The Tinkerers Read online

  Kamen’s big break came in 1975, after his older brother, Barton, who was in medical school, told him about patients who required twenty-four-hour treatment and had no choice but to come to hospital for treatment. Kamen decided to apply his tinkering abilities to creating a device to administer such treatments at home. He used off-the-shelf parts such as circuit boards, timers, counters, motors, and batteries to build his new contraption. He figured out on his own how to mill his own parts from aluminum.

  When William Murphy, the founder of the medical device company Cordis, which had originally hired him to create an audiovisual presentation to promote a pacemaker, visited Kamen in his basement workshop, the young inventor showed Murphy his latest creation, the world’s first drug-infusion pump, something he called the AutoSyringe.

  Word quickly got out about Kamen’s device, and when the New England Journal of Medicine wrote about the pump, orders came in from around the world. In 1976, Kamen, at the age of twenty, started a new company called AutoSyringe Inc.

  Driven by the need to produce more pumps, Kamen hired a construction crew to lift his parents’ house off its foundation while they were on vacation and break through the back of the basement with a bulldozer to expand it into the backyard. Then he hired a crane to lower the equipment he needed into the now sizable workspace, including a Bridgeport milling machine, lathes, and a grinder. Then the house was returned to its foundation, and Kamen’s parents were provided with a new backyard patio, thanks to the protrusion of their son’s new underground build-out.

  Clearly Kamen had more than just the drive to invent. He also had the desire to make a big business out of it.

  His next move was to hire away professors and students from Worcester Polytechnic to help him expand his product line. Pretty soon he and his team were inventing infusion pumps for chemotherapy and treating newborn babies, and the world’s first portable insulin pump. Kamen kept tinkering, and his team of engineers helped make his ideas a reality. After five years, Kamen finally dropped out of college and began devoting himself full time to his company.

  AutoSyringe grew at such a rate that Kamen soon had to relocate its headquarters from his parents’ basement to a Long Island industrial space; and shortly after that, to a facility in New Hampshire, a state notable for its cheap real estate and lack of income tax. He convinced twenty of his Long Island employees to move with him.

  But while the market for his pumps kept growing, Kamen noticed his own interest waning. By 1982, when AutoSyringe was five years old and had a hundred employees, its visionary founder decided to exit the manufacturing business. At age thirty-one, Kamen sold the company to Baxter Healthcare for a reported $30 million.

  Kamen, in his inimitable, unteachable brilliance, had seen a need in the field of health care and filled that need with a solution that, for whatever reason, no one had ever come up with before. Kamen’s first insulin pumps were the size of phone books, a drastic reduction from the contraptions they replaced. Today, the Baxter AutoSyringe is as big as a pack of cards, and is the device of choice for continuous delivery of insulin to diabetics.

  Shortly after, Kamen founded DEKA Research, the company he still runs in Manchester, New Hampshire. With some of the proceeds from the AutoSyringe sale, he invested in some old brick factory buildings built near the end of the nineteenth century as textile mills. The structures were run down but still solid. Kamen liked the fact that they harked back to a time in American history when tinkering and technology defined the nation.

  Kamen went on to invent a quieter, easier to operate, and more portable dialysis machine at the behest of Baxter Healthcare. Dialysis machines at that time were loud, cumbersome, and weighed around 180 pounds. Their technology was controlled by gravity and involved a complex system of valves that had to be connected with tubing. The machines were only available at hospitals and clinics, forcing patients to travel for treatment, sometimes twice a week.

  But Kamen didn’t try to improve the antiquated machine. Instead, he imagined the infinite possibilities, an approach that made the MBAs on his staff nervous. He liked to joke that if J. P. Morgan had informed the MBAs that he wanted to build a railroad to the West Coast, they would have rejected the notion because of the capital outlay for a railroad that headed toward nowhere.

  It was at this point that Kamen solidified his tinkering approach to business. Rather than informing his business with history, he informed it with an unlimited view of the future.

  In the case of the dialysis machine, he decided to start from scratch and devised a machine that didn’t require a technician to operate, weighed only twenty-two pounds, and was so quiet that patients could sleep while receiving their treatment.

  He hired the very best engineers he could find, but, as far as he was concerned, they needed to be more than just smart. He wanted his employees to take big risks and not worry about failing. He called it “frog kissing,” referring to the fact that one had to kiss a lot of frogs before finding a prince.

  He stripped back the process of building a new kind of dialysis machine to some of the earliest discoveries about physics, Boyle’s law and Gay-Lussac’s law, and their application to gases. He briefed his engineers on these principles and explained his hunch that they could be applied in a modern context using computer technology, pneumatics, and other new-fangled processes. It took Kamen and a team of engineers five years of tinkering to generate something genuinely innovative that worked. But all that professional tinkering paid off handsomely for Kamen.

  Baxter released its HomeChoice dialysis machine in 1993. It wasn’t expensive, so patients could buy their own. And it was simple enough to operate that patients could run it themselves. It included a replaceable cassette and easily attachable bags of dialysis fluid. Then all the patient had to do was press the ON button.

  The dialysis machine was yet another brilliant product of what had become Kamen’s distinct approach to tinkering: taking cheap existing technologies and rearranging them to something amazing and new.

  “I don’t have to invent anything,” Kamen liked to say, according to biographer Steve Kemper. “It’s out there somewhere if I can just find it and integrate it.” He liked to think of himself as a “systems integrator” rather than an inventor. But being the owner of patents, like any other inventor, had its benefits: Kamen’s dialysis machine made him a very wealthy man, thanks to the royalties.

  Kamen’s next gambit was inspired by watching a man in a wheelchair awkwardly maneuvering a sidewalk curb at a mall. He was struck by how many normal situations were prohibitive to wheelchair-bound people. They couldn’t go anywhere without sidewalks, they couldn’t have eye-level conversations, they couldn’t reach high shelves in stores.

  He gathered all of the existing wheelchair patents and combed through them for ideas. He was surprised by how many of his own ideas had been tried before. Others had created wheelchairs with legs and arms meant to address the same issues he hoped to conquer, but all of them had one problem or another. None of them inspired Kamen to come up with a new approach.

  It took him two years of failed attempts to reinvent the wheelchair before Kamen literally stumbled upon a big new idea that inspired an entirely new approach. It happened one day when he was emerging from the shower and slipped on the wet tile floor. His legs shot forward and, to steady himself, he flailed his arms as a counterbalance to prevent himself from falling. In that moment, he realized he had cracked open his problem. Creating a new kind of wheelchair was all about maintaining equilibrium rather than simply appending walking implements and gadgets that could grab things.

  Kamen set his engineers to work on this new approach almost immediately. The prototype that emerged in July 1992 was a homely looking clunky thing, a bundle of bare wires and sharp steel edges held together with Velcro and chunks of foam insulation. But it was what was inside that really mattered: a gyroscopic tilt sensor known as an “inclinometer” first developed for gun turrets on battle cruisers. At $100, it was the ap
pliance’s most expensive part. Virtually everything else in the contraption had been bought off the shelf, including two $10 motors made for printers purchased at a nearby discount store.

  The chair’s core mechanism prevented the chair from tipping over while climbing up stairs or over curbs, even though it only had two sets of wheels. It also could raise the user up to six feet tall and easily travel over sand, gravel, and even up to three inches of water. Kamen dubbed it Fred, after Fred Astaire, due to its graceful stair-climbing abilities. It became better known by its trade name, the iBOT. It eventually sold for around $26,000, with a doctor’s prescription, though it was only produced and sold from 2006 to 2009.

  He later invented a handful of heart stents, including one used in the body of Vice President Dick Cheney.

  But for all of his great successes by his early thirties, the idea for the one that earned Kamen his fame didn’t occur to him until he was nearly fifty. The Segway Human Transporter, a relentlessly hyped two-wheel transportation device became a media sensation and then something else. The thing looked like a kick scooter on steroids, and as cool as its technology was (it essentially drives itself), it instantly rendered any adult who uses it forever uncool.

  First dubbed Ginger by its creator (as in Ginger Rogers), the Segway built on the balancing technology first developed for the iBot, but with a different purpose. Kamen envisioned the Segway as the primary mode of travel in the postautomobile era. Cloaked in secrecy, the project took more than three agonizing years to develop, during which Kamen’s whole company was put in financial jeopardy due to the burdensome development costs. The result was a device that could move forward or backward by the rider merely shifting his or her weight. The effect was a mode of transportation that felt almost like an extension of the human body. Though it also contained motors, as well as a rechargeable battery, the Segway earned its original name with a gracefulness previously unimaginable in mechanized travel.

  Again, Kamen had imagined a need where few else saw one, and created something new out of technology that was already around him. In his mind, he was going revolutionize walking. The intellectual power Kamen harnessed to propel the Segway into existence was the ultimate act of American tinkering hubris. But somewhere along the line, the master tinkerer lost control of the Segway’s narrative.

  In early 2001, a journalist at the media business news website Inside.com published word of a soon to be published book by Steve Kemper about Kamen’s latest invention, identified in a leaked book proposal only as “It.” The proposal didn’t identify exactly what Kamen had created, but it did contain raves from high-profile sources, including one from venture capitalist John Doerr, who claimed that it would be the most important technological development since the Internet; and Steve Jobs’s assessment that it would be as significant as the PC and that cities would be designed around it.

  Speculation about what “It” was rose to a fever pitch. Between January and August there were dozens of news stories filed about it and countless television reports, all laced with hopelessly hard-to-live-up-to hype. By the time the Segway was revealed to the general public on the ABC morning TV program Good Morning America on December 3, 2001, it seemed more like the van in Stripes than a world-changing innovation. While the Segway exhibited some undeniably magical properties as a space-age transportation device, among them its ability to balance under any conditions and to move purely from a shifting of the user’s weight, its outward appearance suggested little more than a high-tech two-wheeled motor scooter, as dorky as it was cool.

  Pretty soon, it was being mocked on the late-night monologues and derided by municipalities around the country as dangerous to pedestrians and, as one cardiologist put it, as “an absurd extension of laziness and slothfulness that will further increase levels of obesity and heart disease in America.” Many big American cities banned the use of it on city sidewalks.

  By the time the Segway was featured in the 2009 feature comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop starring Kevin James, it was a cultural punchline that needed no further explanation. With just around 50,000 purchased since its 2001 introduction, Kamen sold Segway to HESCO Bastion, a company helmed by British billionaire Jimi Heselden and a group of investors, in January 2010. In a twist that did nothing to help Segway’s tarnished public image, Heselden himself died in September 2010 after accidentally driving a Segway off a cliff in West Yorkshire, England.

  Today, Kamen chalks up the Segway as another big risk that was worth taking. But these days, his thoughts on tinkering focus more on its future. In a conversation for this book, Kamen imagined a world in which all inhabitants are “enthusiastic and entrepreneurial and risk taking and, in fact, tinker enough to create something that was never there before that is valuable to some large part” of the globe’s 6.3 billion residents. Then, he explained, “Every day, instead of having a little less of a fixed commodity, whether it’s food or water or gold, every day the world gets a little richer, not a little poorer.” Unfortunately, he admitted, that model doesn’t exist yet.

  But Kamen believes that some version of that model helped forge the United States in its earliest days. “The Revolutionary War ended and you had thirteen bankrupt little colonies that finished a war and had no currency, no credit, lots of debt—like we have today,” he says. “But what you had were people who were by definition so free spirited that they formed a country. They took a big idea, an abstraction, and made it real.”

  By his formulation, it is no surprise that some of the Founding Fathers, these risk-taking political leaders, were also inventors. Europe had its institutions of higher learning, many of which had been around for hundreds of years. But it was the relatively uneducated and unencumbered Americans who invented and innovated to such a degree that they created their own wealth, rather than plundering other countries to acquire it.

  “It’s a not a coincidence that the United States brought the world all these life-changing, fundamental solutions to problems,” Kamen says, “and led the world in creating wealth, and led the world in having that wealth. We didn’t steal it from other countries, we didn’t go around the world in the zero-sum game of attacking and conquering and taking other people’s wealth. That was the way ancient history worked: ‘We want your land or your money or your gold.’ The U.S. became this country that created wealth.”

  For decades, America led the world in technological innovation, and melded it effortlessly with what society needed to move forward. “We were the first ones to make cars, and when they became commodities, we started making airplanes,” says Kamen. “And when they became commodities we started making computers. And when they became commodities, we started making software. Then we’ll do proteomics, we’ll do genomics.”

  Such perspicacity allowed subsequent generations of Americans to make certain presumptions about their own lives. Among those presumptions was one that has become nearly sacrosanct: that each generation will live a better, more prosperous life than the one that preceded it. “Americans sadly think it’s a birthright,” says Kamen. In a society that continually wants more for each person and where there are increasingly more people, he says, “you can’t get there by simply moving the wealth around.”

  Kamen thinks America’s tinkering spirit really lost its way in the area of financial engineering, which contributed to the economic collapse of 2008. “Financial engineering was a way to move wealth around, typically move it from people who had created it to people who were squandering it or using it in some way that was not a catalyst to create more wealth but hoarding it,” he said.

  Concerned that his country has lost its tinkering mojo, Kamen says the United States needs a new mechanism to reenergize it. “This could be the first generation of Americans that lose that sense of the excitement and the importance and the need to take the risk, to innovate, to try, to fail, to try again,” he says. “Every part of our culture was saying there’s so much wealth out there; there are easier ways than having to do all that stuff. Let’s just u
se the legal system and the accounting system and just scoop up a lot of this wealth, put it where we want and throw a few crumbs off the table. They leveraged the past, they leveraged their present, they finally leveraged our future. And then it all collapsed.”

  None of this should have come as a shock, in Kamen’s opinion. Indeed, he acts puzzled when describing the impact of the financial collapse on a country ill-prepared to deal with its consequences. “What exactly was the crisis? Oh, you mean the money that was never really there is now gone? I’m not sure that should be a surprise to anybody.”

  While he acknowledges the world of tinkering has evolved in recent years, Kamen is unwilling to characterize those changes as either beneficial or harmful. “I think it’s changed in what we tinker with in some really powerful ways—not good or bad, just powerful. For instance, you can’t tinker by opening up the hood of your car, because most of what’s in there is preformed, presealed, very sophisticated. You need custom diagnostic tools, hardware and software tools to figure out what’s going on. And you also don’t have a group of people who can add that much value or improved that stuff much compared to the people who have now refined it and built it in volume.”

  Kamen believes the mechanical gizmology of today’s world is neither good nor bad. It is simply the end result of decades’ worth of successful tinkering having worked its way into the mainstream. And unless one is inordinately nostalgic, it hardly seems rational to pine for a time before the gadgets that help make our lives more productive, meaningful, and enjoyable. On the other hand, there are enough inspired individuals out there to fill up a recent surge in tinkerer workshops sprouting up around the country.