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No Segway in Sight: Dean Kamen Moves On To Inventive SeriesOct 22, 2010 (The Hartford Courant - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- NORTH DUMPLING ISLAND, N.Y. -- A mile off the Connecticut shore, Dean Kamen's fanciful two-acre island retreat is dominated by an updated 106-year-old lighthouse, powered entirely by wind, solar and a couple of experimental devices of his own making. There's nothing the inventor of the Segway has devised to date to make the boat ride from Noank any less cold and choppy, though, soaking the rare visitor. But just wait. Kamen isn't only excited about his own inventions, which have ranged from an insulin pump and robotic prosthetic "Luke arm" to his latest potential game-changer: a mini-fridge device poised to provide clean drinking water for Third World villages. He's also excited about what other inventors are up to in his new cable TV series. In "Dean of Invention," which premieres tonight on Planet Green at 10 p.m., he flies his own helicopter or plane to see other inventors and their new development in bionic limb replacement, robotic "dogs" to help in battlefield rescues, a car that folds out to become a plane and other single-flyer technology. The eight-episode series starts tonight by focusing in on teeny programmable electronic devices called microbots and the even smaller nanobots that can do their job "Fantastic Voyage"-style -navigating through the bloodstream. The idea of the whole series is, like his program of competitive robotics he sponsors called FIRST, getting young people excited about science. "It's no coincidence that Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison all came from America," Kamen says. "This country had the right perspective of risk, opportunity and hard work" to create an environment where their inventions could be made. The idea of the series, he says, is to "put interesting people we visit into the public view to show what technology can offer us, in a way that we can understand and that is not dumbed down." Kamen's travels take him to Harvard, to see the nanorobot devices injected into mice, or Texas, where he witnessed another new robotic application pulling people out of rubble at disasters. "Besides being fun I met some pretty amazing people," he says. "The kind of people one day you could open the paper and say, 'Hey, look who won the Nobel Prize.'" "Everybody wants to know what the next big thing will be," his cohost Joanne Colan says. "To me, it's something educational, but it is also just really a framework of life. Technology is so innately part of how we live today." "I assumed I did not have to become an actor," Kamen says in his living room addition to his lighthouse, frankly barely discernable over the helicopter-sized noise of his single wind turbine just outside the window. He had experience with telling his tale on TV before, on "60 Minutes" or "20/20" and had a longer form interview on the Sundance show "Iconoclasts" with Isabella Rossellini. He leaves to others "the magic of taking 30 hours of footage and making an interesting 30 minutes." While Kamen is pictured going from his New Hampshire mansion to his helicopter and off, "Dean of Invention" does not visit his island retreat, at least in the first season. North Dumpling Island, for which he has devised a whole kingdom with its own constitution and non-aggression treaties, is actually a part of New York State, though it's closer to Connecticut. Kamen says he's so busy he doesn't get to visit the island any more than a handful of days a year. Still, he's happy to show it off, from its lighthouse tower to his basement, where the power readings from his solar panels that move with the sun and revved up windmill are all charted on a computer. Nearby is his adapted Sterling engine, which has been known to run on anything that burns. His water purification system is nearby in a cabinet. "It's fun," he says of the North Dumpling Island retreat, which the "Today" show Thursday compared to a retreat worthy of Batman alter ego Bruce Wayne. But though its study is affixed with a laptop, a wall of books (including a boxed set of EC Comics) and a framed picture of Albert Einstein overseeing the room, Kamen does very little work there. But his work does take him all over the world from his invention base in New Hampshire, where he says, "it's important to create an environment where you can afford to fail." Some consider his Segway a failure but it has sold up to 70,000 devices since its unveiling in 2000. And, he says, it took a while for the airplane and horseless carriage to catch on as well. It hasn't been helped by the fact it's seen most often in comedies. When the owner of the British company that manufactures the Segway died last month after falling off a cliff while on the device, some mistakenly thought it was Kamen. "I started getting all these e-mails from people that said, 'Are you OK?," he says. There's no Segway anywhere on the island and it's seen only briefly on "Dean of Invention." And Kamen, who has amassed 440 patents has moved onto other devices, which have largely been in the health field. "I spent my whole life building medical equipment and wheelchairs that could balance and climb stairs. That was hard," Kamen says. But an adaptation for the non-disabled helped make his name. "And after 30 years of work in medical and lab equipment," he says. "I'm the Segway guy." He's happy to use the fame to further interest in young people in robotics and technology through his FIRST initiative that involves school kids in competitions (its website is usfirst.org). "It's amazing," he says. "You take two robots and let them compete. Adding sports and technology gives you the ability to light a fire under a group of kids." And he hopes to kindle that flame with his new series. "Dean of Invention" starts tonight at 10 p.m. on Planet Green. To see more of The Hartford Courant, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.courant.com/. Copyright (c) 2010, The Hartford Courant, Conn. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com, e-mail [email protected], or call 866-280-5210 (outside the United States, call +1 312-222-4544). |