Who Killed The Segway?

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.

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

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

It's a hovercraft.

It's a spaceship.

It's a jetpack.

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

This was the biggest story anywhere in the world.

For that time, it was insane.

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

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

All right, are we ready?

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Okay.

I think it's time.

All right.

I think it was behind a curtain and then it came out.

It was like this kind of pokey way they did it.

There it is.

That's it?

That can't be it.

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.

Amid this wreckage, a mystery invention called IT arrived.

Jeff Bezos said it was revolutionary.

Steve Jobs said it would be bigger than the PC.

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

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

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

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

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

That literary agent was Dan Coyce.

He's now an editor and writer at Slate.

Hi, Dan.

Hi, Willa.

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

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

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

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

So, today, on Decodering,

did Dan kill the Segway?

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You remember the Segue.

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.

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.

But that's not how it started.

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

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

Dean was a great character.

That's Steve Kemper.

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

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

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.

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

Dean is anti-authoritarian, whimsical, and wealthy.

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

He declared independence from the United States.

Somehow he got the first George Bush to sign a mutual non-aggression pact.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

How many lives would that change?

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

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.

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

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

Your body is the joystick.

The more lean you have, the faster it goes and you lean back and it slows down.

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

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

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

It became their nights and weekends project.

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.

So it needed a code name.

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

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

And so Fred a stair, and then someone said, Fred upstairs because it's a stair climbing device.

Then the project became Fred.

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

Who dances with Fred?

Ginger.

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

Ginger became its own secret department at DECA.

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

No, ginger was too important.

Ginger could solve the problem of city travel.

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

Ginger could change the world.

Dean planned to manufacture and sell this product himself.

Deca filed patent after patent for Ginger's technology.

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

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

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.

It was a little lab.

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.

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.

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

Dean counted on that.

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

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

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.

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

It's going to be a new world.

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

Who's going to want to walk?

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

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.

And I'll do it, you know, on spec until I can find a publisher.

And so he agreed with that.

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.

Now it's 1999.

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

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

Steve couldn't do that.

He needed help, so he made a phone call.

I'm Rafe Segallen.

I'm a literary agent.

A literary agent helps writers sell their books to publishers.

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

In 1999, Rafe was my boss.

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

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

Steve Kemper and I had emailed about another book proposal.

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

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

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

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

It's going to change the world.

I said, okay, sure.

Tell us more about that.

I remember this call.

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

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.

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

I can't tell you.

I said, What?

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

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

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

He believed in me.

He pushed me to be the book's lead agent.

And Rafe and I told Steve, keep reporting.

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

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.

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

Dean Kamen needed cash.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Dean thought the dot-com world was a joke.

He believed in hardware and products you could touch.

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

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

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

Doerr's company invested $38 million in Ginger.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

But when would that be?

Dean's obsession with secrecy was slowing everything down.

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

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

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.

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

But Dean wasn't having it.

That inventor's paranoia again.

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

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

By this point, it was December 2000.

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

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.

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.

So, we came up with a book proposal.

I still have it.

It's really good.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

Oh, God.

Yes, Hawaii.

We had just moved there.

My wife had graduated from law school.

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

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

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.

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

Like, just the pronoun, it.

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

I knew what to do.

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

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

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

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.

Please don't share, I said.

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.

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

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

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

Wow, it was totally happening.

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

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

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

And I just remember reading it and saying, wow, this is incredible.

Now, it didn't reveal what the it was.

So I remember reading it and thinking, wow, I'd love to publish this.

And then thinking, wow, could we ever publish that here?

The big publishers were interested, but with a caveat.

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.

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

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

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

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

I got to work selling foreign rights right away.

Just like Rafe always did when he made a big deal.

I emailed a bunch of our co-agents and foreign rights scouts.

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

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.

Boy,

the sky was the limit.

My response definitely was $250,000.

You hadn't done a lot of deals.

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

told Dean about it.

He was very excited.

And then like three days later, it all blew up.

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

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

I didn't know what she was talking about.

So I said,

How do you know these things?

And she said, Oh, you don't know that your proposal's been leaked?

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

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.

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

Media hires, book deals, Silicon Valley money.

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

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

The story got picked up everywhere.

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

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

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

So viral they were talking about it on the news.

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

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.

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

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

Soon they went even bigger.

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

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

The journalist Adam Pennenberg wrote that story.

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

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

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

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

He left a lot of clues.

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

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.

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

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

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

This was going to be Marty McFly's skateboard.

They've done it.

We can't wait.

That's James Botorf.

He and his brother Greg were web entrepreneurs in 2001.

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

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

They made a website.

Here's Greg Botorf.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Mr.

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

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

Wow.

Whoa!

This will change everything.

We're going to have to rethink cities.

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

Left side for throttle, right side for steering.

The third flexi grip is gently inserted into the anus to keep the driver in place.

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

All of this hubbub felt completely new.

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

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

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

TV shows making jokes about things they read online.

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

And how was I doing?

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

My old boss again, Rafe Sagelen.

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

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

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.

Because I was miserable.

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

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

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

but I hadn't told him back then.

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

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

a situation that I couldn't control at all.

And I felt so over my head at this at this entire thing.

That's one reason why I loved your taking the lead on it.

So you took some of the pressure off of me.

Yeah.

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

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

I still didn't even know what it was.

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

A lot of those emails were from Steve Kemper.

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

Oh, I felt horrible.

I felt horrible for so many different reasons.

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

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.

He had spent 18 months there.

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

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.

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

But Dean wasn't glad.

He was beside himself.

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

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

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.

He was out.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Okay.

I think it's time.

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

There was Dean in jeans and work boots.

Good morning, America.

There it is.

Now, what does it do?

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

You stand on this Segway HT

and you think forward, you go forward.

You think.

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.

We do have our tricks.

Are we ready?

Are we all ready?

Okay, we have the no-hands version.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

There are many.

First, it was expensive.

Way too expensive.

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret O'Mara, the historian of Silicon Valley.

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

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

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

And that was the second strike against the Segway.

It made you look kind of silly.

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.

Please pull to the side, sir, out of traffic.

Tan jacket, red scooter, please pull to the right out of traffic.

Nick Bakay wrote Paul Blart with Kevin James.

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

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.

And there's something about the motion.

It is more graceful than threatening.

And

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

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.

He thought that would nail the future.

Cops on Segways.

Instead, he got Paul Blart.

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

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

you know, down to the Sunset Strip and nightclubs.

You know, that was not a good plan to begin with.

We didn't put any nails in that coffin.

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

And it only got darker.

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

Jimmy Heseldon loved Segues.

He had big dreams for the company.

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

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.

There's a lot of theories.

The machine is not totally foolproof because fools were so ingenious, you know, as the old saying is.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

It could never quite recover from that letdown.

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

What if we hadn't done what we did?

That's Kurt Anderson.

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.

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

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.

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

Who knows what would have happened?

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.

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

I still won't know who did it.

Maybe you guys knew.

You were kind of cagey about that, I must say.

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

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

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

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

But I was play acting.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I was Rafe's internet guy.

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

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

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.

And that's what happens to naive people.

They take one in the forehead, you know.

I appreciate Steve going easy on me.

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

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

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

Steve...

did write the book on the Segway, though.

It's called Reinventing the Wheel.

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

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

This one's about the last U.S.

ambassador to Japan before Pearl Harbor.

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

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

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.

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

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

Dean Kamen and Decca are still up in Manchester.

I left about a dozen voicemails for Dean's longtime administrator.

I sent word through friends.

He never responded.

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

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

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

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

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.

And Segway?

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

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

In fact, Segway's children are everywhere.

Here's Benji Ambrogi, the DECA engineer.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I'm definitely the only Segway.

But I gotta say, man,

it just feels remarkable riding on this thing.

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

Technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

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.

He said something I cannot stop thinking about.

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.

Exactly right.

All right, thanks, man.

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

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

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.

The leak was the moment Ginger's path diverged.

Ginger was a moment the internet's path diverged.

But it was also the moment my path diverged.

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

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

That raised a curtain for me.

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

And maybe I could learn.

This is Decodering.

I'm Dan Coyce.

And I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

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

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

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

Even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Dan Coyce.

It was edited and produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

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.

If you are already a Slate Plus member, thank you so much.

You can listen to the entire season of Decodering right now.

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It means a lot.

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