- Dean Kamen, multimillionaire inventrepreneur, is going
global with a robochair that climbs stairs, a miracle motor that fights
disease, and his wildest notion of all - that scientists will be the 21st
century's superstars.
-
- Dean Kamen's sense of what's possible is governed by
the immutable laws of nature. Everything else is up for grabs.
-
- Kamen, 49, is a self-taught physicist and multimillionaire
entrepreneur who lives in a hexagonally shaped house of his own design
atop a hill just outside Manchester, New Hampshire. Invisible from the
road, the estate is outfitted with a softball field, a wood-paneled library
that's full of awards and honorary degrees (Kamen never graduated from
college), a wind turbine to help supply power, and a pulley system that
can deliver a bottle of wine from the kitchen to the bedroom.
-
- He calls the place Westwind, and he stuffed it with a
collection of toys and antiques that includes a jukebox, a slot machine,
and a 25-ton steam engine once owned by Henry Ford. In Westwind's basement,
there's a foundry, a machine shop, and a computer room, where Kamen often
toils late into the night. He keeps a Porsche 928 and a black Humvee
in one garage, two Enstrom helicopters in the other. The smaller, piston-driven
chopper takes him to and from work at his offices in downtown Manchester;
the larger, turbine-driven version is reserved for longer hops, like to
his private island off the coast of Connecticut. For trips more than a
few hundred miles, he flies his twin-turbofan CitationJet.
-
- Kamen has high-powered friends to match his taste in
toys, and throws lavish parties that entice many powerful people to New
Hampshire. Visitors have included George W. Bush, NASA administrator Dan
Goldin, and, more recently, John Doerr of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers. But it's not the Rolodex, the air force, or the
tricked-out Batcave that separates Kamen from the usual posse of tech
multimillionaires. It's the way he's gone about acquiring it all, and
the offbeat, often idealistic ways he chooses to spend it.
-
- While Kamen won't divulge the size of his fortune, much
of it stems from having invented things he decided ought to exist - no
market research necessary - like first-of-their-kind medical devices.
-
- While Kamen was attending college in the 1970s, his brother
- then a medical student and now a renowned pediatric oncologist - complained
that there was no reliable way to give steady doses of drugs to patients.
So Kamen invented the first portable infusion pump capable of delivering
drugs (such as insulin) to patients who had previously required round-the-clock
monitoring, freeing them from a life inside the hospital.
-
- In the mid-1990s, he devised a phone book-sized dialysis
machine - at a time when similar devices were as big as dishwashers and
required patients to make regular trips to dialysis centers. Vernon Loucks,
former chair of Baxter International, contracted Kamen's privately held
company, Deka Research & Development, to develop the machine. "We
didn't believe it could be done," he recalls. "Now it's all
over the world. Dean is the brightest guy I've ever met in this business,
bar none."
-
- When he watched a man in a wheelchair try to negotiate
a curb in the late '80s, Kamen wondered whether he could build a chair
that would hop curbs without losing its balance. After $50 million and
eight years in development, the Ibot Transporter - a six-wheeled robotic
"mobility system" that can climb stairs, traverse sandy and
rocky terrain, and raise its user to eye-level with a standing person
- is undergoing FDA trials, and should be available by 2001, at a cost
of $20,000. That may sound high, but keep in mind that the Ibot erases
the need to retrofit a home for a wheelchair. Plus, mobility system is
if anything an understatement: In June, Kamen saddled up his Ibot and
climbed the stairs from a Paris Métro station to the restaurant
level of the Eiffel Tower - then promptly called John Doerr on his cell
phone.
-
- "At first blush, you'd stay away from developing
something like the Ibot, just because of the legal implications,"
says Woodie Flowers, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT and a friend
of Kamen's. "You're going to put a human in it and it'll go up stairs?
That's nuts. But he did it. He's not one to get caught up in conventional
wisdom."
-
- Lately, Kamen has broadened his work beyond health care.
He believes technology and ingenuity can solve all kinds of social ills
- like pollution, limited access to electricity, and contaminated water
in many third-world countries, where bacteria from human feces in drinking
water is a leading cause of cholera. To help ameliorate the water problem,
Deka's team of 170 engineers is working on a nonpolluting engine - funded
by several million dollars of Kamen's own money - based on a concept first
floated in the early 1800s but never realized.
-
- The device is called the Stirling engine; Kamen hopes
it can be developed into an affordable, portable machine that will run
a water purifier/power generator that could zap contaminated H20 with
a UV laser to make it safe for drinking. "It can burn any fuel, and
you can do all kinds of things with it," he says. "It might
be very valuable in emerging economies, giving them access to electricity,
even the Net."
-
- Another project, to be unveiled in the next year, will
necessitate building "the largest company in New Hampshire,"
Kamen says with characteristic bravura. He's shy about details, except
to say it involves a consumer device unrelated to health care and will
require $100 million in financing. Among the investors: Kleiner Perkins.
-
- But Kamen's first love and greatest passion these days
is an idea that may be the farthest-fetched of all: turning engineers and
inventors into pop-culture superstars. Operating through a nonprofit outfit
called U.S. First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology),
Kamen works to encourage kids to pursue careers as scientists, engineers,
and big thinkers. Lots of people talk about doing that, but to Kamen it's
a holy crusade, and he sincerely believes he can reprioritize society
to value inventors the way it values athletes. "Our culture celebrates
one thing: sports heroes," he says. "You have teenagers thinking
they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic
for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or an engineer is."
-
- Kamen launched First several years ago when he realized
that many American teenagers were unable to name a single living scientist.
The organization sponsors a national competition that matches high school
students with engineers from local companies. The kids are given a standard
kit of parts and challenged to build a working robot in six weeks. The
robots are pitted against one another on a playing field, and the best-designed,
wiliest bots rise to the top.
-
- Dean Kamen, with his unconstrained sense of what's possible,
has proven the skeptics wrong many times before. But honestly - replacing
quarterbacks with engineers as mainstream heroes? Maybe he's been spending
too much time in his Batcave.
-
- Kamen wears the same uniform every day, whether he's
in Deka's machine shop, meeting with bankers, or visiting the Oval Office:
beige Timberlands, Levi's, and a cotton work shirt. With his pompadour
of wavy black hair, he looks like a 1950s auto mechanic. In cold weather,
he adds an olive-drab army jacket, its pockets crammed with small tools.
-
- What drives Kamen's imagination? Things he decided ought
to exist, like a water purifier/power generator that zaps tainted H2O with
a laser.
-
- Kamen talks fast, and his voice retains the brassy streak
of his native Long Island. He's funny and charismatic, but he has the air
of someone used to shouldering big, improbable projects - driven, haunted,
quixotic. He doesn't take vacations, and he hasn't paused to marry. "If
I'm awake, I'm working," he says. "Deka and First are my work,
my family, my hobby. They're everything."
-
- His day usually begins by 9:30 at Deka headquarters,
a renovated mill building on the banks of the Merrimack River. That gives
employees "an hour of sanity without me in the morning," he
says. Kamen works until 9 or 10 pm, when he breaks for dinner, bringing
along a staffer or two to talk shop.
-
- Deka projects come in two flavors: Kamen's ideas, and
everything else. Everything else - mainly contract research for health
care concerns - is what pays the bills. Deka designed the HomeChoice portable
dialysis machine in partnership with Baxter, as well as a medical irrigation
pump for Davol. Deka has also worked on a series of innovative vascular
stents (shunts that keep blood vessels clear) for Johnson & Johnson.
"If you've got a tough problem, there's only one place to go,"
says Baxter's former chair Loucks.
-
- By comparison, Kamen's projects are far-out inventions,
like the Ibot or the Stirling: grand in scope, slower in development, and
often too risky to attract corporate funding. "Sometimes we crash
and burn. It's better to do it in private," he says. "I'd rather
lose my own money than someone else's."
-
- When things work out, Kamen basks in his success. On
a frosty day last winter, I followed him around downtown Manchester as
he took an Ibot out for a spin. The Ibot moved so fast that I had to break
into a trot just to keep up. It not only operates in four-wheel drive -
a standard motorized wheelchair has two-wheel drive - but it has a "balance
mode," in which the front wheels rise up, balancing the Ibot upward,
like a dog begging for a treat.
-
- The chair's dual processors direct the grounded wheels
to move back and forth slightly, compensating for weight shifts. The Ibot
is so stable in balance mode that its occupant can even win a shoving match
with just about any human.
-
- In front of First headquarters, I watched as a crowd
of gawkers stopped Kamen to admire the Ibot. One man asked how the chair
works: "Does it just balance with weights?" Kamen - at eye-level
with the guy, balancing on two wheels - paused a moment and smiled. "Technically,"
he said, "it's magic."
-
- Magic moments aside, Deka also has its failures. A project
to develop an automated bedside pharmacy - tied into a hospital's computer
network and able to deliver more than 30 drugs without manual intervention
- is on hold after soaking up several million dollars in funding. "We
ran into a lot of political problems," is all Kamen will say. "The
drug companies don't want it to happen."
-
- He might run into problems with the Stirling engine,
too. The development of a marketable Stirling device has eluded the brightest
engineering minds since Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, patented
the first version in 1816. The basic principle of Stirling's external
combustion engine is simple: A chamber is filled with a gas that expands
as it is heated by a small heat source, such as a propane flame, and contracts
when cooled. The process operates a piston and drives the engine. The
advantage? Cheap, local fuels can be used to run the engines, and Kamen
has adapted his model to produce electricity instead of mechanical power.
-
- But producing the thing is a more complex matter. While
many have tried to use Stirlings to power drive shafts for vehicles, they
have proved too expensive to manufacture on a mass scale, and they're not
always efficient enough. One low tech problem is designing seals that guard
against waste as the heat is transferred into a form that does useful work.
-
- Deka's version heats a chamber containing helium, under
pressure, and Kamen says it can run on gasoline, propane, fuel oil, diesel,
alcohol, or even solar power - with one-fifth the emissions of a gas stove.
Deka's engineers think they'll succeed where others have failed because
they've ironed out all the kinks. "We looked at the history of the
Stirling - all the money and time and expertise poured into it - and identified
a half-dozen key goofs that previous teams had made," says project
leader Chris Langenfeld. "Seventy percent of it was a materials challenge.
We had to track down the right composites to use as seals."
-
- Kamen hopes that his family of Stirlings, five years
in development, will soon bring portable electricity to nations without
a reliable power grid - or any grid at all. He envisions briefcase-sized
Stirlings powering cell phones and cell towers, as well as purifying water.
He aims to have them on the market in the next two years, and is currently
working on the marketing issues - like how developing nations will be
able to afford bulk purchases of the engines, which are projected to cost
$1,500 apiece.
-
- Staffing for the Stirling project alone involves about
20 people, including chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineers; thermodynamicists;
particle and combustion physicists; and software designers and testing
technicians.
-
- "Deka is one of the highest-morale operations I've
ever seen," says Ray Price, president of the Economic Club of New
York and a close friend of Kamen's. "There's no bureaucracy, and very
little structure. Dean expects performance, but how they get to solutions
is up to them."
-
- Kamen supervises the 10 or so projects under way at Deka
at any given time, and is rarely at his desk. He refers to himself as
"a human entropy producer," roaming the halls and labs, tossing
out ideas, asking about timing, and prodding project managers.
-
- Deka also has its mercilessly intense side. "There's
a sorting process that happens at Deka," says MIT's Flowers, also
an adviser for First. "You have the people who stick with Deka because
they realize it's a great place to learn, to try things that haven't
been done. Successful people listen to, understand, and respect Dean."
But Flowers adds that he has known some MIT grads who have found the experience
less than satisfying. "One of them would never cross the threshold
again. Dean occasionally runs over people."
-
- The Ibot chair has a balance mode that raises up the
front wheels, like a dog begging for a treat. "Technically,"
says Kamen, "it's magic."
-
- Those who stick around remain aware of the impatience
that simmers beneath Kamen's surface. The same is true of those people
who contract with Deka. Bob Gussin, Johnson & Johnson's recently retired
chief scientific officer, convinced his former company to fund the Ibot,
despite great internal resistance. He calls Kamen "brilliant,"
but says, "Dean is so intense and so aggressive that you always have
to worry whether he'll get frustrated at not moving fast enough. Sometimes
his intensity is almost frightening."
-
- Kamen exhibited a pronounced entrepreneurial bent from
an early age, as well as a dislike for rote learning. In junior high, rather
than do his homework, he would read demanding primary texts like Isaac
Newton's Principia on his own, and then heckle his science teacher. As
a teenager, he built control systems for sound-and-light shows in his
basement, and before long, he was getting contracts for installations
at Manhattan's Hayden Planetarium, the Four Seasons, and the Museum of
the City of New York. While still in high school, he was asked to automate
the Times Square ball drop on New Year's Eve. Before graduation, he was
earning $60,000 a year, rivaling the combined income of his father, a
comic book artist, and his mother, a high school teacher.
-
- Kamen's tendency to put his own projects before his schoolwork
continued at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.
On frequent trips home, he worked on his portable infusion pump, eventually
dubbed Auto-Syringe. But the basement was getting crowded. Kamen needed
more room. He engaged an architect to expand the basement under a newer
wing of the house, and hired a crew to prop the house on stilts to make
room for a Bridgeport milling machine, an arc welder, lathes, saws, and
other equipment purchased from a neighborhood machine shop.
-
- What did his parents think? Kamen sent them on a cruise
during the period of heaviest construction.
-
- After five years at WPI, Kamen still hadn't collected
enough credits to graduate, so he was asked to leave. He moved back to
Long Island and poured his energy into Auto-Syringe. The New England Journal
of Medicine published an article about the benefits of the pump, and the
National Institutes of Health ordered 100 units. In 1979, to escape taxes
and overcrowding, he moved to New Hampshire. "I saw the license plates
that read LIVE FREE OR DIE, and that sounded pretty good to me,"
says Kamen.
-
- After two years, he sold Auto-Syringe to Baxter for
an undisclosed sum. Up until that point, he'd hardly taken a salary, plowing
the majority of his profits back into the business. For the first time,
he felt rich. Within days of the sale, he bought a helicopter, fulfilling
a childhood dream.
-
- The helicopter led him to North Dumpling Island, a speck
of land with a lighthouse, located in Long Island Sound. His flight instructor's
wife, a real estate agent, told him the island was for sale. One winter
day, he set out to find it. He brought the chopper down near the lighthouse
tender's home. A frightened old man, part of the family that owned the
island, came out to see what was going on. The young inventor befriended
the man and his wife. When Kamen later bought the island (at a bargain
price), he let the couple continue living there.
-
- Though Kamen doesn't visit the island much anymore, it's
a microcosm of his worldview, a whimsical combination of leave-me-alone
and dreams of techno-utopia. An aerial photograph that hangs in Kamen's
office at Deka bears a caption that reads "The Only 100 Percent Science-Literate
Society."
-
- When Kamen wanted to erect a wind turbine on North Dumpling
and the state of New York objected, he seceded from the US. Though the
secession has never been officially recognized, he signed a nonaggression
pact with his friend, then-President George Bush, and enlisted Ben Cohen
and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's as "joint chiefs of ice
cream." North Dumpling has its own flag, its own anthem, a one-ship
navy, and its own currency. One bill, which Kamen carries in his wallet,
is the value of pi. "You can't make change for it," he says
with a grin. "It's a transcendental function."
-
- After the sale of Auto-Syringe in 1982, Kamen began buying
19th-century mill buildings in Manchester and renovating them as office
space (he now owns 570,000 square feet of office space in the city). He
set up Deka R in one, and soon got to know city and state politicians,
like John Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire who would go on to become
a notorious chief of staff for President Bush. Today, Kamen has a direct
line to New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen.
-
- "In a small state like New Hampshire, Dean is a
very visible guy," says Jay Wood, president of Kana Communications,
one of Kamen's tenants. "His helicopter comes buzzing down the river
and lands on a building - you can't ignore that."
-
- When it comes to First, Kamen's a complete noodge. He
makes sure that the state's pols are all visible supporters, which means
First events are usually peppered with political types. Every four years,
when the presidential candidates roll through New Hampshire looking for
votes, Kamen makes First headquarters - aka First Place - and Westwind
available for rallies, parties, and speeches, and looks for a quid pro
quo from the candidates - soliciting promises to invite First winners
to the White House.
-
- One day during my visit, Kamen and I get a chance to
meet up with George W. Bush. Kamen's already been all over the Eastern
time zone, but nothing is more important to him than scoring promises
on behalf of First. He woke up in Cleveland before dawn, then flew to
visit Bose Corporation, near Boston, to show off the Ibot and talk with
Amar Bose about marketing Deka's top-secret consumer device. He picked
up a banker from Credit Suisse First Boston at Manchester airport to discuss
financing, then wolfed down a dinner of pizza and beer at First Place,
where George W. was giving a speech. After the speech, Kamen drags me
through the crowd toward the candidate.
-
- Apparently George W. indicated at a recent Westwind dinner
that he might be able to attend the First nationals in Orlando. "I
want to get him to promise to come in front of a reporter," Kamen
tells me. "You're going to be my witness."
-
- As a teen, Kamen read Newton, heckled his science teacher,
and built high-profile projects in New York. By graduation, he was earning
$60,000 a year.
-
- I'm standing in a parking lot near Manchester airport
with Kamen's parents, Woodie Flowers, and Rich Cox, a Deka technician,
waiting for Kamen to arrive. I'm looking for the Hummer. His mother knows
better. She points to the sky and says, "There's Dean."
-
- Kamen sets the little Enstrom down on the tarmac, and
before long we're piling into the CitationJet. To Kamen, the Citation is
a "beautiful machine," with its twin Williams-Rolls turbofans,
top altitude of 41,000 feet, and maximum speed of Mach 0.7. The thing
looks fast even standing still.
-
- I'd heard a few stories about Kamen's piloting before
I boarded. One was that he had a less-than-perfect attendance record at
the CitationJet training program. But as a friend tells it, he missed
only two questions on the final - the highest score in a class full of
professional pilots. Afterward, he proved to the instructor that those
"wrong" answers were actually correct.
-
- On an unusually warm March afternoon, we're off to Ypsilanti,
Michigan, the site of the initial round of First regionals. Kamen is upbeat,
as evidenced by his safety speech before takeoff: "In the event of
an emergency, those bimbos in the high heels who served you coffee will
be of absolutely no use," he says. Of course there are no flight
attendants on the plane.
-
- Kamen sees the lack of appreciation for science in America
as a problem - but that's not to say he's calling for a revamping of
the educational system. In his view, more teachers, textbooks, PCs, and
Internet access won't get students jazzed about learning. "They need
to have access to challenging, hands-on projects that result in a tangible
product" - like building robots. And they need role models - engineers
- to assist them.
-
- Kamen refers to First as "the NCAA of smarts."
The competition has no formal instructional agenda. You just have to build
a bot that can play a game better than the others do. In January, groups
of high school students receive kits and a description of the game. Each
group has to build the robot in six weeks, working with engineers from
local companies - like Du Pont, Ford, and Honeywell. There are only two
restrictions: expense (no more than $425 can be spent on additional parts,
supplied by a company called Small Parts) and weight (the robot can be
no more than 130 pounds). At the competition, two student teams will be
paired to form an alliance.
-
- This year, the robots have to pick up basketball-sized
rubber balls and drop them in bins, earning one point for yellow balls
and five for scarcer black ones. Robots also earn five points for ascending
a ramp in the center of the field, 10 for hanging from a chin-up bar,
and 10 more for helping a partner robot hang from the bar.
-
- Once we're on the ground, we hustle off to the campus
of Eastern Michigan University, where the students are trying out their
robots. Kamen has no official duties tonight, but he can't wait to see
the action. Inside the field house, teams are making last-minute adjustments
and sawing off vestigial robot pieces to make the weight limit. Kamen
talks to a team tinkering with Chief Delphi, one of several robots sponsored
by Delphi Automotive Systems. Two teenagers approach: "Can we have
your autograph?"
-
- It's just as Kamen would have it: High school kids treating
an engineer like a celebrity. And it happens several times over the weekend.
MIT professor Flowers, who is serving as an emcee, is equally adored.
-
- The following morning, at the kickoff, there are pep
bands and flag bearers, honor guards and spirit corps. Students stomp
their feet and cheer wildly. When two opposing robots face off to get
to the ramp, the screams are deafening.
-
- Kamen watches most of the two-minute matches from the
sidelines, fixated. He marvels at a robot named V Force that can grab the
chin-up bar, slide laterally along it, and, with a long arm, pluck balls
out of its opponent's goal and place them in its own. "Just another
science fair, huh?" he mutters to me after a particularly exciting
match.
-
- In the ensuing two days, the competition will have elements
of WWF aggressiveness and flashes of Nascar-style maneuvering - except
that this event is rooted in mental dexterity. But that's not enough for
Kamen. He wants First to attract the same attention lavished upon professional
sports. That's why he spends his energy at First events needling bigwigs
at sponsoring organizations. This year, GM, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola,
Xerox, and NASA together are supporting 171 teams. But Kamen wants more.
He wants to include every student in the country, and have the events televised.
(He also wants you to enlist, as a kid or backer: www.usfirst.org
-
- Xerox chair Paul Allaire, who is smitten enough with
the event to sit on the First board, is skeptical. "Is it totally
practical? I'm dubious. But it's a good, if lofty, goal."
-
- Another First board member, Bill Murphy, chair of Small
Parts, waves off naysayers. "You watch," he says. "Dean's
a schemer. He won't quit until it happens."
-
- Walking the halls backstage at EMU, Kamen bemoans how
difficult his mission to change the culture has been. "The inertia
is enormous," he says. "If I'd have known nine years ago that
it would've taken this much energy, I ..." He falls silent. But there's
only one way Kamen can finish the thought: "Hell, I still would've
done it."
-
- When the finals begin, the excitement increases palpably.
In the first game of the best-of-three finals, Chief Delphi pokes its snout
into its opponent's goal, sucks out three balls, and skitters over to deposit
them in its own goal. As the seconds tick away, it snatches another two
points. Delphi's red alliance wins the first match, 34 to 16.
-
- The "NCAA of smarts" is just as Kamen would
have it: High school kids treat engineers like celebrities. And build robots
that make the crowd roar.
-
- The next match goes to blue. "It happens like this
every time," Kamen says gleefully.
-
- In the rubber match, the action centers on the chin-up
bar. Both blue alliance robots manage to hang, seizing the lead. But Visteon,
Chief Delphi's red alliance partner, charges blue's Techno Beast, knocks
it down, and, in the waning seconds, pulls itself up to the bar for the
win. The audience roars.
-
- Sly and the Family Stone's "You Can Make It if You
Try" blasts over the PA, and the First judges form a receiving line.
Hundreds of teens line the aisles, exchanging high-fives.
-
- Heading back to Willow Run airport, Kamen is thinking
ahead to the nationals at Epcot Center in Orlando. He's campaigning to
get Governor Jeb Bush, who will attend the finals, to pledge that every
Florida public school will participate next year.
-
- Meanwhile, the Ibot is sailing through FDA trials and
could be available by early 2001. ER star Noah Wyle is planning to make
a feature film about Kamen and First. And work on the Stirling engine
is going well, though, of course, not fast enough for Kamen.
-
- On the flight back to Manchester, he cracks a joke over
the intercom about pilots reporting basketball scores in midflight. "Who
cares about bounce-bounce-throw?" he asks.
-
- I ask if he knows the outcome of the First regionals
at the Kennedy Space Center. "Let me call ground control," he
says, mimicking a pilot-controller exchange. "Ground, this is Citation
six-Delta-Kilo. Do you have the results of the First regionals in Florida?"
-
- Everyone laughs, and then K. C. Connors, First's regional
manager and Kamen's girlfriend, chimes in. "A few more years, Dean,"
she says. "A few more years."
-
-
- Contributing editor Scott Kirsner kirsner@att.net
wrote about theme parks in Wired 8.07.
-
- Copyright © 1993-2001 The Condé Nast Publications
Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1994-2001 Wired Digital, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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