Segway Inventor Turns To Environment

MBCook writes "CNN has an article in which they talk about Dean Kamen's latest inventions designed to provide water to rural villages. His goal is also to provide electricity and opportunities for entrepreneurship. From the article: 'Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,' says Kamen. 'The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.'"

Comments

market to first world countries too!

[snooo53]

What he should be doing is marketing this to rural farmers in developed countries. If I lived on a farm with access to the fuel, I would love to have a kilowatt generator for $1000 to supplement my electricity use.

Cow dung?

[PIPBoy3000]

The electric generator is powered by an easily-obtained local fuel: cow dung. Each machine continuously outputs a kilowatt of electricity.

The main advantage of cow dung is that it's considered "carbon neutral". Plus it's a relatively abundant resource in the communities they're talking about. I worry a little about pollution issues, as you likely get a lot of particulates in the air. Small power plants tend to pollute more per power generated than large, centralized ones. Economics of scale and all that.

Learn the subject matter

[NetRAVEN5000]

"Someone remind me, is this the same guy who used a gyroscope with a 60 Hz sampling rate for stability rather than, I don't know, a third wheel?"

Yes.

And now I ask you - what good would a third wheel do for a wheelchair that climbs stairs? Especially when it already has more than three wheels.

The gyroscope was so that the chair would stay level when it had to go up on its hind wheels to climb the stairs.

Re:Only three types of entrepreneur?

[NaruVonWilkins]

What's very interesting about village microloans is the extremely low rate of default. When you have a group of people involved in ensuring that a loan is repaid, especially in small matriarchal societies, you end up with as little as a 5% default rate.

The Segway was useless and overhyped.

[Valdrax]

The big problem with the Segway was the hype, not the merits of device itself. When Jeff Bezos said that he could see cities being redesigned around the thing, we all thought that it had to be something revolutionary and amazing that would lead us all to change.

What he really seems to have meant was that for the device to sell, cities would have to be redesigned first. It's too heavy, fast, and unmaneuverable to ue on sidewalks, and it's too slow, unprotected, and unmaneuverable to use on streets. In essence, for the Segway to work, there'd have to be a completely new set of lanes for it. Additionally, it has all the problems of not protecting against the elements or having cargo space that prevent it from truly replacing cars. It's also far too expensive for the average person to justify the limited utility.

To sum up, it costs too much and can't be used in a majority of outdoor situations. It was overhyped when it had commercial flop written all over it. The Segway was brilliant example of promising the world and delivering nothing.

Snowmobiles and trail bikes at least have thrill-seeking element that the 12.5 MPH, no off-roading Segway did not.