A Machine Named Ginger: Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger

The first time I saw a Segway was at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dean Kamen described a robotics competition for high school students sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) while effortlessly riding his computerized mechanical marvel back and forth. My second sighting was a photograph of President Bush falling off one (hint to future riders: read the instructions, and do not hold a tennis racket while steering). The third time was on a sidewalk, appropriately, in Atlanta during the 2003 SHOT meeting. What a nifty boy toy.

And what a nifty book is Steve Kemper's Code Name Ginger: The Story behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003). Writing in the tradition of Tracy Kidder's 1981 Soul of a New Machine, Kemper focuses on Kamen's efforts to create, develop, and commercialize a gyroscopically stabilized, two-wheeled, battery-powered vehicle capable of carrying one person and some cargo at speeds up to 20 kilometers per hour. Segway's progenitor was a stair-climbing wheelchair, financed by Johnson and Johnson, whose spinning antics earned it the nickname of Fred, after Fred Astaire; what else could this wonderful new contrivance have been called but Ginger?

Kemper follows Ginger through the early years, almost up to its commercial introduction. In many ways this is a Pilgrim's Progress for inventors, but Kamen is clearly not Everyman—nor, he hopes, is Ginger just any invention. One noteworthy difference between Code Name Ginger and Soul of a New Machine is the former's sustained focus on the problem of raising money. Partly this simply reflects the high-fliers Kamen negotiates with; would you rather read about Steve Bezos's first ride on Ginger and the machinations of Silicon Valley financial entrepreneur John Doerr and a gang of New York bankers, or engineers designing a dial? But the other, more significant reason is engineering's dirty little secret: without adequate funding the best idea is worthless. And Kamen needed over fifty million dollars to commercialize Ginger.

Kamen is clearly an engaging, dynamic character who has earned his egoism, not only by myriad inventions through his company, DEKA (DEan KAmen), but also by his efforts with FIRST to excite kids about science and engineering careers. Another theme of the book is Kamen's tireless promotion of FIRST to the same people he is trying to get money from, sometimes putting that project ahead of the need to raise capital.

Like Tom West in Soul, when Kamen wanted to begin work on Ginger he sought out young engineers "who didn't yet consider anything impossible" (p. 34). Kemper depicts them all, Kamen included, as guys whose main joy in life is bashing metal, giving concepts physical form, finding problems, and then bashing more metal until the wee hours in a well-equipped machine shop. There happens to be such a shop in Kamen's mansion, which is handy when he needs to jump into his helicopter or plane to fetch a part or round up a specialist. This merry band of metal bashers are independent, action-oriented engineers who pride themselves on being a breed apart from their colleagues trapped in large corporations. It's Tom Swift on steroids.

But when Kamen decided not to license Ginger but to produce it himself, tensions began to emerge, springing from the realization, reluctantly arrived at, that corporations do not exist solely to enslave engineers but to perform the acts of organization and discipline necessary to commercialize and manufacture things. Commercialization also meant that Kamen would have to relinquish some control over the creation he was most attached to. This he was loath to do, to Ginger's detriment. Peter Pan does not want to grow up and have to deal with subcontractors, the boredom of production engineering, the tyranny of final decisions. And who can blame him?

Moving beyond DEKA's focus on research and development into designing production prototypes meant hiring different types of engineers and managers with corporate experience...