Business | History | Technology
The Highly Misunderstood Segway Disaster
Why did the company fall from grace so easily?
Published in
5 min readMay 23, 2022
The Segway looked straight out of the Jetsons. It was equipped to self-balance and could blaze a path at 10 MPH.
It debuted in 2001 with great fanfare. Steve Jobs said it would be bigger than the PC.
Steve was wrong.
How the Segway came to fruition and failed
The Segway was invented by a medical device company, Dean’s R&D.
It was a side project of the iBot Wheelchair — a medical chair that could elevate a user and balance on two wheels.
The idea was to help handicapped people rise to eye level with others, feel more included, and have better access.
It could also go down a stairway and is still being developed to this day:
Kamen’s team realized this same technology that elevated and kept the chair balanced could be used to create the Segway.
