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Segway UK Boss Dies After Driving Off Cliff
necro81 writes "Jimi Heselden, the British multi-millionaire defense contractor and philanthropist, who bought the Segway company last December from inventor Dean Kamen, died yesterday after an accident while riding one of the machines. While using a ruggedized X2 version of the two-wheeled balancing scooter at his estate in North Yorkshire, he apparently drove over the edge of a precipice and into the River Wharfe. He was found later by a passerby and declared dead on the scene."
Note that the inventor of the Segway is Dean Kamen. This article is about Jim Heselden, the guy that bought the Segway company.
Living With a Nerd
I guess he bought a segway... to his coffin.
*sigh* I'll show^W^W^W^W segway myself the door.
I initially didn't care much -- they call him a "defence contractor". But it seems he made his money from selling crates of earth to use in actual defences, rather than the rest of the "defence contractors" who make guns and bombs, and should really be called "offence contractors".
The word they shall all be looking for, is apropos.
So what's the point? Blame (ban?) the Segway?
And, oh, by the way:
In the UK, it is illegal to drive a Segway on the road or even on pavements or cycle paths. They can only be used on private property, despite campaigns to let them be used on cycle paths.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Hi. This is ironic and certainly contrary to what was expected. I don't see how you can claim otherwise.
I buy the rights to a product. I intend to manufacture it and have it make me wealthy. Instead it kills me. This is irony.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Read the article. It was not the inventor that died, but the owner of the product.
More info about the guy and the accident is available at the Daily Mail
Ban gravity.
Did you check your facts before you opened up the floodgates of your arse? The guy may have been a defence contractor, but his company made FORTIFICATIONS. Not in the sense of point-defence systems, but in the sense of freaking walls.
The Personal Transporter's *actual* inventor is this engineer I've bumped into -- I work with his brother. DK was "merely" the person who put money and PR behind it. Dean gets a lot of credit -- but really, *his* biggest invention was the insulin pump.
More specifically, he was the chairman of HESCO bastion, a company that makes large cube-shaped wire & cloth baskets you fill with sand. They are used for flood control as well as by the military for defensive walls.
Just an FYI, the XT and X2 lines have been out for years; *IF* that's what he was riding -- and there truly is no other "off-road" Segway -- then it is what it is... but it ain't new.
It appears that he was a miner who received a redundancy payment and used it to start a business making wire cages that were filled with earth to stabilize canal banks. The military found these useful for building blast walls in Iraq and bought a bunch of them. I'm sure he did well as a military contractor but that was not his business.
Sad for the family.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
If you lost your balance (due to vertigo upon seeing the dropoff) near the cliff and leaned forward instead of back, then the segway would have killed you.
Personally, I think this is going to turn out to be what happened.
As to who's to blame... the Seqway isn't intuitive. You have to learn the muscle memory and you have to practice coupling it to situational awareness in order to get the machine to go where you want. If you are suddenly in a new situation -- something the randomness of rugged terrain does to you constantly -- it would be easy for your neuromuscular system to make an unexpected adjustment. You might as well be throwing control-system darts. Add vertigo, which is a condition where the neuromuscular system is misinterpreting and misapplying the information available to it, and you could continue to apply the wrong force. I.e., drunken control-system darts.
He'd have had to have trained under safe conditions (ropes, nets, etc.) in that configuration of ridge, cliff height, and lighting to learn how to use it near the edge of a cliff, and therefore take the Segway out of the blame equation. The rule for the thing should be never to ride it in a more dangerous situation than you've been trained to ride it in.
If you've ever seen someone "roll up" on a Segway, then you know it's in no way cooler than any other scooter. It's the "instantly make anyone look like a total tool" device.
Velcro was designed for its exact purpose. Go ask NASA.
Or...one could refer to the actual inventor, instead of NASA which was founded almost 20 years AFTER velcro was invented. Nice try though. ;-)
To provide lab data about which sealants and tapes last, and which are likely to fail, research was conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Their major conclusion was that one should not use duct tape to seal ducts (specialty tapes are available for this purpose). (They defined duct tape as any fabric-based tape with rubber adhesive.) The testing done shows that under challenging but realistic conditions, duct tapes become brittle and may fail.[6] Commonly duct tape carries no safety certifications such as UL or Proposition 65, which means the tape may burn violently, producing toxic smoke; it may cause ingestion and contact toxicity; it can have irregular mechanical strength; and its adhesive may have low life expectancy. Its use in ducts has been prohibited by the state of California[7] and by building codes in most other places in the U.S. However, metalized and aluminum tapes used by professionals are still often called "duck/duct tapes".
from Wikipedia
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Slashdot: the one place you can, at any time, discuss the meaning of irony and not be modded off-topic.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
"Jimi Heselden, the British multi-millionaire defense contractor and philanthropist, who bought the Segway company last December from inventor Dean Kamen, died yesterday after an accident while riding one of the machines.
The Slashdot moderation system is ridiculous. Is reading comprehension so low that we need to restate everything that has already been posted just so people will grasp it?
Not ironically, Morissette's explanation jibes completely with how I interpreted the song from the first time I heard it. It seems so obvious to me that I remain amazed at the number of people who missed the joke so completely that they think she made a mistake even after it's explained to them.
I have some experience with these barriers- Every American base in Iraq uses thousands of them for building fortification.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion
You'd usually find a ring of them around a building, two deep, with an additional course laid on top of that. They are, as the wiki article mentions, "one of the less heralded life- and labor-saving devices of war" (among other uses).
I felt pretty safe having them around.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
If you'd taken the time to even read eldavojohn's post, you will not see the word INVENTOR anywhere.
He said "maker", which as the owner of the company that NOW manufactures them, is TRUE.
You assumed he'd said "inventor", called him out on it, then made yourself look stupid by posting anonymously to justify your mistake when you yourself were called on it.
Congrats on that, good job.