<p>Inventor Dean Kamen promised that his superscooter would change the world. Then reality hit - hard.</p>
<p>It would be premature to call the most talked about scooter in the history of humankind a huge bust. But the Segway has always been ahead of its time. For a decade, Dean Kamen fiddled and tested and tinkered with his invention, finally stage-managing its public unveiling in December 2001. He figured 2002 would be the year that the Segway Human Transporter launched a transportation revolution. Executives at companies like FedEx and Amazon.com would behold his high tech superscooter and wonder how they'd managed all these years without it. The US Postal Service and police departments across the nation would overwhelm the company with orders. And behind Segway's institutional customers, Kamen envisioned a long line of consumers from around the globe, checkbooks in hand. Maybe not all 6 billion of us would clamor at once to own one, but to him that seemed only a matter of time. After all, he was hawking the Segway as not merely a faster way to get from here to there but also a solution to urban congestion, air pollution, and dependency on fossil fuel. To prepare for the onslaught, Kamen leased a 77,000-square-foot factory near his home in Manchester, New Hampshire,and began puzzling through the logistics of running round-the-clock shifts. He hired scores of lobbyists, who spent much of last year trying to persuade state legislatures to rewrite their laws to permit his scooter to operate on city sidewalks. Before he'd sold a single one, Kamen blithely forecast that by the end of 2002, his enterprise would be stamping out 10,000 machines a week. Meanwhile, his best-known backer, venture capitalist John Doerr, predicted Segway would rack up $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history.</p>