Failed Technologies
The Machine That Was Going to Make Cities Obsolete (And Sold 30,000 Units Instead)
Before the Segway launched, its inventor told Steve Jobs it would be bigger than the internet — and Jobs, for a moment, believed him.
The Idea
The Segway is the cleanest case study in tech history of what happens when genuine engineering brilliance gets mistaken for inevitable cultural transformation. Dean Kamen's self-balancing scooter was, by any technical measure, remarkable — a masterpiece of gyroscopic feedback loops and real-time software control that could keep a rider upright on almost any surface. The engineering was not the failure. The failure was a particular kind of Silicon Valley magical thinking: the belief that a sufficiently elegant solution will reshape the world around itself, rather than the other way around. Kamen and his early backers — which included heavyweight investors and Apple's Steve Jobs — convinced themselves that cities had been designed wrong, and that the Segway would force architecture, urban planning, and human behaviour to reorganise. They projected sales of 10,000 units a week. They got about 30,000 units in the first five years total. What went wrong is subtler than 'people didn't want it.' Many people did want it — tourists, warehouse workers, airport security teams. But wanting a thing and restructuring your life, your commute, your infrastructure, and your social norms around it are entirely different propositions. The Segway required the world to meet it halfway, and the world declined. It is not a story about a bad product. It is a story about the gap between what a technology can do and what a society will actually absorb.
In the World
In 2001, journalist Steve Kemper was given extraordinary access to Kamen's secretive development project — codenamed 'Ginger' — and later wrote a book about it. Before launch, the internal excitement had reached a kind of fever pitch. John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, said Ginger would be bigger than the internet. Jeff Bezos flew to New Hampshire to see it and came away a believer. Jobs was characteristically blunt: he told Kamen the design was 'a piece of shit' and needed rethinking — but he also thought the underlying idea could be world-changing. When the Segway finally launched publicly in December 2001, the coverage was enormous and the mockery almost immediate. It was too expensive for casual buyers, too slow for real commuting distances, too cumbersome for public transport, and — critically — illegal on most pavements in most cities. The infrastructure it needed did not exist, and no government was in a hurry to build it. The most telling moment came when George W. Bush, during a photo opportunity, rode one for approximately three seconds before falling off. It became the defining image: not dangerous, not transformative, just a little awkward. By 2020, the Segway company had pivoted so far from its original product — into electric scooters and hoverboards — that it quietly discontinued the original PT model. The machine that was going to make cities obsolete ended its production run with a press release almost nobody noticed.
Why It Matters
The Segway's failure carries a lesson worth applying far beyond transportation. There is a recurring pattern in tech where the people closest to a breakthrough become so convinced of its transformative logic that they stop asking whether the world will actually reorganise to accommodate it. The technology works. The pitch is coherent. The vision is internally consistent. And yet. This matters for how you interpret any new wave of technology — the ones arriving right now, not just the ones that already failed. When you hear that a technology will force cities to be redesigned, or workplaces to restructure, or human behaviour to shift, it is worth asking: who has to change, and what is their incentive to do so? Innovation does not move in one direction. It negotiates. The Segway also quietly succeeded in the niches that actually suited it — factory floors, theme parks, police patrols — which is a reminder that 'failed technology' rarely means useless technology. It usually means a technology that found a much smaller home than its creators imagined. Learning to distinguish between a genuinely transformative tool and an extremely good solution to a bounded problem is one of the more useful skills available to anyone watching the next wave approach.
A Question to Ponder
Which technology that you currently believe will change everything might actually be finding its real, smaller, more specific home right now — and would that still count as success?
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