they went even bigger.

Speaker 23 Inside.com, the website, wanted to launch a print magazine spin-off.

Speaker 42 So the cover story for their very first issue was, What It Is.

Speaker 80 The journalist Adam Pennenberg wrote that story.

Speaker 37 He thought he'd figured out what it was, a hydrogen-powered scooter.

Speaker 82 Decca had registered all these domain names for like mysterlingscooter.com and, you know,

Speaker 82 things based on a scooter, which I thought, that's kind of weird.

Speaker 52 Dean hadn't been careful enough for the new world of the internet.

Speaker 61 He left a lot of clues.

Speaker 56 All those patents Dean Kamen had filed, his inventor's paranoia backfired.

Speaker 31 In an earlier time, a journalist would have had to do a lot more legwork to dig up all those patents, but now they were all right there on the patent office's website.

Speaker 6 Pennenberg may have basically worked out that Ginger was a scooter, but plenty of people didn't believe it.

Speaker 23 Or maybe it was just more fun to speculate like crazy.

Speaker 76 The first thing that really took off was the whole idea of a hoverboard.

Speaker 40 This was going to be Marty McFly's skateboard. They've done it.

Speaker 32 We can't wait.

Speaker 72 That's James Botorf.

Speaker 31 He and his brother Greg were web entrepreneurs in 2001.

Speaker 37 They ran a site called Bargain Flicks, which compared DVD prices across different online sellers, and another site called ps2bargains.com.

Speaker 50 They were immediately fascinated by it, so they did what came naturally.

Speaker 73 They made a website.

Speaker 52 Here's Greg Botorf.

Speaker 84 And I can't remember whose idea it was, but one of us said, why don't we just put a board up and have people speculate on what this could be?

Speaker 43 The itquestion.com got more than 100,000 hits in its first 24 hours online.

Speaker 44 When Time magazine linked to some DECA patent images, the it question posted, their servers completely crashed.

Speaker 37 Greg had to drive out to the server farm in the middle of the night to pay for more bandwidth.

Speaker 42 Everyone was so hungry for speculation about it that the Botorfs started being quoted in the media as experts.

Speaker 84 And James and I would laugh about the fact that, you know, he's sitting in Cincinnati, I'm sitting in my spare bedroom in Raleigh. We have no idea what's going on.

Speaker 84 All we did was put a board up, and now we're the world experts on this new invention.

Speaker 23 Maybe the peak of IT mania was when it made it onto South Park.

Speaker 80 Mr.

Speaker 38 Garrison invents a revolutionary new transportation device called IT, which blows away Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who literally quote our book proposal.

Speaker 85 It gets over 300 miles to the gallon and is safely capable of speeds of over 200 miles per hour.

Speaker 9 Wow. Whoa! This will change everything.

Speaker 7 We're going to have to rethink cities.

Speaker 9 In classic South Park Park style, the only wrinkle is that it is controlled by levers shaped like penises.

Speaker 85 Left side for throttle, right side for steering. The third flexi grip is gently inserted into the anus to keep the driver in place.

Speaker 26 Anyway, you can just imagine, I'm sure.

Speaker 31 All of this hubbub felt completely new.

Speaker 28 A wild confluence of the internet and old media birthing something we'd never had before.

Speaker 48 A print magazine spun off from a website scouring online patent applications.

Speaker 51 Venerable Time magazine crashing a tiny little fan site because they didn't bother uploading their own images.

Speaker 49 TV shows making jokes about things they read online.

Speaker 43 In the wreckage of Web 1.0, the new internet was stirring.

Speaker 73 And how was I doing?

Speaker 76 It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, without a doubt.

Speaker 25 My old boss again, Rafe Sagelen.

Speaker 76 It was just, I think we were smiling all the way.

Speaker 66 I mean, we were, you know, it was.

Speaker 42 The gulf between how Rafe remembers the feeding frenzy and how I remember it is a great clue as to why he has had an enormously successful career as a literary agent and I have not.

Speaker 41 Because I was miserable.

Speaker 27 Every morning, I woke up out there on my island, stressed and anxious.

Speaker 25 I was supposed to be excited, but everything felt totally out of control.

Speaker 23 When I talked to Rafe for this podcast, I tried to explain.

Speaker 48 but I hadn't told him back then.

Speaker 15 I would wake up and it would be like this horror show of, oh, fuck, what happened while I was asleep?

Speaker 15 The excitement like curdled into total misery at some point because I had an author who was freaking out at me and

Speaker 15 a situation that I couldn't control at all. And I felt so over my head at this at this entire thing.

Speaker 68 That's one reason why I loved your taking the lead on it. So you took some of the pressure off of me.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 50 I didn't know how the story had leaked, but I was sure it was my fault somehow.

Speaker 46 Every morning I would go on theitquestion.com and click around the message boards and read everyone's debates about it.

Speaker 73 I still didn't even know what it was.

Speaker 51 But reading speculation was my way of avoiding all those emails piled up in my inbox.

Speaker 26 A lot of those emails were from Steve Kemper.

Speaker 51 Steve was still trying to report the book, even as Dean was going completely crazy because his secret project was now front page news.

Speaker 9 Oh, I felt horrible.

Speaker 4 I felt horrible for so many different reasons.

Speaker 4 I didn't know what the future would be because of the leak.

Speaker 48 The day after that first article, Steve went back up to DECA to explain that he hadn't leaked anything, at least not on purpose.

Speaker 55 He had spent 18 months there.

Speaker 6 In some ways he'd become part of the team.

Speaker 28 In the ginger testing room where all the engineers autographed the dents in the wall from their notable crashes, there was a big hole labeled in Sharpie, Steve K.

Speaker 35 Those engineers told Steve they were kind of glad it was finally out there.

Speaker 39 But Dean wasn't glad.

Speaker 65 He was beside himself.

Speaker 27 Dean told Steve he still thought the book was important, but that the investors wanted to kill it.

Speaker 65 Steve reminded Dean that it was Dean's call, not the investor's call.

Speaker 40 When Steve walked out of the building, he realized he'd forgotten something and he tried to open the door, but his keycard no longer worked.

Speaker 39 He was out.

Speaker 9 Are you ready?

Speaker 54 I'm ready. Okay.

Speaker 15 I think it's time.

Speaker 12 The curtain finally came up on on the Segway personal transporter in December 2001, just under a year after the proposal leaked.

Speaker 28 There was Dean in jeans and work boots.

Speaker 36 Good morning, America.

Speaker 7 There it is.

Speaker 29 Now, what does it do?

Speaker 40 It's sort of like putting on a pair of magic sneakers.

Speaker 27 You stand on this Segway HT

Speaker 32 and you think forward, you go forward.

Speaker 9 You think.

Speaker 47 Diane Sawyer might have been dubious at first, but she got that same dopey ginger smile as soon as she got a chance to take the Segway out for a spin.

Speaker 11 We do have our tricks.

Speaker 5 Are we ready? Are we all ready?

Speaker 11 Okay, we have the no-hands version.

Speaker 25 Time magazine put the segue on the cover and gave seven pages to the invention. In that story, Dean says that the segue would be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.

Speaker 12 Jay Leno rode out on a segue to do his monologue and interviewed Dean on the Tonight Show, right between Russell Crowe and Sting.

Speaker 25 The next week, the segue even appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, Osama bin Laden fleeing coalition forces, riding a Segway along a mountain pass in Afghanistan.

Speaker 25 Now, I don't need to tell you that even with all this glowing publicity, this incredible launch, the Segway was a flop.

Speaker 45 Remember when Dean leased that factory to make 6,000 Segways a week?

Speaker 37 A year after launch, Wired magazine reported that the Segway factory was manufacturing 10 Segways a week.

Speaker 25 There isn't just one reason why the Segway wasn't the smash hit everyone thought it was going to be.

Speaker 36 There are many.

Speaker 73 First, it was expensive.

Speaker 63 Way too expensive.

Speaker 64 When you could finally order a Segway, it cost $5,000.

Speaker 26 Dean had built the most elegant piece of technology possible to medical level safety standards.

Speaker 62 The thing had two separate engines attached to two separate batteries just in case something failed.

Speaker 65 And Decca didn't know it was overpriced because Dean, obsessed with secrecy, hadn't let his marketing guys do any market research whatsoever.

Speaker 11 The Segway comes to market as something that is so expensive and doesn't meet an existing obvious mass consumer need.

Speaker 12 Margaret O'Mara, the historian of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 11 Its main customer base are these wealthy mechanical engineering nerds who probably built radios and computers in their basements when they were kids.

Speaker 39 That kind of customer base isn't big enough to change the world.

Speaker 33 That kind of customer base, no offense, maybe also doesn't care that much about looking cool.

Speaker 80 And that was the second strike against the Segway.

Speaker 36 It made you look kind of silly.

Speaker 34 This fact was the inspiration for the 2009 hit comedy Paul Blart Mall Cop, starring Kevin James as a security guard who rides a Segway everywhere.

Speaker 61 Please pull to the side, sir, out of traffic. Tan jacket, red scooter, please pull to the right out of traffic.

Speaker 64 Nick Bakay wrote Paul Blart with Kevin James.

Speaker 51 Bakay says that they basically knew they had a movie as soon as they saw a mall cop riding a segue.

Speaker 29 I think they found a way to make the most non-threatening vehicle possible, which is great for a guy who's trying to maintain law and order.

Speaker 81 And there's something about the motion.

Speaker 29 It is more graceful than threatening. And

Speaker 29 you put a big man on one of those things and you're halfway to comedy right there.

Speaker 26 This is not at all what Dean Kamen was envisioning. Back in 2000, Dean tried to convince Steven Spielberg that the cops and minority report should all be writing segues.

Speaker 28 He thought that would nail the future.

Speaker 63 Cops on Segways.

Speaker 60 Instead, he got Paul Blart.

Speaker 67 Do you think that Paul Blart helped to cement in America's mind that the Segway was uncool, or was it always uncool?

Speaker 29 If the idea ever was, well, you know, all the cool kids are going to be riding Segways,

Speaker 29 you know, down to the Sunset Strip and nightclubs.

Speaker 29 You know, that was not a good plan to begin with. We didn't put any nails in that coffin.

Speaker 43 The history of the Segway post-2001 is basically one long, dark comedy compared to the high drama of its development and funding.

Speaker 51 And it only got darker.

Speaker 10 The same year Paul Blart came out, Dean Kamen finally sold Segway to a British millionaire named Jimmy Hesseldon.

Speaker 83 Jimmy Heseldon loved Segues.

Speaker 28 He had big dreams for the company.

Speaker 37 But that all ended in 2010 when he accidentally rode his Segway off a cliff.

Speaker 4 And my theory is that he had one wheel that was too close to the cliff and couldn't get enough traction, and it didn't communicate fast enough with the other wheel and it spun him and it spun him around and took him over the cliff.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of theories. The machine is not totally foolproof because fools were so ingenious, you know, as the old saying is.

Speaker 26 The death of the one guy who loved Segways enough to invest in Segway, killed by his Segway, seemed basically to put a cap on the story of Ginger.

Speaker 31 It was too expensive, it looked goofy, it was cursed.

Speaker 87 But I think there's another reason the Segue failed.

Speaker 26 It has to do with the impossible dreams everyone had for it.

Speaker 49 When it was a mystery, it was the coolest invention in the world.

Speaker 38 Once you saw the Segway, it was just a scooter.

Speaker 43 It could never quite recover from that letdown.

Speaker 26 And that's why I can't stop thinking that the Segway might still have had a chance, but for one thing.

Speaker 76 What if we hadn't done what we did?

Speaker 12 That's Kurt Anderson.

Speaker 51 He was one of the founders of Inside.com, the site that ran dozens of stories about it and put it on the cover of the first and only issue of Inside magazine.

Speaker 43 He asked me, what if it had never been leaked and overhyped in the first place?

Speaker 88 What if it had just been a thing and it came out and Dean came and did it? And that alternate history is interesting because it would have had a, I think, different trajectory.

Speaker 37 Which is to say, what if a 25-year-old dumbass hadn't accidentally leaked the proposal?

Speaker 12 Who knows what would have happened?

Speaker 41 Because after all this time, I do think the leak had a lot to do with how little I truly understood about book publishing and how little we all understood about what the internet was about to become.

Speaker 37 I never told Steve my suspicions, not until we were speaking for this podcast.

Speaker 4 I still won't know who did it. Maybe you guys knew.
You were kind of cagey about that, I must say.

Speaker 4 If you did know, you never let me know. I don't know if you were afraid I would go down there with a machete or something, but

Speaker 81 I was very cagey about it because it became clear to me pretty early that probably whatever had happened was my fault.

Speaker 39 I explained to Steve that once we made the deal with Harvard, I did what agents did next.

Speaker 48 I sent the proposal to book scouts who worked for foreign publishers.

Speaker 37 But I was play acting.

Speaker 45 I didn't really understand the way that ecosystem works, that scouts trade material back and forth, they gossip, they share.

Speaker 87 And once something enters that world, it's everywhere.

Speaker 45 You ask an editor to keep a proposal secret, they'll do it.

Speaker 51 You ask a scout, you're basically telling them, please don't do the thing that is the whole point of your job.

Speaker 49 Once upon a time, it wouldn't have mattered if a bunch of book scouts and their friends knew about this book proposal, but all of a sudden, sharing leapt the bounds of the real world and went online.

Speaker 51 Ginger was one of the first moments that Web 1.0 started to turn into the internet we know now, the all-encompassing, media-eating, real-world-changing internet.

Speaker 38 I was Rafe's internet guy.

Speaker 37 I'd even coded the HTML on the Sagellen agency's fancy website, but I completely failed to anticipate that.

Speaker 81 I'm sure I was cagey with you because I felt 100% responsible for all this shit that was going down.

Speaker 4 I believe that you guys knew what you were doing, and it could have happened to anybody. But I see what you're saying, Dan.
I mean, you were naive like I was naive.

Speaker 4 And that's what happens to naive people. They take one in the forehead, you know.

Speaker 28 I appreciate Steve going easy on me.

Speaker 23 I stopped trying to be a literary agent not too long after all the Segway stuff happened, for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 3 But in the back of my mind, there was always my sneaking suspicion that it was my carelessness that ruined everything for Steve.

Speaker 51 I didn't want to do that to another author.

Speaker 65 Steve...

Speaker 51 did write the book on the Segway, though.

Speaker 40 It's called Reinventing the Wheel.

Speaker 37 It's a very, very good portrait of innovation and of how a promising project can go completely off the rails.

Speaker 6 Now, in 2021, Steve Kemper just turned in another book, his fourth.

Speaker 23 This one's about the last U.S.

Speaker 40 ambassador to Japan before Pearl Harbor.

Speaker 67 He told me he thinks it's probably his last.

Speaker 38 When I asked Steve what lesson he took away from the ordeal of the Segue story, he surprised me.

Speaker 4 It was a bad experience at the end, but it was so worth it to write the, to live through it and then to write the book. Writers, you don't get many chances at something like I got to do.

Speaker 4 Embed yourself with this kind of group of people, this kind of main character, and tell that story from the inside. It just doesn't happen.
So

Speaker 4 I wish I'd had another opportunity to do something like it again.

Speaker 36 Dean Kamen and Decca are still up in Manchester.

Speaker 26 I left about a dozen voicemails for Dean's longtime administrator. I sent word through friends.

Speaker 12 He never responded.

Speaker 28 The company's still working on big projects like a portable water purifier.

Speaker 50 They're still trying to make that stair-climbing wheelchair work.

Speaker 26 It bombed for Johnson Johnson because it was way too expensive.

Speaker 31 But the next time you go to the movies, you might see a different DECA innovation.

Speaker 49 The Coca-Cola Freestyle Machine, that miracle device that mixes flavors into your Diet Coke with the same precision that Dean's first invention, the drug infusion pump, delivered medication at carefully calibrated levels.

Speaker 39 And Segway?

Speaker 71 After poor Jimmy Hesseldon died, Segway was bought by the Chinese company 9-bot.

Speaker 10 Segway now makes a lot of the rental scooters that you can see zipping around every American city.

Speaker 12 In fact, Segway's children are everywhere.

Speaker 23 Here's Benji Ambrogi, the DECA engineer.

Speaker 61 I was on a bike ride this past weekend, and I saw a guy on one of these single-wheel devices, you know, with two pedals on each side, and there's a picture of that in one of our patents.

Speaker 23 The DECA guys scoff at those hoverboards and scooters, how cheap they are, how sometimes the batteries just burst into flames.

Speaker 25 But way more people own and use them than ever owned or used a Segway.

Speaker 23 The other day I went to Capitol Segway in downtown D.C.

Speaker 89 I said I put an hour on there so I put 3 p.m. Now if it's not here by them then we'll assume you've put it in the river or something.
Right.

Speaker 56 If it went in the river I went in with it.

Speaker 71 He gave me a 10 minute riding lesson, put a helmet on me, and let me out to ginger around the National Mall.

Speaker 59 There's scooters everywhere, there's bikes, saw a hoverboard.

Speaker 87 I'm definitely the only Segway.

Speaker 87 But I gotta say, man,

Speaker 7 it just feels remarkable riding on this thing.

Speaker 50 Propelled forward by a technology I could never understand in a million years.

Speaker 86 Technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

Speaker 37 When I returned the Segway, I told the guy at the the rental place how I'd learned about all the incredible inspiration and skill that had gone into the segue, all to make something that cost 10 times as much as a scooter and required a lesson from an expert to ride.

Speaker 35 He said something I cannot stop thinking about.

Speaker 89 A bunch of really smart people got together. That you needed like one dumb person in the room too to kind of keep things at that level.

Speaker 87 Exactly right.

Speaker 21 All right, thanks, man.

Speaker 25 The segue was an elegant work of genius when what the world really needed was a good enough piece of crap.

Speaker 65 Maybe it's too bad I was the only dumb guy around.

Speaker 43 On the way back to my office, just walking on my plain old feet, I thought about the moment when your path diverges from what you always thought it would be.

Speaker 43 The leak was the moment Ginger's path diverged.

Speaker 25 Ginger was a moment the internet's path diverged.

Speaker 12 But it was also the moment my path diverged.

Speaker 23 I watched what Steve Kemper did, how he turned that Smoke and Mirrors proposal into a true, entertaining, rock-solid book.

Speaker 26 Amidst the swirl of speculation and hype and wild promises, there was always his sure reporting.

Speaker 48 That raised a curtain for me.

Speaker 73 I didn't know how to do that, but at least I knew I didn't know how to do that.

Speaker 23 And maybe I could learn.

Speaker 64 This is Decodering.

Speaker 37 I'm Dan Coyce.

Speaker 20 And I'm Willa Paskin.

Speaker 17 You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

Speaker 41 You can find me at Dan Coice, K-O-I-S.

Speaker 17 If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

Speaker 17 If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 18 Even better, tell your friends.

Speaker 20 This podcast was written by Dan Coyce. It was edited and produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch.
Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Speaker 20 Thanks to William Solman, Mike Ambrosi, Brian Tuhe, Justin Amada at Capital Segway, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback on the way.

Speaker 16 If you are already a Slate Plus member, thank you so much. You can listen to the entire season of Decodering right now.

Speaker 17 If you are not a Slate Plus member, we would love your support. It means a lot.

Speaker 16 Please sign up for Slate Plus at slate.com slash decoder plus and we'll give you access to this whole season of decodering.

Speaker 17 Otherwise, we'll see you next week.