Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
FAILURE IS THE RULE rather than the exception, and every failure contains information. One of the most misleading lessons imparted by those who have reached their goal is that the ones who win are the ones who persevere. Not always. If you keep trying without learning why you failed, you’ll probably fail again and again. Perseverance must be accompanied by the embrace of failure. Failure is what moves you forward. Listen to failure.
But there are different kinds of failure. Sometimes, failure tells you to give up and do something else entirely. Other times, it tells you to try a different approach, a new route to the top of the mountain. Or it may tell you to make a detour. Sometimes, it tells you that you need help. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem to tell you anything.
Linda Stone, a former executive at both Apple Computer and Microsoft, recalls a conversation she participated in with Steve Wozniak and Dean Kamen, perhaps the two best-known living inventors. “I’ll never forget it,” Stone says. “They just were talking about all their failures, and how they both felt like failures.”1 They were almost bragging about various laboratory fiascoes and catastrophes. Given their success, this seemed extraordinary. According to Stone, the conversation occurred just before an awards ceremony. “They were both being celebrated,” she says. So Wozniak and Kamen clearly weren’t talking about their failures as a way of feeling sorry for themselves. Rather, they were identifying with a thinking strategy they both had in common. “Every failure is a learning experience,” concludes Stone, “and it should be seen as part of progress, rather than seeing it as the enemy.”
You wouldn’t normally associate Steve Wozniak with failure. His early career has often been described as a rocket ride. Born in San Jose, California, in 1950, the son of a teacher and a Lockheed engineer, Woz played with surplus transistors that his father brought home from work, making his own walkie-talkies and intercoms. Woz was operating ham radios by age eleven and designing computers by age thirteen, but mostly on paper. A habitual prankster, in high school he built “blue boxes”: devices that patched into phone company switches, enabling the user to make free calls and redirect other people’s lines.2 As he was creating these things, Woz learned about tinkering—trying something, learning why it doesn’t work, recovering from that small misdirection, and then using the resulting knowledge to try something else. “I’d scrap things together—try this, try this, try this,” Woz has said.3 He was embracing failure iteration. “Another way of looking at failure is learning the ability to iterate,” says Linda Stone.
Through a common friend at Homestead High School in Santa Clara, Woz was introduced to Steve Jobs, an ambitious hippie and fellow prankster who later ended up getting a gig as a technician at Atari Inc., maker of computer games. “He could persuade people to do things that normally couldn’t get done,” Woz recalls. After graduating from college in Boulder, Colorado, Woz worked as an engineer with Hewlett-Packard, designing handheld calculators. There, he learned from the failures of others. He recalls being able to walk around to various workbenches and quickly tell when his colleagues were crafting designs that wouldn’t pan out. He enjoyed the job, but Woz has repeatedly speculated that if he had tried to create a personal computer at H-P, it would have failed. “We probably would have made the wrong decisions technically and built the wrong product,” he has said. With the future demand for individual desktop computers clear to both of them (but not to their bosses at Atari and H-P), the two Steves went into business together in 1976, setting up shop in Jobs’s garage.
Many times, Woz would induce his own failures by reviewing work he had already done. “I once laid out the whole board, and then I got an idea to save one feed-through [circuit],” he recalled in an interview some ten years later. “So I took the board apart, I trashed maybe a week’s worth of work, and then I started over.”4 The Apple I computer featured eight kilobytes of random access memory. While Woz did the inventing and the engineering, Jobs typically was out making sales pitches and raising money. The Steves built 200 machines and sold 175 of them to hobbyists over ten months.
With the modest success of the Apple I under their belts, Jobs convinced Woz to quit H-P and form Apple Computer, with $3 million in backing from local venture capitalists. Wozniak then created the Apple II, the last personal computer to be designed entirely by a single human being. It contained dozens of innovations, including support for color graphics, word processing, and games, and it, too, was the product of rapid failure iteration. For example, in creating the disk drive Woz began with a design based on fifty chips. In a frantic engineering zigzag that featured dozens of false starts, he managed to reduce the number of chips to three. The result of all this iterative failure, the Apple II, was so clearly superior to any other personal computer then on the market that it dominated the field for three years. By 1980, Apple Computer was a public company, with revenues exceeding $100 million. The Apple II architecture managed to hold on to a small piece of the personal computer market even after IBM introduced its famed PC in 1981 and Apple unveiled the Macintosh in 1984.
But looking back on his career, Woz remembers far more failure than success. He didn’t cope well at Apple as the company grew. He felt that the talent-rich Macintosh team needed him less and less. He resisted being a manager or a businessperson. He was distracted by his wealth. After he became successful, he has said, “I wound up trapped by the world.”5 He left Apple in 1985 and immediately went searching for something new to invent, hoping to duplicate his earlier success.
Instead, Woz made new mistakes. His next company, Cloud Nine, was a failure in many respects. He pinpointed a problem: that the average consumer had too many poorly designed remote controls. But Woz’s invention, a programmable remote control designed to work with any TV or other consumer electronics device, didn’t work well with some equipment, and it was not embraced by manufacturers or consumers. His failure was so complete that he felt as if his artist-like ability to connect different ideas in his head was gone. He felt that he couldn’t program software anymore. “It gets to the point where you can’t tell where the inventiveness was lost,” he said not long after the Cloud Nine dream died. He lost most of his Apple fortune, and he became disillusioned by the entire industry.
Faced with failure, Woz seemed to give up. He became one of the world’s most famous teachers, holding classes in computer graphics for elementary school kids in his own garage. His former partner, Steve Jobs, soon moved on to learn a fantastic set of lessons from his own “failure,” Next Computer Inc. But Woz seemed content to sit on the sidelines. “He’s uniquely undriven,” said industry pundit Stuart Alsop.6
But maybe Woz was just responding to failure in his own way. His style of inventing complex electronics all by himself was no longer applicable in a world made infinitely more complex by his own invention. He decided to specialize, to immerse himself in the one component of the computer that was most prone to failure, the only part he still found interesting: the user, particularly the young user, the kid in school. He was taking a giant detour. While dabbling in philanthropy, he delved into the practice of teaching and the study of learning, more specifically how children use computers to learn. He did this for nearly fifteen years, during which time more of his fortune evaporated.
Then, in January 2001, gathering all he had learned, Wozniak got back into the game of invention. Now in his early fifties, he started a company called WOZ (for Wheels of Zeus) and secretly began building prototypes and showing them to potential investors. He called WOZ “a new wireless products company to help everyday people do everyday things.” He was inspired by his dog outsmarting and escaping the electric fence in the yard one too many times. He raised $6 million in venture capital, to back his prototype of developing a set of cheap radio-frequency chips that communicated with Global Positioning System satellites, so people could keep tabs on the whereabouts of their kids, pets, or other valuables. He called the network that would send location data to end users wOzNet. “The goal is doing something neat and fun,” he said.7 Was Woz about to capitalize on his past failures? Or was he going to make a new set of mistakes? Knowing the history of Woz, he was about to do both, and that’s the way it should be.
Dean Kamen has probably failed more consistently and more often than his friend Steve Wozniak. That’s because Kamen has never let up from the process of invention and never intends to. Along the way, Kamen has become the ultimate just-do-it inventor and a master at failure iteration. As with Wozniak, Kamen’s mother was also a teacher. His father carved out a career as a highly successful comic book illustrator and portrait artist. Growing up in Rockville Center, Long Island, Kamen, a year younger than Wozniak, loved to learn but was impatient with the structure of school. “My hobby was thinking, and watching people,” he says.8 His father advised him, “If it’s not a big deal, don’t complain. If it is, do something about it.”9
Kamen created his first profitable invention one summer during high school. In his basement, he experimented with connecting a box of multicolored lights to a stereo system and coordinating a light show to the patterns of music. (Hey, it was the 1960s.) One day, his boss, a cabinetmaker, took Kamen on a business call to the Hayden Planetarium, part of the New York Museum of Natural History. The sixteen-year-old Kamen decided he would build a version of his sound-and-light show box for the museum, and he persisted in bringing his improved box back to the museum and installing it himself for a demo. As soon as he plugged it in, boom! All the circuits in a wing of the building blew. “I almost set the place on fire,” he recalls. From this failure, he learned about a thing called a three-phase power system, and he accommodated his next version to that system. The museum ended up ordering five units for $10,000. News of Kamen’s sound-and-light show invention made the New York Times, and he was flooded with orders. Pretty soon, his basement “looked like the inside of a transistor radio.”
For Kamen, the prospect of failure sometimes served as a motivator in and of itself. William P. Murphy Jr., the founder of Cordis Corp. and the inventor of many medical devices, heard about the museum’s sound-and-light show and hired Kamen to design an audiovisual presentation for the unveiling of his company’s latest invention, a physiologic pacemaker. But when Cordis engineers installed Kamen’s equipment at a big trade show in California, something went haywire and the power supply melted only a day before the big presentation. Kamen flew out to the show, crawled under the stage, and diagnosed the problem as backward wiring. Then he flew back on the red-eye to his basement lab, worked all day to rebuild a new power board, caught another flight back to California that evening, reinstalled the equipment, and got it to work just in time. Murphy, the son of a Nobel Prize–winning doctor, recognized in Kamen a kindred spirit, someone who had the same compulsion to create. Murphy was so impressed that he became a mentor to Kamen.10
Inspired by his association with Murphy and by the stories told by his older brother, Bart, a Harvard Medical School student, Kamen turned to inventing new medical devices. But he recognized that he wouldn’t be able to invent these sophisticated instruments unless he was able to make a lot of mistakes very rapidly. He needed a way to do failure iteration. In particular, he needed a lathe, a three-thousand-pound device that can sculpt intricate parts. So he had one delivered and installed in his parents’ basement.
Kamen called his company Independent Prototype, and he ran the shop for four years. All through his college years at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he drove back and forth between his lab and his dorm room, doing a lot of inventing but not very much schoolwork. In the shop, he created a miniature syringe that automatically delivered precise doses of medicine. The drug-infusion device led to a story in the New England Journal of Medicine. After reading it, officials at the National Institutes of Health ordered one hundred of Kamen’s syringes at $2,000 each. Large research hospitals became clients of Kamen’s company, which he renamed Auto Syringe Inc. By now, Kamen no longer found much use for the charade of going to college, so he dropped out and became a full-time inventor.
To keep up with the demand for his devices, he needed to expand his operation and acquire the means to iterate a wider range of ideas and concepts. “I wanted a full machine shop,” Kamen recalls. “And I saw all that wasted space in my parent’s backyard.” So, with his parents away on a ten-day cruise, Kamen ordered in a crane and a bulldozer. The construction crew lifted the entire house off its foundation and dug an eight-foot hole in the backyard to expand the basement. Town officials came by, screaming that he didn’t have a permit. “Pieces of sidewalk were popping up,” says Kamen. “It was worse than I thought it would be.” When his parents came home and surveyed the full scope of what their son had done to their home, his father turned to his mother and said, “Okay, now what’s for dinner?”
Kamen was clearly oblivious to the consequences of trying new things, and perhaps his parents knew they couldn’t and probably shouldn’t stop him. Most of his ideas flopped, but he was having so many of them, and he was able to test them so quickly, that a small portion of his ideas turned out to be good ones. In addition to the Auto Syringe, Kamen developed a portable insulin pump for diabetics that found strong demand in the market. The product led to a six-figure income by the time he was in his early twenties.
One day Kamen spotted a license plate with the motto “Live Free or Die.” He had never been to New Hampshire, but he decided that the motto sounded pretty good. He needed to be closer to his medical clients in Boston, he needed cheap and abundant laboratory and manufacturing space, and he liked the idea of not paying personal income taxes. He had his lab gear and machine shop loaded into four Ryder trucks, formed a convoy with twenty of his employees, and headed north.
Upon his arrival in Manchester, Kamen rented a set of buildings “for next to nothing” and proceeded to embark on a string of ill-fated projects that once in a while led to a big payoff. Taking the first two letters of his first and last names, he soon renamed his company DEKA Research. “It’s always been a continual series of failures,” says John Morrell, one of DEKA’s top engineers. “But it’s punctuated by an occasional success.”11 Under this business model, those few successes pay for all the failures, and learning from the failures often leads to a success. In 1982, for example, Auto Syringe was considered such a success that Kamen was able to sell the product to the healthcare giant Baxter International for $30 million. Baxter came back a few years later and asked Kamen to fix a problem with the valves in its kidney dialysis machine, used in hospitals worldwide, but Kamen rejected the premise of the assignment. He instead built a portable, compact machine that for the first time enabled patients to filter their blood in their own homes.
With the cash from the sale and the continual flow of royalties from Baxter’s new HomeChoice dialysis machines, Kamen bought an airplane, a helicopter, and his own small island, called North Dumpling, in Long Island Sound. He famously seceded from the United States to form his own tiny country. “The only 100 percent science-literate society,” goes Kamen’s credo. “America can learn a lot from its neighbor.” For his provisional government, he named Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, originators of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream products, as the Joint Ministers of Ice Cream.12
But Kamen has little time to relax on his island. More often, you can find him tooling about among a cluster of old red-brick mill buildings on the banks of the Merrimack River. Containing a half million square feet and featuring eighteen-foot ceilings, the Manchester mill complex was at one point the world’s largest textile plant. But it had stood empty for fifty years when Kamen bought it and established DEKA there. “It was in tough, tough shape,” Kamen recalls. He proceeded to invest more than $10 million to transform the place into the ultimate inventor’s playground, installing a football-field-sized machine shop on the fourth floor so that he could iterate new ideas and learn from failure faster than anyone else in the world.
Often, inventors will tell you that they would never have embarked on a particular project if they had known ahead of time how much trial and error and disappointment and money they would have to invest to make it a success. You might think that Dean Kamen’s IBOT project would belong in that category, but only if you didn’t know Dean Kamen.
One day in 1990, Kamen became fascinated while witnessing a wheelchair-bound man trying to get over a curb en route to a shopping center in Manchester. Kamen followed the man into an ice cream parlor and saw him struggle to reach the counter and grab his ice cream cone. As a lover of ice cream, Kamen was outraged. As an inventor, he was inspired. He thought it was ridiculous that a wheelchair couldn’t climb a curb—or stairs, for that matter—and he thought it must be debilitating for wheelchair-bound people when they couldn’t rise up to interact with someone else eye to eye.
For the next two years Kamen pondered the problem, but neither he nor his team of engineers could think of a reasonable solution. One day, when Kamen slipped on a wet bathroom floor, the solution came to him. Balance. That was the problem. The technique of catching yourself before falling—that was what needed to be simulated in a new kind of wheelchair.
What followed was ten years of nearly constant frustration, with only an occasional eureka. Soon after pinpointing the problem, the team Kamen assembled homed in on the enabling technology: a set of electronic gyroscopes that could provide the IBOT with its automatic balance. “We didn’t invent the gyroscopes, the microprocessor, the sensors, and the other components,” Kamen says. “We find the best-in-breed components and integrate them. Twenty years ago, gyroscopes used to be big, mechanical objects with spinning masts. Ten years ago, they had smaller rings. Five years ago, they went solid state. These days, they’re building gyroscopes at the size and scale of the microchip.”13
Kamen was talking about these electronic gyroscopes on a hot July morning while giving a private tour of his vast laboratory. In the IBOT development area, a visitor could catch only a glimpse of the kind of failure and pressure that has gone on here. A sign on the wall read, “God said: Let there be light. Dean says: Let’s make it lighter.” The joke was in reference to Kamen’s challenge “to put the IBOT on a diet,” reducing its one-time weight of 300 pounds to something closer to 200 pounds. It had to be done without reducing reliability and functionality and without increasing the costs. At the time of this visit, the 225-pound IBOT was functioning beautifully—climbing stairs, providing the rider with the ability to stand up while retaining perfect balance, and so forth. The system had passed a set of clinical trials, and was going through a laborious process of gaining FDA approval so that it could be sold by Johnson & Johnson, the company that had purchased the sales and marketing rights. (The final approval came a few months later.)
The IBOT, of course, inspired Kamen’s most famous invention. “We built an IBOT, and once the balancing systems worked perfectly, we realized that they could be used in other places,” he says. He generalized the technology so that it could apply to everyone. “When you’re a baby, you stick your butt out or head out and you fall on it. You move your center of gravity in front of your feet, and then you start to fall and you put a foot out in front. You go into a controlled fall, but you catch yourself on the ball of your foot.” That’s the basic principle behind the Segway, Kamen’s two-wheeled personal electronic vehicle. “The Segway becomes an extension of yourself,” he says, “because it is acting in response to your own basic understanding of balance.”
The Segway is yet another invention built upon failure after failure. “People think engineering is a nice, neat, clean, linear process,” says Doug Field, Segway’s vice president of product development. He joined DEKA in 1996, after twenty years with the Ford Motor Company. “But there’s never an obvious solution,” Field continues. “There’s so much complication. It’s a messy, dirty, frustrating process.”14
To get through this process, DEKA’s culture doesn’t merely tolerate the occasional mistake; it provides incentive for creative failure. “Most companies penalize failure,” Field says. “[But] failure is important. Don’t punish it. Don’t make it difficult to try something. You can fail without letting down the team.” To encourage his engineers to fail in the most dramatic fashion possible, Kamen instituted a peer-nominated award known as the Frog. As the saying goes, “You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.”
The objective is to prompt a lot of frog-kissing—to elicit as many ideas as possible, test them as rapidly as possible, throw away the bad ones as soon as possible, and end up with what survives. The best ideas become part of finished products, but the most fantastically bad ideas are also rewarded—with the Frog. Winning it is a badge of honor. “We want people to put their heart and soul into it,” says Field. To win the Frog, “we want a beautiful implementation that is fundamentally flawed.” Distinguishing the perfect product from the frog is never obvious. As Field puts it, “You never know the quality of the idea until the end of the kiss.”
The handlebar system for the Segway was one of the areas in which the team produced and kissed many frogs. Forty engineers and designers focused some of their keenest attention on the handlebar’s user interface and steering mechanism. They began by constructing prototypes on screens, using computer-aided design (CAD) software. But Kamen prefers to see physical objects made in his machine shop so that you can hold them your hands and test them in actual machines. “Everybody talks about rapid prototyping and all that CAD activity, but there is nothing like real parts,” he says.15
One early prototype—a straight aluminum handlebar with a radio-button-like dial for controlling the steering—proved too difficult for riders to learn. “It required a surgeon’s touch,” says Field. Frog. In a subsequent design, engineers developed a plastic sleeve so that users could control the steering with the whole hand and wrist, as opposed to the fingertips, and that design proved successful. But it featured steering handles at right angles to the main bar, and these handles kept getting caught in riders’ belts and shirts. Frog. A more rounded, M-shaped version included more electronics and was crafted from hard plastic. That proved to be much easier to manufacture, but its many buttons and features, Field says, caused confusion and distraction. Frog.16
In the end, it came down to a design emphasizing simplicity and aesthetics. “This is a beautiful form,” marvels DEKA engineer Morrell, pointing to the product they decided was just right. “It looks like a bird flying, right?”17 Yet the team still keeps the rejected frogs around the lab as a way of embracing failure and learning from it.
Dean Kamen and Stephen Jacobsen, the Utah-based robotics inventor introduced in Chapter 8, are rivals in some areas, but they are also peers who spend time talking about the process of invention, admiring each other’s skills, and they’ve developed a certain form of mutual respect. They have a common set of acquaintances. Bill Murphy has served as a mentor and key business contact for both Jacobsen and Kamen. Woodie Flowers—a legendary MIT engineer professor who works with Kamen on running the annual FIRST robotics competition for students—was Jacobsen’s roommate as a grad student at MIT. In addition, both Jacobsen and Kamen have done projects for a common set of clients, including Baxter and Johnson & Johnson.
But Kamen has become famous, whereas Jacobsen hasn’t. To see why, consider a few examples of how Jacobsen invented successfully but still failed to make an impact or get the credit he deserved. For instance, he recognized the limitations of Baxter’s kidney dialysis machines fifteen years before Dean Kamen reinvented the same device. Jacobsen collaborated with Willem Kolff, the original inventor of the Baxter technology, and received a string of patents on a new machine that was many times better than the one Baxter was marketing worldwide. But Baxter wasn’t yet ready for these ideas, and so the company repeatedly rejected Jacobsen’s product. “Timing is everything in the world of invention,” says Jacobsen. “If you’re too early or too late, you’re screwed.”18
Overall, you’d have to say that Stephen Jacobsen’s career has been a stunning success. After he started Sarcos Research in 1983, his reputation for inventing “information-based machines that move” grew and grew. Demand for his services became so great that he was able to pick and choose which invention projects to undertake for some of the world’s biggest and best-known corporations. He calls Sarcos a “skunk works for hire.” At any given time, his laboratory is working on dozens of different projects, under contracts ranging from $50,000 to $30 million. He expands and shrinks the size of his invention team from between thirty and two hundred people depending on what kind of medical devices, robots, and miniature electronics products he has agreed to invent and develop.
But visit Jacobsen at his Salt Lake City laboratory on any given day, and you’ll encounter a jumble of half-assembled robot heads, motors, and circuit boards. He admits that most of the things he does simply fail. “People come in here and see all these prototypes and they say, ‘Gee, you have a lot of failures,’” says Jacobsen. He replies with a quotation from Thomas Edison: “These aren’t failures. They’re experiments.” Edison also proudly declared, “I have discovered a thousand different ways not to make a light bulb.” Jacobsen, too, spends much of his time learning how not to do something that’s never been done before. “We try to make mistakes as fast as we can,” he says, echoing Kamen and almost all other successful inventors.
For years, Jacobsen has pursued a somewhat secret goal. After he watched Robert Jarvik get all the credit for the artificial heart at the University of Utah in 1981, he thought he too could one day achieve an immortal result. “I’d love to invent something that gets remembered, something like the phonograph,” he says. Yet however great his achievements, wider recognition has eluded him. When he invented the Utah Arm, it probably should have been seen as a breakthrough, something that captured the imagination of the general public. But it came at a time when The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman were hot on prime-time television, so the advanced technology embodied in Jacobsen’s invention didn’t come as a surprise to a public accustomed to bionic and robotic special effects in their living rooms. Later, Jacobsen invented a whole new field, MEMS, the forerunner to today’s nanotechnology boom. What did that get him? A position on the editorial board of the Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems.
In recent years, he has contributed to some of the key micromechanical sensors inside Honda’s famous ASIMO, a sophisticated toy robot. But as an inventor for hire, Jacobsen rarely gets any credit. Instead, he is almost completely focused on where such robots fail rather than on what they can already do. When he demonstrates the robots he has created, people naturally get excited. Perhaps his most spectacular demo product is a robot that can juggle three balls. You can watch the robot calibrate its actions and get better over time. It seems to be learning before your eyes. “You show people these juggling robots, and people think it’s one step away from doing a lot more,” he says, “but these are actually very primitive learning programs.”
Failure is what drives the development of these robots. Jacobsen spends his time working out theories of what a real robot would be like. He’s trying to develop robots that aren’t just programmed but rather act on their own and don’t need to be refueled or recharged. “Robots are very hard to do,” he says. “Honda, Toyota, Sony—they all believe that the time has come for robots. What would really be nice is autonomous robots. Take it out of the box, teach it, then it goes and does things. It would learn and see and perceive. They need intellectual independence. But that’s just part of it. There has to be energy independence and sensory independence, too.”
When it comes to learning from failure, Jacobsen has collected a pile of lessons the hard way. At one point in the late 1980s, he decided that the real hot spot for robots would be in the entertainment industry. Hollywood. Las Vegas. Disney. That’s where the money and recognition really are, he thought. Jacobsen was engaging in a behavior to which many inventors succumb: He began chasing rainbows. For a Disney theme park exhibition, Jacobsen built a lifelike Joe Cocker robot that sang “Feeling Alright” with many of the singer’s body gyrations and facial expressions. He built sword-fighting robots that mesmerized audiences. He made a John Wayne robot that drew big laughs whenever it said, “Round ’em up, partner.” But he doesn’t make much money on these projects. “They beat you up on the price,” he says, “and under these sponsored contracts, you have to sign these big documents that tell you to keep your mouth shut.”
In the course of making mistakes on these projects, Jacobsen became one of the world’s best developers of animatronics, lifelike robots that put on a computer-coordinated show. Larry Miller, owner of the Utah Jazz basketball team, hired Sarcos to produce one of these animatronics spectacles for a new theme restaurant called The Mayan. Jacobsen created a flock of pelicans, toucans, iguanas, and other colorful birds and lizards that banter with one another and sing songs such as “Women” by Mungo Jerry (“In the summertime, when the weather is hot …”). Creating each robot cost $100,000. But the restaurant didn’t do as well as expected, and the entire exhibit was soon relocated to the basement at the Sarcos lab. “Every time I’m in a crummy mood, I just come down here and watch and listen to this,” he says “This makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”
For the Bellaggio, the world-famous $1.3 billion hotel and casino complex in Las Vegas, developer Steve Wynn hired Jacobsen to create robotically controlled wave fountains that would put on a spectacular water, music, and light show for guests twice per day. Over the course of two years, Jacobsen and his team designed and constructed a set of ten-foot-tall underwater wave machines that form beautiful water patterns that travel a quarter of a mile in the Bellaggio’s manmade lake. “This had to be done on time, or they’d cut your legs off,” Jacobsen recalls. When the project was completed, there was a blacktie dinner scheduled for thousands of press and VIPs. When Jacobsen and his team arrived, they were led into the hotel’s basement. “They actually made us eat dinner in black tie in the basement, in this shitty storage room,” he recalls. “We were then led upstairs and put behind a fence so that we could never be where the big people were. They didn’t want us to be known. They never mentioned us.”
The failure to gain recognition was even more painful after Jacobsen completed a project for the Universal Studios theme park. For the Jurassic Park exhibit, Universal hired Sarcos to create the centerpiece attraction, a giant robotic dinosaur, to be as lifelike and scary as possible. Jacobsen developed an eighty-thousand-pound tyrannosaurus rex robot called the Ultrasaur. The neck alone was forty feet long. The project took two years, and there were so many pieces that Sarcos had to subcontract some of the components to dozens of design shops all over the western United States. But when it came to unveiling the Ultrasaur to the press and the public, Jacobsen wasn’t invited or mentioned. “Management saw us as an outside vendor,” he says, “as someone to provide services at a minimum price.”
Jacobsen has learned a lot from these failures to receive credit for his work. Achieving a spectacular success doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere. If Jacobsen had secretly programmed the Ultrasaur to start attacking tourists, perhaps that would have made him famous. Maybe that would have gotten the public’s attention.
From all these episodes, Jacobsen learned an overarching lesson: Don’t let disappointment lead to disillusionment. Surprisingly, after all these letdowns, Jacobsen has kept the faith. “I tell students this all the time,” he says. “The most important thing you can have is the ability to believe. Believing is a controllable aspect of people. You can let it be beaten out of you by bad events. You can become cynics, and a cynic does nothing. If you are going to invent or create, you have to put a lot of effort into something strictly on the idea of belief, because you can never know enough to justify doing it otherwise. It’s pretty much the same way in anything you do. The venture guys bitch and moan and fail about 60 percent of the time. I bitch and moan, and I fail about 60 percent of the time. You’ve got to roll the dice. It’s easy to be let it be stomped out of you. But failure can teach you to keep the faith.”
These days, inventors rarely get the chance to become identified with their own inventions. Steve Jacobsen is proof of that. If you are working at a corporation or if you’re a contractor for hire, someone else will receive the credit. Perhaps this explains why there are so few famous inventors these days. Perhaps it also explains why Dean Kamen decided to market the Segway on his own even though the chance of failure was high.
There is no doubt that the Segway is an engineering marvel. Steve Jobs, for one, was so impressed by early demonstrations that he apparently felt he was witnessing another Woz-like creation in the making. Jobs reportedly offered the buy the invention outright and then negotiated to purchase a minority share. The deal ended up falling apart, but not for lack of excitement. Other investors stepped in and eagerly ponied up $100 million for a small stake in the company, Segway LLC, making it one of the most highly valued start-ups ever.19
Why such excitement? Does the Segway solve a huge problem or fill a huge need? As defined by Kamen, the Segway is the answer to the urban transportation problem. “Cars are so good that we’ve paved entire continents to accommodate them,” he says. “But no one enjoys traffic in cities. It causes congestion and pollution, and your speed is one-tenth of a mile per hour. Think of the fuel used in traffic. Forty-three percent of the world’s gas is used by cars. Nineteen point six percent of people’s disposable income goes to car payments and gas. In New York City, people will spend six hundred dollars per month just to park their car. Sixty-five percent of the land area in cities is parked cars. Every city in world! Three point two billion people live in cities—half of the world’s population.”20
Backed by all these statistics, Kamen is convinced that what people really want is a vehicle that can move four times as fast as walking but takes up only a little more space than a pedestrian. He pegs the market for the Segway at a few billion people. He doesn’t see it as an expensive toy for rich people or gadget freaks. “I didn’t spend thirty years in the medical business to come up with a new toy,” he says. It all sounds compelling, and there is no doubt that Kamen’s invention and his argument have made Segway into the most talked-about invention in a very long time. In a way, Segway has revived the very notion of invention itself as something important and fascinating.
What’s unusual here is the way the inventor has put himself on the line. We rarely see the inventors. They are the men and women behind the curtain. Even Kamen typically licenses or sells his best inventions to giant corporations, makes a lot of money, and then moves on to invent the next thing. Friends and colleagues told him that this would have been the wise course of action here as well. “I tried to talk him out of it,” says Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft research chief, who learned from Kamen how to fly helicopters.21
Myhrvold says that a great inventor like Kamen should be back in the lab creating something new rather than out being a “social crusader,” promoting and marketing. “Inventors sometimes go on a crusade to get the world to accept their idea,” Myhrvold says. “Inventors are often seduced by their own ideas. They fall in love—like with their kids—often irrationally so. It’s a pitfall. It’s a dangerous path to be on.” The easier route, adds Myhrvold, would have been to look at the market for the Segway like the market for snowmobiles. The snowmobile is a terrific invention. It’s fun, it’s useful, and making and selling snowmobiles is a profitable business. But it’s not an especially large business. Not everyone wants or needs a snow-mobile. Myhrvold says that Kamen should have outsourced everything. “In ten years, who can make the Segway more cheaply—Dean Kamen or Honda?” Because Kamen is doing everything himself, says Myhrvold, “there is a huge risk of failure for things that have nothing to do with the invention itself.”
Maybe that’s the point—maybe Kamen doesn’t particularly mind if the Segway is perceived as a spectacular failure in the short term. That would explain its hefty initial price tag of $5,000 and Kamen’s decision not to do any advertising so that he could fine-tune his message in the face of great hype and expectation. With reported first-year sales of less than fifty thousand units, no one could argue that initial sales have set the world ablaze. For Kamen, though, it might be about something more than the Segway itself. It might be about reviving the Edisonian ideal of the inventor as the hero.
That is certainly one of the main driving forces behind Kamen’s nonprofit organization, FIRST (For the Inspiration of Science and Technology), which funds an annual robot-making competition as a way of getting high school students as excited about creating technology as they are about playing and watching sports. The annual finals are typically held in a giant football stadium. Kamen is so passionate about FIRST that he deflects almost every question about his own ambitions into a speech about FIRST. Perhaps this explains Kamen’s decision to cast himself as the front man. Wherever he goes, he’s riding the Segway and wearing his trademark uniform: workboots, blue jeans, denim shirt. Perhaps he’s doing all this for a reason. Perhaps it’s important to him to project his image as a blue-collar engineer who is at work full time changing the world. Perhaps he sees himself as a new-kind-of-old-kind-of role model.
Linda Stone, who counts Kamen as a friend, says that Kamen perceives failure and success much differently from what is considered normal. Among the common traits Stone has observed in many inventors is their ability to delay gratification, a characteristic that she feels is discouraged in our instant gratification society. “Culturally, we behave in a way that weeds out, or that selects out, an ability to really develop a sense of delayed gratification,” Stone says. “When I look at Dean Kamen, his IBOT wheelchair took ten years to develop. All of these things have taken at least ten years. The Internet was thirty years in the making before it found that place where technology met human needs and desires. So I’m both concerned and disturbed about the degree to which the ability to handle delayed gratification is not rewarded, and we are so aggressively looking for immediate gratification and we have such a compromised sense of time horizons today.”22
As with any new invention, no one can tell what the Segway will look like in ten years, who will be using it, and for what purpose. Kamen has already offered his own guesses. First, he suspects that it may make a bigger splash in China than anywhere else. “The percentage of people living on farms there is getting smaller every year,” he says. “China will have to move 800 million people into cities over the next twenty years.” It may be physically impossible for all those people to be driving cars, even if they could afford them. He sees the Segway as revolutionizing the Chinese city of the future.23
The most promising way to improve the technology may lie in replacing the current rechargeable battery with a Stirling engine. Talk about learning from failure. In 1816, Scottish inventor Robert Stirling came up with the concept for a single- or double-piston engine in which simple differentials between hot and cold chambers generated energy. An “external” combustion engine, the Stirling can run on anything from cow dung to leaves to propane. In principle and in practice, the Stirling works. But it doesn’t work well enough. Kamen and his team have studied nearly two centuries’ worth of experiments. They are trying to boost the power and efficiency enough so that such an engine can keep the crankshaft turning on the Segway, and Kamen has formed a separate company, New Power Ventures, to develop the engine technology. He sees a reinvented Stirling as a long-term replacement for the ubiquitous internal-combustion engine and our dependence on oil.
On the day of my visit, he’s working on the Stirling in his machine shop. “This would be part of a ball bearing assembly to hold one of the rotating components,” Kamen says, picking up a heavy metal gasket crafted by a large machine. He explains that the engine’s mechanisms must withstand extreme heat and pressure. “You can’t buy standard bearings that can do that. Nobody here planned to invent new ball bearings, but in order to make this engine practical, we have to eliminate some problems, and so unfortunately we have to develop a bearing technology that doesn’t exist.”
This work might not pay off for five years or more—if at all. In the short run, all Kamen can do is feed information from his failures back into his development projects. That goes for marketing as well as engineering. By spearheading everything himself, he’s learning not only about engineering and manufacturing but also about public relations, about negotiating new uses and markets for his invention, about convincing national and state governments to alter their laws and their urban planning to allow Segways on sidewalks, and so on. We’re talking about a man who learns so much from failure that this experience could make him virtually unstoppable.
Just because Kamen’s Segway hasn’t yet transformed life on Earth, that by no means rules out his potential to do so in the future. “Everybody knows that in order to build big muscles, you have to work against the heaviest weights until you fail,” says Linda Stone.24 In this way, every failure that doesn’t kill inventors will make them stronger.