The other night I watched a National Geographic Channel feature on Dean Kamen. I've never heard of the guy, but since I was just channel surfin' anyway I deciced to stick around and see it the feature was interesting. This guy is some piece of work. Read this short feature story about him to get to know him more: Wired.Com's Breakout Artist.

Dean Kamen was a college drop-out, but he educated himself in physics and became an inventor of practical gadgets. His first invention was a the first portable infusion pump. He even showed the camera crew from NatGeo a few of his very first prototypes. He says he baked the PCB's for them right in his mother's old oven.

Now a millionaire many times over, he has over 150 different patents in his name. He owns his own company, DEKA Research. Two of his more famous inventions are the Segway and the iBot. He's the talk of the Internet, so much so that months before these two inventions were even seen by the public, there were millions of netheads logging into bulettin boards all over the Net to get the latest speculation on them. When finally unveiled, all the Segway got was disappointed glances. The iBot fared better. In this article by Bob Metcalfe, the iBot is given a rave review.

When he's not busy laboring away secretly in his DEKA office, he's a philantropist with innovation still in his head. In 1993 he founded US First, which sponsors an annual robotics competition for high-schoolers all over the US. It's kind of like the Olympics of juvenile robotics innovation. He fought hard to find corporate sponsors to provide contestants (ordinary high school kids) with industry-grade components worth thousands of dollars. Kamen is quoted to have said, "You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is." --taken from the DEKA website. It's the geeks versus the jocks all over again -- LOL! Only this time around, the geeks will fare better with a benefactor like Kamen. In this interview by the Futures Channel he describes what he aims to accomplish with US First.

This guy is just remarkable. What's in store for the future? The stirling engine. Critics say nobody can make it viable. Kamen says he'll make it viable(!) to provide poor households around the world with the means to produce electricity and purify water. Why isn't the world filled with more Kamen's and less Bush's and Gates' ? It would've been better that way.