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American Morning
New Invention Promising to Change Way We Travel
Aired December 03, 2001 - 07:05 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: It is one of the most talked about new inventions that is promising to change the way we travel. What you are about to see is what some people are calling a scientific wonder. The inventor claims this creation will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.
What's it called? Well, until now simply "it." Today, we take a look into the future and lift the veil of secrecy on the segue, a self-balancing people mover.
Here with our own sneak preview is writer John Heilemann, who spent three months working on a story about "it" for "Time" magazine.
The secrecy lifts this morning. How are you this morning?
JOHN HEILEMANN, "TIME" MAGAZINE: Yes, finally. I'm great, Paula.
ZAHN: Is the buzz surrounding this invention more than the object merits?
HEILEMANN: Well, you remember back last January when the news broke about this thing a little bit and there was a leak and all the speculation started, people said everything about this. It was going to be, you know, a hydrogen powered hover craft or a personal helicopter. You know, on that basis, people are going to be disappointed, because this isn't something out of the Jetsons.
But at the same time, it's a very, very amazing piece of engineering. It's an incredible...
ZAHN: We're looking...
HEILEMANN: It's an incredible product that is incredibly fun to use.
ZAHN: We're looking at a picture of it now?
HEILEMANN: Yes.
ZAHN: Describe to us how it will ultimately be used, what it does, how fast it goes.
HEILEMANN: Well, what, this thing was also called Ginger for a long time. It was named, in a way, after Ginger, like Ginger Rogers, and Dean Kamen, the inventor here, had built a wheelchair, an amazing wheelchair which goes up and down stairs and balances perfectly for the disabled, which came before this device.
This is a, this thing looks basically like a sort of standup motor scooter with the wheels on the wrong side or like one of those old rotary motor, rotary lawn mowers people used to go along on.
ZAHN: Sure.
HEILEMANN: But what's really incredible about this thing is that it's got this incredibly sensitive balancing device, balancing system within it so that if you're on this thing, the way that you go forward is to lean forward. The way that you go back is to lean back. And in the most subtle ways it interprets your balance and it's constantly carrying you wherever you want to go.
ZAHN: And you don't fall off?
HEILEMANN: And you can't fall off. No matter how hard you try, the thing keeps you up. It kind of becomes one with your body so that you're, what your balance, what your system of balance is telling the machine to do the machine is picking up on immediately and reacting to.
There are no brakes. There is no accelerator. There's no throttle. There's no steering wheel.
ZAHN: How do you stop?
HEILEMANN: You stop by thinking about stopping and so when...
ZAHN: You think about it?
HEILEMANN: ... when you think about stopping you come to a stop. It was the most amazing thing when I first got on this device. I had no idea what I was doing. And Dean Kamen was standing 50 feet away from me and he said come to me. And I said how do you do that? And he says just think about coming. And I thought about coming toward him and I start to roll in his direction. And then he said stop. I said how do you stop? There's no brakes on this thing. He said think about stopping. So I kind of stared in the middle distance and the thing came to a stop.
Think about moving backwards, I thought about going backwards and I drifted back.
ZAHN: Now anybody listening to this is going to say this makes absolutely no sense.
HEILEMANN: That you're crazy. I know. I know. I've been looking at technologies for a decade and I've never really seen one that seemed to me that it was sort of like magic, and this is like magic in a lot of ways. And that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to change the world, but just as an experience, it's sort of uncanny. It's not like anything else anybody has ever made. ZAHN: Was his idea to replace the use of cars in urban settings? Is, will that happen?
HEILEMANN: Well, who knows? I mean that's a big question. But there's, what Dean has done is he's devised something that is meant to be perfectly compatible with pedestrians. The other thing about this is that is you run into somebody on it, because it immediately reacts to touching anything, even if you're going quite quickly, if you hit somebody it immediately pulls back away from them. So it can't really do much damage to either the rider or the person that it hits, which means that it's kind of compatible with being on the sidewalk.
And that's their dream, that these are going to be on sidewalks along with pedestrians. They have this vision of empowered pedestrians and the notion is get rid of the cars, get rid of the congestion and have people on these things. They can go, you know, two or three or four times the speed of walking and use for the whole day 15, 20 miles of cruising only takes about five cents worth of electricity. So it would kind of solve the energy problem with the dependence on foreign oil.
ZAHN: But we're a year away from consumers having access to this product.
HEILEMANN: Right.
ZAHN: In the short-term, though, he is hoping that, like you said, FedEx workers and postal workers will use this?
HEILEMANN: For about a year they're going to sell this thing to big established institutions -- the United States Postal Service. You'll start seeing your postman or letter carriers on this thing, the FedEx, private security firms. In the national parks they're going to use these things, also, because there's a big congestion problem with cars in the national parks.
For about a year, big companies inside their warehouses will be using this, stuff like that. But then after about a year, they're going to let it rip for the consumers at about $3,000 apiece. And that may be a problem, too, for it. It may be too costly. But we'll see.
About a year from now, though, I could expect next Christmas this could be a pretty big Christmas item.
ZAHN: Well, if we let history be our guide, we know that $3,000 price tag might ultimately drop.
HEILEMANN: Well, the price tag might ultimately drop but also, you know, if you look back on the early personal computer industry, people thought it was nuts. But the first PCs came out and they were $3,000 to $5,000 apiece and enough people bought them eventually to spark a pretty big market.
ZAHN: You must feel good to get this off your chest. Now you can talk about this publicly for the first time in many, many months. John Heilemann of "Time" magazine, good to have you along with us this morning. You were one of the first reporters that was able to see this product.
HEILEMANN: Thanks a lot, Paula.
ZAHN: Appreciate your dropping by.
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