Segway PT

» see segway.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in december 2001 i was 17, on a 56k modem in turkey, reading about a machine code-named "ginger" that tech sites swore would change everything. when the segway was finally unveiled on good morning america the claim was enormous: dean kamen said it would do for walking what the car did for the horse, and that whole cities would be redesigned around it. i never stood on one. almost nobody i knew in turkey ever did. but the hype reached even a teenager on dial-up in ankara, which tells you how big the build-up had been.

the segway was a genuinely clever piece of engineering. two wheels on a single axle, with gyroscopes and tilt sensors feeding a control loop that kept you upright by driving the wheels under your center of gravity faster than you could fall. you leaned forward to go and leaned back to stop. kamen had built it out of the same balancing technology as the iBOT, a self-balancing wheelchair he designed in the 1990s. the problem was never the engineering. the problem was that it cost about 5,000 dollars and solved a problem most people did not have.

the rollout did not go the way the hype promised. george w bush famously fell off one in 2003. the device got banned from sidewalks in a number of places. and the company changed hands in a way that became grimly famous: in 2009 a british businessman named jimi heselden bought segway, and in 2010 he died after riding one of the company's machines off a cliff into the river wharfe near his estate. the irony was cruel and it stuck to the brand for good.

by the time the segway actually reached me it was not a personal vehicle at all. it was the thing airport staff stood on, the thing tour guides in coastal turkish towns rode at the front of a slow line of tourists past the old harbor. the machine that was supposed to replace walking had become a novelty you rented for an hour. ninebot, the chinese scooter company that bought segway in 2015, ended production of the original PT on july 15 2020. the brand still sells electric scooters and the little self-balancing hoverboards, but the upright two-wheeler kamen promised would rebuild civilization is gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the hype ~

the secrecy before launch was the real story. the device was developed under the code name ginger, and a book proposal leaked in 2001 quoting steve jobs and jeff bezos reacting to the prototype, with jobs reportedly saying cities would be built around it. journalists speculated for months about what "it" was, guessing at an antigravity device or maybe a hydrogen engine. when the curtain finally dropped and "it" turned out to be a scooter you balanced on, the gap between the promise and the product became the template for a kind of tech disappointment that has repeated ever since.

~ the actual end ~

the segway never sold the way the projections promised. kamen's company had reportedly modeled selling tens of thousands of units a month. across its entire nineteen-year life it sold around 140,000 total. by the end the PT was about 1.5 percent of the company's profit, with the real money sitting in the scooter and hoverboard lines ninebot had built around the brand. ending the original PT was a footnote, not a funeral. the machine had already become a museum piece while it was still in production.

~ the long tail ~

the segway's actual legacy is not the segway. the self-balancing control loop kamen built lives on in every cheap hoverboard and electric unicycle, and the broader bet that cities would reorganize around small personal electric vehicles turned out to be right, just not in the form he imagined. e-scooters from lime and bird did to sidewalks in the 2010s roughly what kamen predicted the segway would do, at a tenth of the price and with none of the dignity. the segway was not wrong about the future. it was just too expensive and too easy to laugh at.

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