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The path wasn't really wide enough for both of them. This happens all the time on walks in the English countryside. One walker finds a place to move aside to let the other pass. There'll be a smile and a greeting, maybe a word about the weather, but the man at the top of the hill wasn't walking.
He was on a Segway, you know, that two-wheeled, chunky electric scooter-type device that you'd sometimes see being ridden by sightseeing tourists in cities or security guards in shopping malls, not so often on country walks. Mr Christie later described seeing the figure on the Segway back up slightly off the path, inviting the dog walker to continue up past him. The man wobbled, then disappeared from view,
Mr Christie went to look over the edge, down the steep drop. At the bottom, 40 feet below, was a Segway. And the man, not moving, face down in the river. Mr Christie called the emergency services, but there was nothing they could do. The man had died, the post-mortem found, of multiple blunt force injuries to the chest and spine. The body of the Segway owner was identified.
It turned out he didn't just own a Segway. He owned Segway, the company. The story made headlines. And you could almost hear the guilty chuckles being suppressed in newsrooms around the world. Owner of Segway dies on Segway. Segway maker is killed on one. Segway boss dies riding one off cliff.
You can't openly poke fun at the accidental death of a 62-year-old man while being courteous to a dog walker. Still, segues were kind of a joke. President George W. Bush famously tumbled off one at Kennebunkport.
Their dorky, uncool image had recently been reinforced by the comedy movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop, in which Kevin James plays an out-of-shape Segway-riding security guard with delusions of grandeur. That the boss of Segway had ridden a Segway off a cliff was the kind of news story that made you suppress a guilty chuckle. But that wasn't the real story here. It wasn't the real story at all.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This is a cautionary tale of two inventions. One was simple and boring. We'll hear about that later. And one was fiendishly clever and massively hyped.
That hype started with a much-shared news article in January 2001 about a mysterious leak from the world of publishing. What is it? Book proposal heightens intrigue about secret invention touted as bigger than the internet or PC.
The story was about a book proposal that had been offered to publishers in strictest confidence. Harvard Business School Press had bought the rights to the book for a quarter of a million dollars. The book was about an invention currently being worked on, not yet revealed to the world. And the invention? That was the mystery. The book proposal didn't say anything.
Harvard Business School Press had bought the book without knowing what the invention was. The literary agent who'd sold it to them didn't know. The book's author knew, but he couldn't tell. He'd signed a non-disclosure agreement with the inventor, a man called Dean Kamen. Kamen had made his fortune in medical devices. He'd developed the world's first drug infusion pump, portable insulin pump, and portable dialysis machine.
Now he was making something else, something so important. He'd invited a writer to document for posterity the process of making it. The book proposal called the invention simply It. The book's author, Steve Kemper, wrote in that proposal that It would profoundly affect the way people live. It will sweep over the world and change lives, cities and ways of thinking.
But don't just take Kemper's word for it. In the proposal, Kemper describes how he saw various tech titans and investors respond to seeing it, after Dean Kamen had sworn them too to secrecy. Jeff Bezos let out a loud honking laugh and told Kamen it's Steve Jobs said
If enough people see the machine, you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen. One venture capitalist said he'd never expected to see anything as important as the World Wide Web until he saw it. Another investor predicted it would make more money in its first year than any startup ever. And in five years, Dean Kamen would be worth more than Bill Gates.
But what was it? You know, dear listener, exactly what it is, of course. It's a segue. And so did anyone in 2001 who was paying attention. Online sleuths dug out all the patents Dean Kamen had recently filed.
Some featured drawings of scooter-type devices. One journalist correctly joined some of the dots. You can tell by the way the patents connect that Cayman is combining technologies to produce a scooter that mimics the way humans maintain balance. When you stand on the scooter, holding that big T-bar, if you lean a little bit, it moves with you. So far, so spot on. But this couldn't just be a scooter, could it?
There had to be something special about it. Add up some more clues and you'll come to the inescapable conclusion that it's a scooter using an alternative power source. Hydrogen. Others disagreed. It's an anti-gravity hoverboard. No, it's a teleportation pod. A magnetic levitation device? Or maybe IT is actually an acronym for...
IT for inductance transportation? Inertial thruster? Speculation ran wild. It became the fourth most searched for topic on Lycos.com, if you remember Lycos.com, just behind Napster and Britney Spears. The animated sitcom South Park based an episode around It, imagining it as a cross between a personal transportation device...
and a sex toy. In December 2001, after nearly a year of hype and jokes and increasingly wild guesses, the time has finally come for it to be revealed, live on Good Morning America. Dean Kamen wears jeans and a blue work shirt. He stands awkwardly next to a white curtain, flanked by the show's hosts, Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer.
Alright, are we ready? Are you ready? I'm ready. OK, I think it's time. The curtain rises to reveal... A segue. The deck to stand on. Two big wheels either side. The waist-height handlebars rising up on a central pillar. Alright, there it is. Now what does it do?
This is the world's first self-balancing human transporter, Kamen explains. You think forward, you go forward. You think backward, you go backward. Diane Sawyer seems distinctly unimpressed. I'm tempted to say, that's it? That can't be it. But it was. This was it.
The very same invention that had had Jeff Bezos honking with laughter, Steve Jobs sure that cities would re-architect around it, and various investors falling over themselves to pour money into it, convinced that it was going to make a fortune and change the world. Looking at it there in the studio, it was hard to see what they'd all been thinking. But then the presenters and Kamen left the studio and went down to Bryant Park to try the Segway out.
Neither of the presenters had been on one before. Diane Sawyer looked a little hesitant. But in a matter of seconds, Charles Gibson was giggling like a child. And all you do is just, as he said, you think forward a little bit and off you go. I mean, you do. And then you want to turn to the right. I mean, you just turn to the right. Gibson's verdict? It's really cool. The author, Steve Kemper, said he'd seen this many times while shadowing Kamen to write his book.
Skeptics turned into believers as soon as they took one of the devices for a spin. I've never been on a Segway, so I can only go by how others describe it. Like the writer John Heilerman, who did a cover story for Time magazine just after the launch. No matter which way I lean or how hard, it refuses to let me fall over. The machine is sensing and reacting to subtle shifts in my balance. I am slack-jawed.
So, while it was true that much of the media coverage saw the Segway's launch as a letdown, eagerly awaited revolutionary urban transport device turns out to be a scooter. There was also still scope to believe that if only people just gave one a go, they'd want one. But I've promised you a tale of two inventions. A clever and complex one, the Segway, and a simple and boring one. It's time to meet that other invention after the break.
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Jimmy Hesselden was born in 1948 in the English city of Leeds. He grew up on the Halton Moor public housing estate, a place where money was scarce and prospects were grim. Here's a writer who escaped the estate, describing life in his family's house at around the time Jimmy was born. A soot-encrusted kettle simmering on the hob, flat irons resting in the hearth,
earthenware milk cooler, chimney rods, loaf tins in the oven, bread cakes the size of hubcaps cooling on the windowsill. Like most young men who grew up on the estate, Jimmy left school as soon as he could at age 15. He worked first as a labourer, then a coal miner. In the 1980s, the British coal mining industry collapsed. Jimmy, now in his mid-30s, was one of many who lost his job.
But he did get redundancy money, and he used it to start a business in sandblasting. Jimmy holidayed with his family at a caravan park on the northeast coast of England. Year by year, the caravans were getting perilously closer to the sea. This stretch of coastline was eroding more quickly than any in Europe. Every year, a couple more yards of land slipped away.
houses built a safe looking distance inland were now being abandoned as the cliff edge crept ever nearer, until finally the land beneath them crumbled into the waves. One way to try to shore up eroding coastlines is with gabions, an idea that stretches back to ancient Rome.
Gabions are cages, made once with wicker and now with wire mesh, and typically filled with rocks. You can stack them up to build retaining walls. Jimmy came up with an idea for a better gabion. A flat pack, wire mesh cage, easy to transport, unfold and erect, with a heavy duty liner so you can fill it up with whatever you have to hand, not just rocks, but gravel, sand or mud.
It expands like a concertina to form a container. Jimmy called his brainchild the concertina. And in 1989, he took out a patent and set up a company called HESCO. He made his first sale to a water company that wanted to shore up the collapsing walls of a canal. A promising start. Jimmy thought it might make a nice little sideline to his sandblasting business.
The concertainer is a simple idea. As soon as you see one being used, you get it. The Segway could hardly be more different. When Time magazine's writer got off after his first ride, slack-jawed with amazement, he asked Dean Kamen to explain how it worked. Kamen's reply, he wrote, involved a blizzard of equations.
Dean Kamen first got the idea that would become the Segway when he watched a man in a wheelchair struggle to get over a step into an ice cream shop. He wondered, could he make a wheelchair that would climb up stairs? It seemed to Kamen that you'd want a device that could regain stability when it was knocked off balance. Kamen got some engineers at his medical device company to rig up a basic prototype with off-the-shelf parts: gyroscopes, batteries, motors from a printer,
It looked more like a little table on wheels than a wheelchair, but it would do for now to prove the concept. Shove it and it righted itself. Pretty cool. But put it on stairs and it kept falling over. Eventually the team realised that they'd been thinking about the problem all wrong. When humans climb stairs, when we walk,
It's not that we're constantly losing stability then regaining it. We're a little bit unstable all the time. But we're constantly making little adjustments to keep that instability under control, so we don't end up flat on our faces. Taking a step is like a controlled fall. Walking is one controlled fall after another.
Armed with that conceptual insight, Cayman's fast-growing team of engineers set about mimicking the human ability to stay upright while moving. As Cayman puts it, they made a device with a gyroscope that acts like your inner ear, a computer that acts like your brain, motors that act like your muscles, wheels that act like your feet. The sensors and software in the table-like prototypes became more and more sophisticated.
Cayman, remember, had set out to make a wheelchair. But then, one day, an engineer stood on one of those prototypes for a laugh. As he shifted his balance, the table moved on its wheels. Soon, the engineer was surfing around the lab. It was great fun. But Cayman didn't just see fun. He saw a product that would revolutionise how people got about.
When Kamen invented medical devices, he made his money by selling the rights and collecting royalties. But with this product, he'd do it differently. He wanted to make it and market it himself. He created a company within his company. He forbade his engineers from talking about their work. He approached a journalist, Steve Kemper, because he thought the genesis of a world-changing idea ought to be recorded.
Steve Kemper's book would eventually be published with the title Reinventing the Wheel. And Dean Kamen wasn't happy with it. The way Kemper tells the story, the product seemed to be taking a long time to get to market, despite millions of dollars and years of research.
The engineers were still surfing around the lab on their prototypes and occasionally crashing into walls. When they crashed hard enough to dent the wall, they'd sign and date the dent. Kemper signed a dent he made. He thought he saw the root of the problem in the wider company culture. Things couldn't just be good. They had to be great, even if that meant constantly going back to the drawing board.
Dean or one of his engineers would come up with a great new idea that yanked the product in a fresh direction. Parts and designs and specs constantly mutated. Dean issued dire warnings about deadlines but didn't stop making suggestions for improvements. But making things great costs money, and Cayman's money was fast running out. He had no choice but to show his product to potential investors.
Remember the meetings Steve Kemper described? The venture capitalist who thought the Segway would be as important as the World Wide Web? And Steve Jobs? After 30 seconds surfing around, Jobs said, "This is the most amazing piece of technology since the PC." Investors practically fought to give Cayman their money. They valued the company at half a billion dollars. True, some things might still go wrong. Jeff Bezos worried about regulators.
You have a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it? The lead software engineer worried about making the product as safe as possible, though there was only so much he could do. In a sadly prescient turn of phrase, he told Steve Kemper, somebody will probably go over a cliff on one.
Dean Kamen himself was mainly worried that some bigger company would get wind of his product, figure out the technology behind it, and beat him to market. The technology is so good that the risk is not that it won't be everywhere in 10 years, but that it might not be us providing it. It'll be Honda or Sony. The only advantage we have is that they're clueless. To make sure Honda and Sony remained clueless, Kamen was paranoid about secrecy.
Every potential investor who saw a prototype Segway had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. When his company recruited new engineers, the applicants weren't allowed to see what they'd be working on. Job ads were cryptic. We're looking for talented, passionate and unique individuals to design and develop this revolutionary electromechanical product that will create a new industry. This is the product you will tell your grandchildren about.
Cayman's quest for secrecy also hobbled his marketing team. They couldn't do basic consumer research.
Cayman did think about his marketing strategy. He heard that Steven Spielberg was about to film a futuristic sci-fi movie with Tom Cruise, Minority Report. He tried to persuade Spielberg to put the characters on segues. But when his marketers wanted to show some ordinary people a segue and ask, would you buy one? How much would you pay? Cayman was dismissive. Who would worry about stuff like that?
Cautionary Tales will return after the break.
I love cycling and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe, which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble, with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it
And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.
Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,
Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis and even their extensive archives. So where
Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.
When Britain's Ministry of Defence saw Jimmy Hesselden's new type of collapsible gabion, the concertainer, they realised straight away that it had uses far beyond shoring up canal walls. They could use them in war zones, they thought, as a quick way to build protective barriers around aircraft, machinery and people. They placed a big order with Jimmy's company, HESCO, and took the concertainers to the first Gulf War in 1991.
They worked brilliantly. The traditional way for armies to build protective barriers is with sandbags. But filling up sandbags is time-consuming and exhausting. Constructing a typical wall of sandbags might take ten soldiers most of a day. To make the same size wall out of Jimmy's concertainers took 20 minutes for two soldiers and a digger. Soon, the US military had embraced Jimmy's product too.
It became better known as the Hesco Bastion. It saved the lives of soldiers like Sergeant David McGregor from Texas, who was caught up in a mortar attack in Iraq in 2004. If that basket had not been there, then I would have been killed instantly. In July 2008, in Afghanistan, India's diplomatic staff received a tip-off from American intelligence that the Taliban planned to attack their embassy in Kabul.
They quickly threw up a defensive line of sand-filled HESCO bastions around the compound walls. A few days later, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a diplomatic vehicle outside the embassy gates. The embassy was on a busy street. The explosion killed 58 people. But the embassy itself was largely unscathed as the sand-filled containers absorbed the blast.
A senior official later expressed no doubt. The Hesco barriers saved the lives of all those in the compound. When Jimmy dreamed up his idea, he'd thought of shoring up coastlines against erosion. And it turned out that the Hesco bastion did indeed work pretty well for that, and for building other kinds of retaining wall, such as for garden landscaping. Also, containing fuel spills.
and creating barriers against sediments to help wetlands regenerate, and making walls for temporary housing after natural disasters, and flood defence. In 2005, as Hurricane Katrina wore down on New Orleans, workers raced to plug gaps in the city's levees. They built a wall of Pesco bastions along the 17th Street Canal. It survived the storm.
A nearby concrete wall did not. As it sat in the caravan park by the seaside, Jimmy had thought his idea of a flat-packed gabion might make him a bit of income as a sideline to his sandblasting business. Two decades on, he featured in a newspaper's list of the 400 wealthiest people in Britain. Jimmy's fortune was estimated at £200 million, $300 million.
As Dean Kamen prepared to launch the Segway, his team met with investors and advisors. The author Steve Kemper describes someone posing a question to the company's marketing director. What's the product's value proposition? You know, like, why would anybody want to use it? The marketing director seemed stumped. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that he hadn't been allowed to test the product with actual consumers, Kamen waved the question away.
We need to remember that what big ideas do is make new ways to see things. Steve Jobs chimed in to agree. That's the story of the PC. Nobody had any idea how they'd be used. And look what happened. They're right. Big ideas do make new ways to see things. It's the story of the PC. It's the story of Jimmy Heseldon's concertina, too.
Other people looked at this product to stop erosion and saw a new way to fight floods, regenerate wetlands and protect soldiers. But it's not the story of the Segway. When people looked at the Segway, they shrugged or laughed. Not everyone, of course. Some people loved it, until they heard the price.
Dean Kamen had burned through so much money to make the Segway great, he had to charge nearly $5,000 for the entry-level version. Over $8,000 in today's money. It was too much for many. Kamen had imagined Tom Cruise riding a Segway in Minority Report, but when screenwriters saw the Segway, they gave them to characters who were comically unaware of how silly they looked.
Niles Crane in Frasier. Job Bluth in Arrested Development. The mall cop, Paul Blart. 20 years on, Segways aren't made anymore. After some changes in ownership, the Segway brand now sits with a Chinese company called Ninebot.
They make electric scooters that have the word Segway on them, but they're just regular electric scooters, the kind that are dime a dozen in cities these days, where you have to do the balancing yourself. What's to blame for the Segway's failure? Dan Coyes was Steve Kemper's literary agent, and he wonders if the answer is him. He recalls how he wasn't quite careful enough with Kemper's mysterious proposal for a book about it.
The proposal was supposed to stay confidential, but he shared it too widely. It got leaked. And after all the hype about anti-gravity or teleportation devices, the reveal of the self-balancing scooter couldn't help but invite the question, is that it? Writing in Slate, Dan Coyes argues that often with new products, the audience doesn't quite understand them immediately. It takes a while for their value proposition to emerge.
but the Segway could never quite recover from the letdown of its launch. He wrote, "I can't stop thinking that the Segway might still have had a chance, but for the hype. Maybe. But maybe the answer is simpler. Most of us don't really mind doing our own balancing. We don't need a machine with gyroscopes that mimic the inner ear and motors that act like muscles. We're happy enough to use our own muscles and inner ears."
The Segway was a brilliantly clever, exquisitely engineered solution to something most people never saw as a problem. The concertainer solved problems that Jimmy Hesselden hadn't even thought about. Before Cautionary Tales, I wrote another podcast series called 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. Some of the inventions I talked about were as complex and hyped as the Segway, but many were as simple and boring as the concertainer.
The pencil. The brick. The postage stamp. Easy to understand, obvious in retrospect, and used in ways that turned out to be far more powerful than anyone could have foreseen. Often, it's the simple ideas that change the world. Sometimes, they make their inventors rich, too. What does a man like Jimmy Heselden do with a couple of hundred million pounds? To start with...
create jobs. Jimmy built his Hesco Bastion factory next to the public housing estate where he'd grown up. Not much had changed. Halton Moore still had a grim reputation for poverty and unemployment. Jimmy recruited kids who'd just left the local school. Youngsters, he said, who'd grown up without role models. And older workers too. Those who, like him, had been made redundant late in life and feared they might never work again.
He paid them way over the going rate. No wonder they felt loyal in return and worked so hard for him. When war broke out in Kosovo, the United Nations ordered a load of Hesco bastions to protect their forces. Jimmy's workers delivered the order ahead of schedule. Jimmy decided to thank them by taking them all on vacation to Spain. Jimmy gave millions to military charities with no publicity or fuss.
He set up a foundation to work on projects in his local community and gave tens of millions to that. He indulged himself too, of course he did. Jimmy bought an 18th century mill by the river with 67 acres of land. He employed a team of workers to convert it into his dream house. They made the water wheel work again. But the dream house never quite got finished because Jimmy and his wife, Julie, were perfectly happy living in a small lodge on the site
and Jimmy kept getting distracted with other ways to keep his workers busy. He had them build a miniature train track and a donkey sanctuary. Kids from local schools could come for day trips, he thought. He built a replica of Stonehenge because, why not? He built a museum for the classic cars he'd collected, an Aston Martin DB5, once owned by the Beatle George Harrison, a Rolls-Royce Phantom that belonged to the Hollywood star Betty Davis.
Jimmy fell in love with another form of transport too, the Segway. He bought an off-road version. He liked to scoot around on the countryside paths near his house. In 2009, Dean Kamen decided to cut his losses and put the Segway company up for sale. Jimmy Hesselden bought it. A few months later, one Sunday morning in September, Jimmy took his off-road Segway out for a scoot by the river.
As he crested a hill, he looked down the path to see a man walking his dog, about to climb up. The path wasn't really wide enough for both of them. Jimmy Hesselden's funeral wasn't held in a church. They put up a big marquee on the industrial estate by his factory. 2,000 people turned out to pay their respects. Most were local. One had flown in from Texas. Sergeant David McGregor explained...
I'm here to pay tribute and thanks to a man who saved my life through his product. If it wasn't for Jimmy's barriers, my wife and children would only have a flag to remember me by. As a bugler from the Yorkshire Regiment played the last post, a thousand green balloons floated up towards the sky, bearing the words, A Hero to the Heroes. Just a few days had passed since those headlines about Jimmy Heselden's accident.
Segway boss dies riding one off cliff. It might have looked like a darkly ironic footnote to an absurdly overhyped invention, but everyone at Jimmy's funeral knew that wasn't the real story. It wasn't the real story at all. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com. MUSIC
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Russelo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lital Millard, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Murano and Morgan Ratner.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.
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