Zoo Station

Emeka Okafor sent me this interview with Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and head of Deka Research. To start with, Kamen was asked what drove him to create.

Life is really, really short. There was an infinite past before I was here--some would argue it was 20 billion years or so, but I am not so sure. Suffice it to say that there was a very long time before I was here, and there will be a very long time after I am gone. My life looks like a tiny dot on that continuum. This perspective gives me a sense of urgency. With that sense of urgency, I get up every day and think that I do not want to waste any time. And if you don't want to waste time, you look at all the problems you can work on and say, "I only want to work on the big problems. I am only going to work on the ones that matter." If you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.

Among other things, he was also asked about his obsession with the Stirling Engine.

I have had a life-long fascination with Stirling engines and with thermodynamics generally. But as you say, the Stirling has been fascinating scientists and engineers for well over 100 years, yet it has never been a competitive solution to most problems versus other kinds of heat engines out there, like steam engines, internal combustion engines, and gas turbines. Stirling engines are big relative to their energy density, expensive, hard to manufacture, etc. In short, they cannot compete with the power generators that are already a part of the infrastructure in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. However, there are a lot of places in the developing world that are waiting, and will continue to wait, for a top-down approach to provide power.

But there is no infrastructure in place, and it will probably take 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, or longer before centralized power and electricity will be available in these places--if it ever happens--for reasons that have nothing to do with engineering or technology. The obstacles are social, financial, and political, but they are not technological. Our goal is to use a bottom-up approach to instantly get people on to the ladder of technology, beginning with getting them electricity in their homes and villages. This enables them to take care of their basic needs, attain a better quality of life, and start creating wealth. We defined the problem: they need a generator that runs on any fuel, is very reliable and essentially maintenance free, is able to generate sufficient power for a small village, and is small enough so that a couple of people can carry it around. If we had an engine that could do all that, it would be a big deal. We realized that in developing world environments, the Stirling, despite a number of problems that had to be solved with it, could really be the core of a bottom-up way to build distributed point-of-use power generation throughout the world. It was as much an insight into the practical realities of the situation as it was about the second law of thermodynamics.