Dean Kamen

Dean Kamen grew up in Rockville Centre, New York, the son of Jack Kamen, an illustrator for Mad magazine and EC Comics. As a teenager he built light and sound systems for local bands and museums, and had earned roughly 60,000 dollars by the time he finished high school. He enrolled at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to study engineering, but spent most of his five years there in a makeshift lab instead of class, building the AutoSyringe, a wearable drug-infusion pump, at his older brother's request for the brother's medical research. He left in 1976 without a degree, already running a company built around the device.

Kamen built DEKA Research and Development around a stream of medical and mobility devices: the first wearable insulin pump, a portable dialysis machine, the iBOT, a stair-climbing wheelchair balanced on gyroscopes that the FDA approved in 2003, and the Luke Arm, a mind-controlled prosthetic arm approved in 2014. In 2001 he unveiled the Segway after two years of prerelease hype that promised it would reshape cities, a promise it never came close to keeping, though the underlying gyroscopic balancing technology found a second life in the iBOT and later wheelchairs. His Slingshot system uses a Stirling engine to purify water for communities without clean supplies. In 1989 he founded FIRST with MIT roboticist Woodie Flowers to run robotics competitions for students, a program he has called his proudest invention, and he holds more than a thousand patents.

The Segway is the clearest measure of the gap between Kamen's ambition and the market's response. Before launch, Steve Jobs reportedly told Kamen it would be bigger than the personal computer, and speculation ran wild enough that Kamen priced it at 5,000 dollars expecting to sell 100,000 units in the first thirteen months. It sold roughly 140,000 over its entire nineteen-year production run, arrived to reviews that ranged from puzzled to mocking, and never became the everyday transportation Kamen predicted. He sold the company in 2009, Chinese firm Ninebot bought it in 2015, and the last one rolled off the line in July 2020. Kamen has said he built it as engineering, not marketing, and points to the underlying balance technology, now inside the iBOT and its wheelchair successors, as where the real payoff landed.

As of 2026, that reputation is not settled. Kamen visited Jeffrey Epstein's private Caribbean island in 2013, five years after Epstein's 2008 sex-offense conviction, and thanked him afterward for what he called a magical place. Epstein had arranged a 10,000-dollar donation to a FIRST affiliate in 2009, and a woman later identified as both a victim and a facilitator in his abuse appeared in a 2013 FIRST newsletter. When the connections became public, Kamen took leave from FIRST's board on January 31 and resigned March 12, while two of his other ventures cleared him. He has said he made errors in judgment staying connected to Epstein after the conviction, but denies knowing of the crimes and has not been accused of any himself.

Dean Kamen's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• AutoSyringe invention
  The first wearable drug-infusion pump 1976
• Segway invention
  Self-balancing personal transporter 2001
• iBOT invention
  Gyroscopically balanced stair-climbing wheelchair 2003
• Luke Arm invention
  FDA-approved mind-controlled prosthetic arm 2014
• FIRST company
  Robotics competitions for students, founded with Woodie Flowers 1989

• April 5, 1951 aged 0 Born in Rockville Centre, New York
• 1969 aged ~18 Earns roughly 60,000 dollars building light and sound systems as a teenager
• 1971 aged ~20 Enrolls at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• 1976 aged ~25 Leaves college without a degree after inventing the AutoSyringe insulin pump
• 1982 aged ~31 Founds DEKA Research and Development
• 1989 aged ~38 Founds FIRST with Woodie Flowers to run student robotics competitions
• 2001 aged ~50 Unveils the Segway after years of prerelease hype
• 2003 aged ~52 The FDA approves the iBOT stair-climbing wheelchair
• March 12, 2026 aged 74 Resigns from the FIRST board over ties to Jeffrey Epstein

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