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review: Remember a few years ago when the media were saturated with hype and speculation about "Ginger", or "IT" as it was also known, a supposedly revolutionary invention that was going to change the world? It was a media culture moment that will undoubtedly show up on VH1's "I Love the '00s" somewhere down the line. This book is about the development of Ginger, now known as the Segway Human Transporter, and Dean Kamen, the so-called "modern-day Edison" who brought it to the world. When I spotted this book on the "new releases" shelf at our neighborhood library branch, it caught my eye because not only had I been intrigued by the pre-launch foofarah, but I was working (OK, temping) at Amazon.com when they started shipping the first Segways to consumers, and so in a weird way I feel like the history of the thing somehow tangentally connects with my history. Plus, you know, I'm nerdy and I like science and inventions and stuff.
This isn't really a science-oriented book though, and thank goodness for that because the parts that focused on the engineering stuff had my eyes crossing (I only said I like science, not that I'm good at it). It's not fully a business-oriented book either, even though it's published by the Harvard Business School Press, and you certainly do get plenty of details on the wheeling and dealing aspects. It's more of a biography of the "Ginger" project and of Dean Kamen, a brilliant and eccentric inventor and self-made millionaire who made his fortune making revolutionary electronic medical devices (the germ for Ginger came from a stair-climbing wheelchair his company developed). Kamen is a nutty guy. The most telling story in his bio was when he decided there were some things he could improve about his personal helicopter, so he bought the helicopter company. He's also a bit like Grass Valley Greg, the character on Mr. Show, in that he encourages his employees to take risks and make "opportunity-stakes" in Greg's term, or "kiss frogs" (in search of a prince) in Kamen's phrase. Like a good literary character, he is flawed but also has likeable traits, such as his fierce loyalty to his employees, to whom he is something of a benevolent, possessive, patriarchal tyrant. He has grand visions, and he is part P.T. Barnum in his love for grandstanding and hyperbole, but he is also extremely secretive and somewhat paranoid about his work (especially Ginger), and this contradiction provides a lot of the dramatic tension that moves the book along.
Several of the designers, engineers, and billionaire investors figure as "characters" in the story as well (they are even introduced, script-style, in a "Cast of Characters" section), and they are all vividly drawn (Steve Jobs? Nutball). Kemper has a keen eye for the telling detail or action and the confidence to let those details speak for themselves. He writes in a punchy, succinct, colloquial style peppered with colorful, almost hard-boiled turns of phrase such as "He...expected a statue with no bird s*** on it, despite the pigeons everywhere.". Actually at the beginning of the book I was wary that Kemper was glazing his own ham--trying to make the story exciting by saying that it was an exciting story in his intro--but this was not the case. There's plenty of dramatic grist in the conflicts and twists that arise in the development of the project, and he moves you through them briskly. I hate to use a hacky phrase, but I literally found it compulsively readable and stayed up until the wee hours one night to finish it.
Unfortunately it turns out that it's ultimately kind of a tease, because the final major twist is that Kemper was actually banned from the project as it neared completion. The details of that event actually shed some light on the whole media phenomenon, which is interesting, but you don't really get to find out the final details of how the story ends. For instance, throughout the book you find out about all the different names they considered for it over time, but you never get to find out how the ended up on "Segway". So the conclusion is anticlimactic, but the rest of the story totally exceeded my expectations.
Another reason I was interested in this book was to see if Ginger has the potential to be as important as the hype made it out to be, and I feel better informed but still somewhat conflicted. I do think that the oft-quoted grand vision of Ginger inspiring cities to be redesigned and saving the environment is cockamamie, but I also think there is potential for greater application than just a toy for rich nerds, which seems to be the main use right now. Here in Seattle we've seen street cops use them, and that seems like a good idea, and the idea of having them for rent in airports and amusement parks is good too. They could also be big in Asian cities, though at the current price of $4000 they will never replace bicycles there. Ginger is going to have to fit into the physical and economic realities of the world as we know it, and not the other way around. But Kamen's lofty dream is compelling and obviously sincere, and it's easy to see how he got so many powerful people so excited about it. (mike.08.04)
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