Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People
Dirt Nap City is the podcast about history's most interesting dead people. In each episode, Alex and Kelly dive into the life of a famous person that you have heard of, but probably don't know much about. Our stories are about actors, entrepreneurs, politicians, musicians, inventors, explorers and more! We also cover things that used to be popular but have fallen out of favor. Things like pet rocks, drive in theaters, Jolt Cola, and many other trends of yesterday make up our "dead ends". But whether we are talking about interesting historical figures or past trends, the show is funny, light-hearted, entertaining, informative and educational. You will definitely learn something new and probably have some laughs along the way. Everyone will eventually move to Dirt Nap City, so why not go ahead and meet the neighbors?
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Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People
Lean In, Fall Down - The Rise and Stall of the Segway PT
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Why did the Segway fail?
This episode of Dirt Nap City dives into the high-stakes history of the Segway PT, the machine that was supposed to revolutionize human transportation but ended up as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley. Before it was the "mall cop" scooter, it was Project Ginger (or simply "IT"), a top-secret invention that had tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs predicting it would be more significant than the World Wide Web.
We start by revisiting the year 2001, when the world was obsessed with a mystery. Inventor Dean Kamen didn't just build a scooter; he built a masterpiece of engineering. Utilizing dynamic stabilization and a sophisticated gyroscopic system, the Segway allowed users to steer simply by shifting their weight. At the time, it wasn't just a gadget; it was the promised end of the internal combustion engine and the beginning of the "walkable city."
Despite the engineering brilliance, the Segway crashed hard upon arrival. We break down the $5,000 price tag (nearly $8,500 today) that priced out the average commuter and the regulatory "limbo" that left the device banned from sidewalks and too slow for roads. You’ll hear about the design flaws that Steve Jobs warned about—specifically that the machine lacked the "lean, sleek" aesthetic required to make it a status symbol—and how it eventually became a punchline in pop culture rather than a pillar of infrastructure.
Is the Segway a total failure, or was it just twenty years too early? We explore how the original PT paved the way for today’s micro-mobility explosion, from Bird and Lime e-scooters to the modern hoverboard. While the company eventually folded into Segway-Ninebot, the "lean" technology it pioneered remains the foundation of personal electric vehicles worldwide.
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Dirt Nap City is the podcast about the most interesting dead people in history.
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Someday we'll all live in Dirt Nap City, so you should probably go ahead and meet the neighbors!
You know, Alex, I've been on this kind of kick about um maybe the 80s and the 90s and malls and stuff like that. Have you noticed that?
SPEAKER_01What was the last thing you said? The 80s and 90s and what? Malls. Oh, yeah, malls. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like those kind of things.
SPEAKER_02I've been on. Yeah. West Oaks. I mean, more the concept of malls, you know? But I think there was a movie. And I don't even I don't even think I ever actually saw this movie, but it's a pretty famous movie that that had the word mall in it, and also a guy with a really funny name. Remember Paul Blart? Mall cop?
SPEAKER_01Yes. I love that movie. I love you know why? Well, I'm I'm sure if you and I watched it right now, we'd be like, this isn't any good. But that movie came out when my son was the perfect age for that kind of comedy.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01Lots of physical comedy. He was probably seven, you know, six, seven, right in that wheelhouse. Um, maybe he was eight. I don't know. What year did that movie come out? But it was probably in the nineties. You know, no, no. 2000s? My son was born in 2020.
SPEAKER_02Okay, yeah, yeah. You're you're right. You're right. It has to be. It has to be. Um, okay, so so but malls were still a big thing then, right?
SPEAKER_01Sure.
unknownSure.
SPEAKER_01I mean, maybe never going out, but maybe that's what even made it funnier, uh having a mock-up in 2011.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it was very, very dated. When you think of Paul Blart, how how would you describe him? What are some things that he's uh he's doing? He's like like the photo of him in the movie poster. He's on a segue. Yes, yes, he is. That's what makes it funny. I want to talk to you about the Segway PT. The Segway PT. Do you know what PT stood for?
SPEAKER_01Like a PT cruiser? A personal transporter?
unknownOh my god.
SPEAKER_01You know what's funny is that the only place you really see Segways these days, and I'm sure we'll get into it, tours, is tours in Austin, specifically. It's like Austin's still clinging to the Segway, and see these goofy people moving around with helmets on, going one mile an hour wearing helmets and pretty pants. Keep Austin weird.
SPEAKER_02Keep Austin weird with the Segway.
SPEAKER_01It seems like Austin is keeping the Segway business alive with their tours.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's not alive. It's not alive. It's it's it's long since departed. And we'll talk about where it is today.
SPEAKER_01Dude, I remember a 60 minutes story on Segways. Um, what was the guy's name that you're gonna about to see? Dean Kamen. Yes, Dean Kamen. I remember a 60-minute story on him right when Segways were I don't even think they've been out yet. They were about to be come out. And this it would, it's if you could get your hands on watching this segment, it talks about how cities are gonna be revolution, like we're gonna redesign cities. That this is a revolution that we're just at the beginning of that we can't even imagine what life in 2020 is gonna be like. This could be more important than the internet. Oh my god. They oversold the segue so hard. You know, he did this. Is the opposite of what Wrigley did, where Wrigley created a demand for something that didn't exist, it pushed a little too hard, and this is what happens when you have a half a penny stick of gum versus uh you know five thousand dollar complicated device that that goes one mile an hour.
SPEAKER_02Well now, I mean let's let's let's let's back up a little bit. Uh the the segue was was actually pretty cool. Um you know, it was based on a safe self-balancing wheelchair that Kamen had had developed. Right, right. Um I remember that. And it it had the ability to gyroscope kind of thing, right? Yeah, yeah. You step on it and there were little motors that would that would keep it upright and super technically complicated. Yeah, yeah. I mean, all the kind of things now that we're seeing in drones and one-wheels and all these devices and you know, scooters of today. But but it was early. It was one of those things that might have been a little too early to the party. But yeah, they had a self-balancing wheelchair that um had a had had the actually the patent for the self-balancing wheelchair was granted in 94. And I'm sorry, it was filed in 94 and granted in 97. So it it preceded the Sebegue that's a cool idea. Four years, five years. Yeah, that's a very cool idea. Um well, you're right. It it caught fire in the hype machine, and people were just uh I mean, like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and all the Silicon Valley tech visionaries and all the newscasters jumped on it and all these feel-good stories.
SPEAKER_01You know, you mentioned the Amazon warehouses used those too right away, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was before they had like uh robots doing it, they had people on these stupid segues.
SPEAKER_02Well, well, um it I shouldn't say stupid. That was very judgy. Uh it was first um unveiled to the world. Now you mentioned 60 Minutes. Do you remember how it was unveiled to the world? December of 2001? Was Good Morning America. No, I don't I didn't see that. GMA. It was uh Good Morning America. They had a they had a um uh the set had a like a little curtain, like a little round curtain, and there was Dean Kamen on it in the round curtain, and the round curtain pulled up and he's riding it around. Did he have a helmet on? Uh oh no helmet. No helmet. No, this was see, yeah. He yeah. The helmet's what one of the things that ruins it. Well, he was probably probably the best segue writer in the world at that time. The only right. Well, that's yeah, that's that was the joke. But he he was he was uh he was pretty comfortable on the thing. Well, the launch from 2001, 2002, people were blown away by it. I mean, nobody had ever seen anything like that before, right? The self-balancing aspect of it. Um they got tons of investment, they blew through a ton of money, and they were expecting to sell a hundred thousand units in the first year. And by 2003, so two years after it launched, guess how many units they had sold? Two years after the launch?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And their goal was a hundred thousand a year? Yep.
SPEAKER_02Man. Guess low. Uh 10,000? 6,000 units by 2003. So so of course, um Where would you buy one though? Online? I think you had to buy it directly from I think it was a direct yeah, kind of like the Tesla model. You know, you didn't they didn't have dealers or anything. You couldn't go to Academy and pick up a $5,000 um. See, maybe that was the problem though. Yeah, yeah. It might have been, I mean hindsight, right? One one big thing that really set it back was um several software glitches where they had to actually do recalls. Oops. And so, and and you know, in 2006, you couldn't push an update to software to to anything like you can today. You know, you can do today, everything is wireless. Back then, it was a process to update the software or to update a piece of hardware, but much like a vehicle, much like a it was a personal transporter, they ended up having to recall these things, and it got so bad that in 2009, um the company was sold to a British businessman named Jimmy Heseldon, H-E-S-E-L-D-E-N. And Jimmy Heseldon had the business knowledge in 2000, 2009. He he was doing really well, he had a lot of money, he thought he could turn this thing around. Well, you know what happened to Jimmy Heseldon? He was out on his segue in September of 2010. Um, he was riding it walking his dog uh near his his estate, and he drove it off a cliff and died from multiple blunt force injuries and chet to the chest and spine consistent with a fall whilst riding a gyro bike. Oh no. That's what the coroner said. So so the new owner, the new owner dies in uh 2010, and that really I don't think I'd be driving that thing anywhere near a cliff. Well, you know that what they say is he was walking his dog and he got out of his way to let some hikers go by and maybe the dog did something and he just like went over the edge. And and uh yeah, that was that was a bad sign. But you know, you're right, they still are seen today. They're not currently manufactured. The company that ended up buying them is called Ninebot, and you can still get um Segway branded scooters, but they're not they're not um not a traditional Segway. They're they're two wheels, but instead of being um side by side, they're front to back, kind of like the ones we rode in Cleveland, right? Like a bird uh scooter.
SPEAKER_01So do you think it was a distribution issue? Like if they had sold them, if you could buy them for $1,000 at Academy, do you think they would have made a bigger splash?
SPEAKER_02Well, here's the thing here's the reasons they failed. That's a great question. Um, they couldn't they couldn't sell it for a thousand dollars because it costs more than that to make it, right? So they'd be selling them at a loss. And may and maybe that's a strategy. I mean, you know, you're you're trying to get people to chew gum, right? Yeah, yeah. Uh but but chewing gum, you know, the the cost unit there of giving one of those away versus giving away a five to ten thousand dollar segue is is a huge difference. Um, there was also the problem they were pretty bulky and heavy, so you couldn't really take it on public transportation like you can maybe a bicycle. Oh, you can't. You couldn't really put it in your vehicle, right? Right. If you want to take it somewhere to ride it um downtown, like I want to drive downtown with my Segway, take it out and ride it. That wasn't a real possibility. It was also um a problem, like what we were talking about initially, the overhyped launch was a problem for it because immediately people had these super high expectations about what it was, you know, when everybody would be riding them. And when those things start to crumble, the whole uh buzz that they had around it fell apart, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they totally oversold that. I'm just wondering if there's a world where it could have made it.
SPEAKER_02Um well, let me give you a few more reasons it didn't. Um there was also regulatory issues and safety concerns. People, you know, is do you have to ride a helmet? Do you have to wear a helmet to write a segue? Can you ride them on sidewalks? How fast can we get them to go? They're banned from sidewalks, but they're too slow to go on streets, right? Um and then there's these high-profile accidents, you know, and every time it uh one of them crashes, it ends up on YouTube.
SPEAKER_01And there was kind of a wider berth than a bicycle, right? Like if you were on a sidewalk, it would take the whole sidewalk.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you're you're you're definitely um you're definitely taking up more space than just a human body, right? So you're taking up a little more space. If you were walking riding two of them side by side, um, you would be taking up the whole sidewalk for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, everybody has to go single file.
SPEAKER_02So there's also there's also just the whole backlash against them being uncool or dorky. Uh you ever see, so you know the song Um Uh I think it's called Riding Dirty. You ever seen Weird Al's uh parody of that? White and nerdy? Well, guess, guess what he's doing in the white and nerdy video? Riding a segue. He's riding a segue, yes. And and so he leaned into that dorkiness. And and that's the whole reason Paul Blart wear rides a Segway, right? Is because it's just ridiculous looking to some people, you know? So reeling it back, what problem were they trying to solve? Um, I think it was that last mile mobility problem that that is often you can get a bus to get to take you somewhere, uh, then get you close to a place, but there's always that last mile, or or you have to walk a mile from your house to the bus stop and you don't want to get all sweaty, so you just drive. But the problem is with last mile mobility, it needs to be something you can take with you on the bus, right? It needs to be something or you can or something that is portable enough that you can actually carry it and use it. Um you know, if Segways had been around when the bird scooters and stuff started coming out and they could get the price down, that might have been something they could have done was you had an app and you just rented them downtown.
SPEAKER_01But I mean, the 60 Minutes story, if I remember, and it was, you know, it's been 25 years. I believe they were talking about a world where people have them instead of cars. And they would redesign cities where you wouldn't need to drive very far. Right. Everything, everything you need is only a mile or two away, and everybody's got a segue, which is fine if that city exists, but you can't build a city, you can't build the segue first, and then the city.
SPEAKER_02Right, right, right. It's it's again, as we've talked about with many of these dead ends, it is a uh problem or a solution looking for a problem. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And and those can happen, they just can't be super expensive.
SPEAKER_02Well, it was a it was kind of a niche item, right? And it didn't really solve a mass problem. Um, and what's really funny too is you know, they talk about micro mob micro mobility. Have you heard of that? Um, being electric skateboards, one-wheels, e-bikes, all those things. Um those things are now getting very popular. E-bikes are very popular. The the birds and the scooters are very popular, but the thing that's different about those is they are actually more portable and they're more affordable, and they don't look so stupid, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, and one of the ways that those got popular was by cities buying them and renting them out to tourists and for you know a couple of bucks, um, and or having like Lyme things where you just like drop it off, you know, and people can just grab one and go. And yeah, those are so much lower cost and portable, and you know, I think that you're I think they're also more rugged, probably. Yeah, you can't have something that weighs a thousand pounds and costs five thousand dollars that's gonna solve a lot of these mobility issues.
SPEAKER_02So I've never actually been on one, have you? No. On a segue? I'd like to try it. I I would I would like to just see what it's I'm surprised you've never been on one.
SPEAKER_01In fact, I'm surprised too. Yeah, I mean, there's an alternate universe where where I owned one. Well, not only that, but this stuff takes off and you have a YouTube channel, and people are sending you free segues all the time by different manufacturers and different weights, and that you're you know, there's all it's totally something that you would have been the market for. Like if you didn't get one, nobody's gonna get one.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the and and the knockoff companies from China are sending me Sigways, SIG or or Sigway Segway with a Z Segways.
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, like I said, you're the you're the target for this. And if you didn't have one, then it was never gonna make it because you love like emerging transportation technology, right?
SPEAKER_02I I do. I love anything that makes you go with a battery. Early adopter. Well, that's the segue. Um, if you've ever written the segue out there, hit us up. We'd love to hear what your experience was, not at DirtNet City. And, you know, maybe maybe it was a stepping stone to where we ended up. You know, maybe it was it was something where we ended up with some better uh better alternatives because of it.
