my hero: Dean Kamen

August 30, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

It must be like…20 years since I first read about him.  He had invented the wearable insulin pump and made enough money to buy a small island (I believe in CT?) and printed his own money which I saw as a sign of independence and defiance. Many thought he was crazy; to me he was an amazing man. He’s been a huge supporter of bringing youths into the field of engineering, and he invented the Segway.  He is the epitome of innovation leadership and inspired me to work in engineering. 

The Segway Sage Speaks: Inventor Dean Kamen sounds off on Segway’s disappointing start and his other new projects

Kamen’s current projects include a water purifier and a power generator that is about as big as a washing machine. Here’s what he had to say…

About his water purifier… Our machine takes out bio-agents from shallow water without using chemicals like chlorine. It takes out ions and heavy metals and chemicals like arsenic from deep water without activated charcoal. It takes out salt water from the ocean without osmosis. It has no chemicals, it has no filters, it has no membranes, no consumables of any kind. It takes any input of water — you don’t even have to pretest it — and what comes out is pure, distilled water. It meets the U.S. pharmacopoeia standard for water that can be injected. It’s astounding. And it takes one-third the power of a handheld dryer to make a thousand liters of water a day, which, based on the World Health Organization’s standards, is enough for a village of 100 people. And if you’ve got a few hundred people, you put a couple of machines in.

What he plans to do with the purifier…

I will not [lose focus] of the primary goal: to alleviate the number one source of health problems and disease on this planet, which is water-borne pathogens… it may be that the fastest way to do that isn’t through a non-profit, but to do a for-profit piece and then double-use the knowledge, the technology and the tooling. If we need to do that, and it speeds things up, not slows them down, we’ll do that.

I feel he’s been given short shrift by the media which symbolizes how little we care about visionary inventions and engineering.  This is the first great story I’ve read about him in decades because it highlights not just technology innovation but vision focus and business model differentiation.

There really are just two basic needs to help people out of misery and poverty: water and electricity. So what if you could make point of use water with a little machine, instead of [depending on] municipalities? What if you could make point of use electricity, instead of waiting for the equivalent of Con Edison to build a massive infrastructure and transmission lines? Let’s build technologies that scale down to deliver point of use water, point of use power, that don’t have to get more granular than the village.

On whether there’s a commercial market for the power generator…

There probably is. Again, my rule is the same. If it’s go and do that, but it’s a distraction from the focus, I won’t go there. But if it’s, "Hey, how are we going to get the money to tool these things up?" there’s enough people that want a small quiet machine like this that’ll run year after year.

(Via TIME Magazine Online: Top Business Stories.)

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