Dean Kamen Talks Engineering, Inventions

DeanKamen is an engineering hero. Among our readers, he ranks as one of themost respected and accomplished engineers. His name is associated with highlyvisible innovations such as the Segway, the portable infusion pump and morerecently innovative devices to serve impoverished areas of the world. He is alsoa fierce advocate for attracting more students into engineering through organizationssuch as the FIRST Robotics Competitionfor high-school students. Design NewsEditor-in-Chief John Dodge recently conducted a wide-ranging interview withKamen at his sprawling hilltop home in New Hampshire. Dodge also shot an extensivephoto gallery of machines, scientific gear and industrial antiques in Kamen'shome.

DN: What is the inspiration for this house?

Kamen: I justwanted a really cool place that I could fill with really cool technologies, oldand new.

DN: How many pieces do you have?

Kamen: I've got alot. They are all my favorites.

DN: How long have you been collecting pieces?

Kamen: As long asI can remember.

DN: Do you find it on the Web? Where do you get this stuff?

Kamen: I don'tthink I found any single piece on the web. People know me and send me stuff. Itravel around the world and a lot of it is stuff made for me by DEKA engineers.Once a year, I have a holiday party. They always come up with some beautifulpiece of technology that has some relevance to something we have been doing.

DN: You have a huge antiquesteam engine in the lobby. What did it take to get it in here?

Kamen: It's about150 years old (built for the Britishtowboat Oscar). It came out of the Ford Museum in GreenfieldVillage (MI) and we started working on it years before I moved into this house.I designed the house with that space available for it. When they finishedpouring the floor underneath it while there was still no roof, I had the twocore pieces of the engine brought in and we covered them with tarps. As thehouse got finished, we started building the rest of the engine. Each spoke ofthe six flywheel segments we brought in through the front door with 10 reallystrong guys.

DN: How long did it take from the time you acquired it to getit into this finished state?

Kamen: It's notdone yet. We're still doing work on it. Every year, I say this is the year itwill actually run.

DN: Do you have to get steam permits?

Kamen: No. We'reconverting it to a Stirlingcycle engine. The floor beneath that one (pointing) is where we're buildingthe cylinders for the displacers and then they will feed up through the floorthrough a six-inch pipe to the working pistons in the main engine. The originalsteam cylinders will be the workingcylinders of a Stirlingcycle engine. So there will be no exhaust steam or noise - just this giantbeautiful piece of kinetic sculpture spinning away.

DN: How much does it weigh?

Kamen: About 40tons...

DN: Was it a Ford Museum surplus item?

Kamen: Every 20years or so, the museum goes through a big process of redefining itself. Whenthey were doing that in the early or mid-80s, they (offered) this and I waslucky enough to bid and get it. I had it disassembled out there and moved to abig warehouse here. I did a lot of work disassembling it and taking each piece apartwith a forklift. Then we sand blasted and refinishing it and made the brightmetal shafts with stainless steel. All the castings werefinished and painted. We remade the bronze bushings and startedreassembling it piece by piece in the house.

DN: Is your company DEKA Research for profit andprivately held?

Kamen: Yes and yes.

DN: There's not a lot of information about your activities onthe website. Is that deliberate?

Kamen: A littleof each. The kind of stuff we put on the website is (information) about thetechnology we are proud of and vectors to send people to FIRST where I want to getinformation out. But there's not a lot of information I want to put out about DEKA.We greatly value our privacy.

DN: How do these innovations find their way into market? DoesDEKA sell them?

Kamen: We are notselling them because we have no production capability. The design is not readyfor production. When it is, we hope to find partners to do that because DEKA isnot in the business of making and selling products. We are in the business ofdesigning products and letting the rest of the world, typically our corporateclients, go out and build and sell them so we can move on to designing the nextthing.

DN: Who makes the Segway?

Kamen: Thecompany Segway does.

DN: Do you own Segway or part of it?

Kamen: I retainthe technology and various companies have licenses to our technologies. Medicalcompanies have licenses to medicalapplications and Segwayhas a license for the consumer products.

DN: How many Segwaysare out there?

Kamen: I don'tthink they like giving out that information, but it's in the tens of thousands.

DN: What's some other news out of DEKA in terms of products?

Kamen: We'reworking on lots of stuff. Most of the stuff I can't talk about because it's forclients. The stuff I can talk about is a water project and a Stirling engine forelectricity for the developing world, the next generation of drug systems.That's our day job. We're also working on prostheticlimbs.

DN: How far along are you on the advanced prostheticarm?

Kamen: Hopefully abouta year from today, we'll have them to take home and use in clinical trials.

DN: I understand with your water purifier, you can turn filthywater into clean. Put in sewerage and out comes potable water. Is that true?

Kamen: The waterpurified is a very robust system in terms of what it can take as input.Literally, you can put in sewerage water and get out absolutely pure drinkingwater. You can put in water with biological and chemical toxins. There's very littleconcern about anything getting through that device.

DN: What is the filtering technology?

Kamen: It's a vapor compression distillerand does a very good job of getting rid of most of the stuff that would beproblematic for filters or chemical devices.

DN: Is it ready for production?

Kamen: Nope.Again, we are working as hard we can to make those things ready for production.Our goal will be to find partners once we are done with the design that willput it in production and as with the generator find some developed worldapplications for it that can justify putting it in production and selling it inthe for-profit world. Hopefully that'll leave us with the capability to buildmore of them (for the) developing world as a means of supplying desperatelyneeded clean potable water to over a billion people.

DN: How did you and DEKA end up in New Hampshire?

Kamen: I grew upin New York.As my business started growing, I needed more and more engineers andscientists. I realized that getting people who were graduating from engineeringschools from around the country - young enthusiastic kids to move to New York - was a bit ofa stretch. You want to be in New Yorkif you are in finance, advertising, publishing or the fashion business. Gettingyoung enthusiastic inventors and engineers to move to New York would be hard. And I wanted to beclose to the Bostonarea, skiing, the ocean, mountains and where there is a lot more open land.

There's a young kind of attitude and environment (here).Being in New Hampshirehas a lot of the really neat advantages of being away from things that arereally big but close enough to access them. To me, it represented a perfectopportunity.

I said let's give it try. People told me "You'll be back ina year." When we moved up here, it was one of the best business decisions weever made. Look at us out here. You're up on a hill. You can't see a singlehouse. Yet, we're less than an hour drive from a major city like Boston and itsuniversities. We're right near other major universities like Dartmouthand the University of New Hampshire. It's aplace where you can be far enough from the big downtown and not feel isolatedfrom the world.

DN: How does one individual get 440 patents?

Kamen: Well, Ishare them with a lot of my brilliant engineers. I am not sure the raw count isthe appropriate thing to do. We specialize in looking at the world's problemsand trying to find ways to apply technologies in new ways to solve oldproblems. When you go about doing that, you do a lot of inventing. And so Ihave a lot very creative inventive people. Since the only thing our companydoes is create new solutions to problems, the only thing we really create isintellectual property so we have to protect what we do.

DN: What are the most significant patents?

Kamen:Significant is a bad term. We have classes of patents mostly around medicalproducts. But we also have patents around energy and transportation. We are workingin more areas.

DN: How important is energy in terms of projects at DEKA?

Kamen: It'sgetting more important all the time. If you asked me that question a year ago,we had one or two projects directly related to energy and others that are sortof related in the sense like a Segway saves you energy when you're gettingaround.

Now we have a lot more projects related directly andindirectly such as our Stirling engine, windtechnology, hybrid vehicles and a whole lot of technologies that collectivelywould be considered energy.

DN: What is the status the Stirlingengine?

Kamen: The Stirling engine has been around since 1816 when it waspatented by ReverendRobert Stirling. As he did it, it wasn't very practical or competitive tothings like steam. Today it would not be very competitive to things like gasturbines or diesels. But there are plenty of places where you need some form ofheat engine for which a gas turbine or diesel are not very practical today,which is why they're not used.

DN: How is your Stirling enginedifferent from Reverend Stirling's engine?

Kamen: That's areally good question because the core thermodynamic cycle and the brilliance ofhis idea are identical. But in terms of implementation, today there are so manybetter materials that you can run much hotter than he could. There are thingslike sensors to control it better. We can get power in and out of the enginewithout having any shaft that penetrates the pressure vessel because we have apure electric drive inside. In many, many ways, he would not even recognizewhat we are doing as a Stirling engine, but the thermodynamics of it are allpure Stirling.

DN: What are you doing in hybrids?

Kamen: We havenot talked much about hybrids. I have one out in the garage (After theinterview, we trekked to his garage and he showed me a THINK hybrid whoseengine was being converted to a Stirling).

DN: You and I were just at a conference where a guy saidconservation is a sham and that we are "chromosomally" incapable of it.

Kamen: I heardhim say that. I heard him say that. I think he was trying to make anintellectual point as opposed to a factual point. I would agree in some wayswith what he's saying. It's unrealistic to expect people are going to bedisciplined enough to do that until the cost of not doing it is very high,which is happening with the price of fuel. But I think he was saying, "Let'suse our creativity so we do not have to choose between quality of life andquality of the environment. Let's find a way to use technology that will allowus to do all the things we want to do...but do it using less energy and (without)using energy in detrimental ways to the environment." And I think that's arealistic goal.

DN: We heard another speaker who is a venture capitalistcriticize the Department of Energy, saying little comes out of it relative towhat taxpayers pony up to support it. He also said federal and corporate labsare marginally productive. As a hyper-productive inventor and innovator, whatdo you think?

Kamen: Well, Ithink any entrepreneur sees any big organization as sub-optimal. Theentrepreneur has to do more with less and is competing with guys who have lotsand lots of resources and typically multiples of what's available to theentrepreneur in terms of resources and times. So every entrepreneur measurestheir relative capability against these big guys and says, "They're not doingas much." And relatively speaking that might be true, but the economies ofscale tend to be better in terms of productivity for the little guy. If thatwasn't true, big organizations would have all the advantages if scale also madethem more capable of fundamentally being more effective. There would be nolittle companies out there because they'd have no advantages. So I don't thinkit's surprising that he and most people believe that little organizations aremore effective relative to their resources versus big organizations. That's anongoing debate and it's not going to be settled here or anytime soon by anybodyelse.

DN: What are you doing with wind energy? I notice you have aturbine in your yard.

Kamen: We have awind turbine here and we are working hard now to make some changes in it from astructural point of view.

DN: Is it homemade?

Kamen: That wasoriginally from a company no longer in business in the U.S., takenover by a Canadian group, and we are making changes and improvements to make itsignificantly better in terms of efficiency and reliability. And we're also ona couple of other wind-related ideas that are totally different from that.

DN: What kind of output does that one have?

Kamen: That'll doabout 50,000W in a 24 mph wind.

DN: So my 7-kW Generacgenerator will produce about one seventh of the wind turbine, right?

Kamen: Thetrouble is the Generacwill give 7,000 kWs whenever you ask for it and I'll make 50 kW when the windblows at 24 mph.

DN: Won't that fuel development of storage technologies when itcomes to renewable energy?

Kamen: Storage iseither an unsung issue or opportunity, depending on where you sit in the worldof energy. You can't store electrons in the grid very well so a lot of themagic will be unleashed when there are cost-effective, reliable, easilyintegrated storage systems. But that will take awhile.

DN: We did some research among our readers about whichengineering hero they'd most like to have dinner with. You would sit at a tablewith Ford, Tesla and Edison.

Kamen: (Laughs) Holymackerel. You know, if you said I was third out of three guys at that meetingwe went to, I'd be depressed.

DN: I think politicians were the group with most responses as agroup and businessmen were second.

Kamen: That'sdisappointing. Who was the audience?

DN: The survey drew from 1,800 engineers who responded.