Dean Kamen—A real-life Tom Swift inventor from the old mold
Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of listening to a keynote speech by inventor Dean Kamen at the Semico Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he also received the Semico Research Bellwether award from Semico President Jim Feldhan (see photo, right). I was truly impressed with the scope of Kamen’s thinking. This is a man who makes no small plans. Kamen is best known as the inventor of the Segway-the two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter now in use mostly by police and security personnel, tourism operators, and Steve Wozniak. However, after listening to Kamen speak, I came to realize that the Segway is perhaps the least of his inventions. He’s done far, far more.
Kamen was really speaking at Semico Summit to make a pitch to get corporate support for his FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) programs, which encourage young students in high school to get excited about science and technology through hands-on, Olympics-styled regional and national competitions. However, to get attention of the executive-heavy audience attending the Semico Summit, Kamen first walked us through his invention path dropping photos of himself with the last four presidents and a video of him appearing on the mock comedy pundit TV show “The Colbert Report” like breadcrumbs with a trail leading to his FIRST pitch.
Kamen started by talking about his portable insulin pump, which is based on his first major invention-the autosyringe. Kamen developed the autosyringe in his family home’s basement as a way of administering minute quantities of anti-cancer chemicals to afflicted newborns. He later adapted the design to deliver insulin to diabetics on a continuous basis. These efforts seem to have set the path of Kamen’s inventing career. Since then, he’s become a consultant for healthcare conglomerates, developing a range of electromechanical products for them.
The next product he discussed was the development of a new stent design. Stents are the small metal splints or scaffolds that cardiologists place inside of arteries to treat plaque-induced blockages. Kamen is a fan of helicopters and he’s got a team of metallurgy experts working on helicopter designs. He tasked them with creating a new stent design and said that he’d gotten rapid FDA approval by referring to his design team as experts in alternative drug delivery systems. After all, he said, you could call a helicopter an “alternative drug delivery system.”
Then Kamen projected an image of himself in a complex wheelchair, accepting the National Medal of Technology from then-president Bill Clinton. The wheelchair, called the iBot, can climb stairs and provides paraplegic patients with a high degree of mobility. The iBot wheelchair is also the prototype for the Segway PT (Personal Transport). The Segway is a de-featured iBot with a different control yoke.
He then talked about reinventing dialysis. One of his clients asked him to improve the design of dialysis machines. After looking into the problem, Kamen refused to do it. He said that the average dialysis patient will get treatment, usually about every other day, for about 35 months. After that, the effort to make the average hour-long trip each way to the dialysis center becomes too much effort and the patient elects to stop treatment. Put another way, the patient elects to die because of the poor quality of life. Improving facility-centered dialysis, said Kamen, didn’t appear to be a good solution. Instead, his design team developed a home-dialysis machine. They did this over the objections of the client. One year later, the first model went into production and has administered two million treatments to date. The second-generation machine is about to debut.
More recently, Kamen has turned his attention to the problem of pure water availability in poor countries. He said that if you took all of the pharmaceuticals and medical devices now being marketed, they attack about 50% of the disease in the world. The other 50% is caused by unhealthy, impure water supplies. Kamen decided to do something about that. His team developed a flash-boiling vaporizer. Stick the input hose into anything that looks wet, he said, and the output hose will produce 50 gallons of clean water per day. Kamen’s design team also created a cow-dung-burning Stirling engine that powers the flash boiler and recycles the boiler’s waste heat back into energy to reduce the energy cost of creating the pure water.
Then Kamen went looking for a company that would produce the clean-water generators and found that his existing clients didn’t have offices in third-world companies. He then identified one multinational company that did have the reach and the interest: Coca-Cola. They and their bottlers have 300,000 employees in Africa alone, he said. Kamen appears to have worked a package deal with Coca-Cola. They will be rolling out his water distillers and he has developed a soda mixing machine for them to install in wealthier countries. In fact, when Kamen showed a photo of his drink mixer, I recognized it as the new drink machine down the block from my home installed in the local “Pizza My Heart” restaurant. It’s an interesting machine because the drink flavors are installed in the bottom of the machine using what look like laser-printer toner cartridges. It’s a slick design. (Dean Kamen’s soda fountain in a box serves up drinks at the
Pizza My Heart pizzeria in downtown San Jose, photo left. Closeup of the LCD touch panel on Dean Kamen’s soda fountain in a box, photo below.)
By now, I thought I couldn’t be surprised by what might come next, but I was. Kamen said he’d been approached by the US Army to develop a robotic arm as a prosthesis for people returning from war after having lost one or both arms. “As if I don’t have enough to do already,” thought Kamen. However, a night’s restless sleep convinced him he needed to try even though the specifications were “impossible.” The prosthetic needed to be able to reliably deliver a raisin or a grape to the wearer’s mouth, without crushing the grape. It needed to weigh no more than the “original equipment,” which is nine pounds for a 50-percentile female, said Kamen. It needed to be self-powered as well so the batteries had to fit in the size and weight restriction. In the end, Kamen’s team developed an 8.9-pound arm and he showed videos of the first users feeding themselves grapes and pouring water from plastic bottles. It was truly impressive.
Finally, after more than an hour of trotting out these wondrous inventions, Kamen got to the real mission for his talk. He discussed the FIRST program by first setting the stage. Politicians, he said, are clamoring about jobs, jobs, jobs. Kamen said that if all we want for our kids are jobs, then the US is done as a country. We need inventors and entrepreneurs to add value to the system, he said, and our culture including our current system of education is not encouraging them. Our sports- and celebrity-soaked culture glorifies everything but inventiveness and entrepreneurialism. Back in 1989, Kamen decided to take action and created FIRST, a program that holds regional and national robotics competitions to expose young people to the excitement of invention and goal-oriented teamwork. This year, more than 600 teams from 29 countries participated in the FIRST championship. More than 25,000 people attended the event. The FIRST program touched roughly a quarter of a million students this year alone.
That’s thinking big.
For more information on FIRST, visit this page.
Infinity commented:
I bow down hmulby in the presence of such greatness.
Henri Becker commented:
Congratulation to Jim and Dean to get together.
The Semiconductor Chip, Equipment and Electronics Industries need a lot of talent.
We need more motivated people like Dean to motivate the kids for a bright future in technology.
Keep on going, I am still pushing to get such great program in Europe.
Thanks again (former Team116 HHS VA supporter)
eng in WI commented:
to: eng in NH, of course he promotes himself. He needs to stay in the limelight to stay connected. Questions to you. Does your current employer promote itself? Does it have a stream of amazing inventions? If so, it's an exception. Almost all product design is done by engineers but companies get trapped into doing evolutionary products. I'm not promoting slave labor though. Use your affiliation with Kamen as a positive and promote yourself. When asked why you left, leave out the coolaid and abuse and say you needed new adventures.
Dave commented:
Wouldn't an inventor who "developed" the next generation of Coke dispenser with Coke want his name on the patent filings? They are no were to be found. Patent 7,913,879 "Beverage dispensing system" and Patent 7,757,896 "Beverage dispensing system". Sounds a little mysterious to me.
FIRST mentor commented:
My son and I are part of one of the many FIRST Robotics Teams. I am amazed every day at the inventions these high school students constantly come up with. Designing, building, programming and going to the robotics competitions are only a part of what they do. I have seen great inventions from them all year for a number of different problems. Dean Kamen has been a huge inspiration to us all! My son has been a part of LOTS of groups over his 15 years and FIRST is the best one by a long shot!!! Thank you Dean and please keep up the great work!
Engineer in NH commented:
Dean is not promoting First only out of the kindness of is heart. The kids that come out of first look to Dean as a Celebrity. They clamour to work for him at his company DEKA. This allows him to hire at below market wages. The kids work long hours drinking the DEKA koolade. They treat all but a select few employees badly. If you want kids to go into engineering, companies need to start paying a wages that take into the training and constant learning needed to stay on top of technological advances. Product knowledge is not always something that can be easily offshored. Most of the engineering work at DEKA is done by his employees. Dean is mostly a promoter of Dean.
A former DEKA employee
Tom D. commented:
Wow, so much hand-wringing and blame in these comments! I'm not going to defend the policies and politics of corporate America, but I'm not going to blame them, either. If "widgets" can be made offshore cheaper, it's going to happen. Protectionism and tariffs are not the answer, we'd loose that game. Innovation is the answer, and Mr. Kamen is on the right track. Globalization has changed the face of manufacturing, and that's not going to change, the genie is out of the bottle. We have to adapt, as we've always done, to compete in the new global, connected, economy. Finger pointing, whining, and longing for the "good ole' days" isn't going to change the face of the world, a new generation of innovators/inventors will. My $.02 worth.
George in Saint Lazare commented:
This man is a real inspiration, I'll have my eldest read this tomorrow.
Dan of Reason commented:
Ask to see your children's school history books. You will find that the US is pretty bad, and wealthy people (mainly inventors) have stolen from the rest of the world. Alternatively, Google 'The Story of Stuff'. You can only rob the farmer's grain and seed once...
George In Vt commented:
Paul in Silicon Valley hit the nail on the head. To take it a step further the only motivation for this to happen is pure greed facilitated by a hubris and disdain that the major outsourcing corporations have toward the country that has allowed the creation of such overwhelming wealth.
When will they wake up and realize that it is in their best long term interest to have the middle class crop to renew itself??? To do so it must be fertilized with education, health care and jobs that pay well enough to allow the continued consumption of all the goodies we love. Instead they pour fertilizer of another type on the middle class. Import tariffs would be a good idea to bring back what made this country the envy of the world. Instead we have given it all away.
There is a balance between the ruling class, (remember them? I thought we got rid of the ruling class in 1776) and the middle class that will sustain growth long term. But now the coporatocracy will just go from country to country until everyone's wallet is vacuumed dry.
The movie Network - I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going to Take it any More - is our current reality. Or put another way: Feudalism with Cable.
Deb MH commented:
Dean is on the right track in creating innovators in America to create jobs.
The National Academies formed a committee of 20 distinguished Americans, headed by
Norman R. Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin and former Undersecretary of the Army. The
committee included other current and former corporate CEOs, university presidents, scientists (including
three Nobel Laureates), philanthropists, former government officials, and education leaders.
1
In 2005,
this committee published a provocative report entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and
Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.
2
The committee concluded that a primary driver of
the future economy and concomitant creation of jobs will be innovation, largely derived from advances in
science and engineering. While only four percent of the nation’s workforce is comprised of scientists and
engineers, this group disproportionately creates jobs for the other 96 percent.
3
2
NAS/NAE/IOM, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic
Future, National Academies Press, 2007. (The initial report was released in 2005, with the final edited book issued in
2007. It is available at Amazon.com and other sources.)
3
NAS/NAE/IOM, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5, National
Academies Press, 2010, pp. 2-3. (Also available at Amazon.com or other sources.)
Randy commented:
Steve Cox hit the nail on the Head. I am a retired engineer because the company I use to work for is now Chinese owned. My 35 years in R&D saw a lot things change. Such as first sending "some" manufacturing off shore. Then came sending "some" design work off shore. And finally, sending the entire product line off shore. All the while the corporation was reaping Hugh profits with little to no tax increases!
Paul in Silicon Valley commented:
Feedback to Mr. Kamen--it is hard not to be impressed by your creativity, endeavor, altruism, and the drive to see your inventions go into production. Nice work!
On one comment, I must take exception. You state that if our focus is only jobs for our kids that the US is done as a country, and that we need to encourage kids to become entrepreneurs.
The problem is that entrepreneurs are a tiny fraction of our working population--the vast majority of people in product-producing industries are in manufacturing of the product.
Due to egregious tax laws whose corporate rate is 0% for US companies' foreign operations, due to CEO's that believe that higher profits from foreign work forces is better than keeping Americans employed, and other CEO's that hire 80,000 H1-B's workers in the midst of record US unemployment--the real problem is that our corporations really don't care whether American workers remain employed.
Mr. Kamen, this is the truth: the problem is that the industrial jobs anywhere are mostly manufacturing, and today these are rapidly going offshore, or in some cases, foreign nationals are being brought in to do the jobs Americans are qualified for and would love to have.
We lack work for our kids because we have given the jobs to other countries. We are under attack from within.
Steve Cox commented:
Awesome - just awesome. Thanks for sharing, Steve.
