- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: Harvard Business Press; 1 edition (May 1 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1578516730
- ISBN-13: 978-1578516735
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 16.3 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 680 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#211,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > Transportation
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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
When, in 1999, journalist Kemper started following the efforts of Dean Kamen to invent a new type of transportation device, he could hardly have known the story would turn out to be at once enormous and tiny. Kamen, inventor of the Uber-hyped Segway (a two-wheeled scooter with an impressive self-balancing system), was already wealthy from earlier inventions (e.g., portable dialysis machines, drug-infusion pumps) when he set his boutique engineering firm to work on the Segway (or "Ginger"). Shrouded in secrecy from the beginning, the project quickly took on a messianic quality, with Kamen proclaiming Ginger would be the primary mode of transportation in a decade. The combination of a cool, mysterious new toy with the timing of the late years of the Internet gold rush created a venture capital feeding frenzy, with figures like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos clamoring to be a part of project Ginger. Kemper's rigorously fair-minded book, which gives all due credit to Kamen and his team, also records Ginger's endless delays, brought about by what he casts as a mixture of Kamen's egomaniacal hubris and his company's inability to think in practical terms (the project was shockingly far along before anyone considered what state regulators might think of the new vehicles that would soon vie for space on sidewalks). The last act is well known. Kemper's book proposal gets leaked and a media circus swirls around the secret world-changing project, only to collapse in a welter of "That's it?" disappointment. The result is a book that is eye-opening and heartbreaking.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
"It's going to change the world."-Dean Kamen
They came from across the country and from the lab down the hall. Some left behind lucrative jobs, some moved their families. Each hand-picked engineer was drawn by the same irresistible lure: the chance to work with a brilliant, eccentric inventor on a secret project. Dean Kamen was already a millionaire with an impressive list of medical inventions to his name, but none of them had excited him like his newest world-changer. Extraordinary things were happening inside his New Hampshire laboratory, things no one could find out about-at least not yet.
This is the unforgettable story of "Ginger," officially named the Segway Human Transporter: a self-balancing, electric-powered people mover that Kamen called "magic sneakers." With the pacing and excitement of a suspense novel, Code Name Ginger documents the birth of a marvelous new technology and the feats of its remarkable inventor, his team of engineers, and the financiers who pursued them.
Steve Kemper was the only journalist granted complete access to the Ginger project as the machine was designed, prototyped, and readied for manufacture. He takes us inside a world of ingenious engineering, in which improbable ideas become real: wheelchairs climb stairs, scooters balance on two wheels, polluted water is made clean. He reveals Kamen as few have seen him: in the heat of invention, racing against time, caught between his idealistic beliefs and his obsession to make Ginger a commercial success. He chronicles the wheeling and dealing of high-rolling investors and New Economy kingpins from John Doerr to Steve Jobs. And he delivers vital business lessons about leadership, entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation while recounting a technological adventure that will be studied and argued about for decades.
For anyone who has ever wondered what it was like inside Thomas Edison's lab or the Wright Brothers' garage, here is the twenty-first century equivalent. Step inside Dean Kamen's laboratory and discover the thrills and risks of invention. The Segway's story, like the machine itself, is appreciated best by climbing aboard and taking a ride.
AUTHORBIO: Steve Kemper is a journalist whose work has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, and other magazines. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
"Rockville Center, Long Island, a small, pleasant suburb thirty-eight minutes by train from New York City, isn't known as a cradle of invention." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
"Rockville Center, Long Island, a small, pleasant suburb thirty-eight minutes by train from New York City, isn't known as a cradle of invention." Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great,
By A Customer
This review is from: Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World (Hardcover)
A unique insight into the development of not only a new product, but a new industry. Whether you like the Segway or not, the book gives you behind the scenes look that most people never get to see, and it's a type of revolutionary technology (maybe not the application) that only comes around every few decades.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice read, but lacking in a few ways...,
By
This review is from: Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World (Hardcover)
I don't own a Segway, but I find it (and DEKA) interesting from an engineering perspective. This book is a largely non-technical view into the process of creating it.Is it a good read? Yes. Would I recommend it to others interested in the topic? Yes. Could it be improved? Yes. I wish it were more technical, which seems to be a reasonable request since the readership should be largely engineers and business people, not a general audience. It also needed a section of photos and/or diagrams of Ginger as the engineering progressed and to illustrate various features discussed in the book. (For example, the handle is described as W-shaped and then it becomes redesigned as M-shaped, but it wasn't clear if that was from the perspective of the rider or looking at it head-on.) I also thought that the writing was awkward in places, and found the few transitions from third-person observer to first-person participant to be jarring. I do recognize that the author's presence was key to those few events, but it was jarring to the flow of the page nonetheless. So, overall, I liked it, but given that it will probably be the only book on the topic, I wish it were better...
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice Read!,
By
This review is from: Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World (Hardcover)
Enjoyed the book. Would have liked to have read a bit more about the engineer's and the engineering process, and it would have been nice to have seen some rough sketches of Ginger at different stages. Nonetheless, I think Dr. Kemper did a nice job.
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