Segway Scooter Memories: Recalling the Innovation That Didn't Change the World

Those old enough to remember the '90s are likely to recall it as a time of tech boom that the most bullish thought would be effectively permanent (Dow Jones 36,000! Dow Jones 40,000! Dow Jones 100,000!)--but that the boom proved bubble just after the turn of the century. What they are less likely to recall is that after the famed dot-com crash much of the business community and "intelligentsia" went on, on some level, thinking, or at least hoping, the crash was just a minor correction and that the boom would get going again in short order (as seen when the business press went nuts over a spasm of growth in late 2003).

If what the investors and those presuming to advise them had on their minds was asset values and profits, there was also where those values and profits would come from--technological progress, which we were led to expect would explode in these years.

It was in this atmosphere that Dean Kamen's development of some new innovation that would "change the world" became a "hot story"--and I remember how in late 2001 we were told what it actually was.

I was underwhelmed by what we actually saw, a funny-looking scooter. So were most others, I think. And if some have not wholly let go the idea (back in 2018 CNN published a piece telling us that while it hasn't done so it yet might), it seems that most of us have forgotten the episode, or at least brushed it off as being of no importance.

However, to me the Segway scooter acquired an increasing symbolic significance over the years--of the gap between the reality of and the hype about the pace and force of technological innovation in our time. Even after we had reconciled ourselves to the remoteness of the "flying car" future, the Kurzweils of the media-business world breathlessly talked up the imminence of a grand new "molecular" age of intelligent machines, of atom-by-atom construction, of revolutionary new materials promising solutions and wonders far, far more radical. Instead the Segway was what we got then--and looking back from 2024 it still seems to me that that it remains as good a symbol as any for the reality of twenty-first century INNOVATION!