Harvard Business School Press executive editor Hollis Heimbouch has just paid $250,000 for a book about IT - but neither the editor nor the agent, Dan Kois of the Sagalyn Literary Agency, knows what IT is.
This is all they know: IT, also code-named Ginger, is an invention developed by 49-year-old scientist Dean Kamen and the subject of a planned book by journalist Steve Kemper. According to Kemper's proposal, IT will change the world, and is so extraordinary that it has drawn the attention of technology visionaries Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and the investment dollars of preeminent Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, among others.
Kemper - who has been published in the Smithsonian, National Geographic and Outside - has had exclusive access to Kamen and the engineers at his New Hampshire-based research and development company, DEKA, for the past year and a half. He tags the proposed book as Soul of the New Machine meets The New New Thing, and won over his agent and publisher with e-mail messages describing the project in carefully couched language. He also included an amusing narrative of a meeting of Bezos, Jobs, Doerr and Kamen.
In the proposal, Doerr calls Kamen - who was just awarded the National Medal of Technology, the country's highest such award - a combination of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Doerr also says, a touch ominously, that he had been sure he wouldn't see the development of anything in his lifetime as important as the World Wide Web - until he saw IT. According to the proposal, another investor, Credit Suisse First Boston (dossier), expects Kamen's invention to make more money in its first year than any startup in history, predicting Kamen will be worth more in five years than Bill Gates. Jobs told Kamen the invention would be as significant as the PC, the proposal says.
And though there are no specifics in the proposal as to what the invention is, there are some tantalizing clues. Is IT an energy source? Some sort of environmentally friendly personal transport device? One editor who saw the proposal went as far as to speculate - jokingly (perhaps) - that IT was a type of personal-hovering craft.
Consider the following items, culled from the proposal:
IT is not a medical invention.
In a private meeting with Bezos, Jobs and Doerr, Kamen assembled two Gingers - or ITs - in 10 minutes, using a screwdriver and hex wrenches from components that fit into a couple of large duffel bags and some cardboard boxes.
The invention has a fun element to it, because once a Ginger was turned on, Bezos started laughing his "loud, honking laugh."
There are possibly two Ginger models, named Metro and Pro - and the Metro may possibly cost less than $2,000.
Bezos is quoted as saying that IT "is a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it. The question is, 'Are people going to be allowed to use it?' "
Jobs is quoted as saying, "If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen."
Kemper says the invention will "sweep over the world and change lives, cities and ways of thinking."
The "core technology and its implementations" will, according to Kamen, "have a big, broad impact not only on social institutions but some billion-dollar, old-line companies." And the invention will "profoundly affect our environment and the way people live worldwide. It will be an alternative to products that are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
IT will be a mass-market consumer product "likely to run afoul of existing regulations and or inspire new ones," according to Kemper. The invention also will likely require "meeting with city planners, regulators, legislators, large commercial companies and university presidents about how cities, companies and campuses can be retrofitted
