These remind me of Chell's boots in Portal (in reverse?). For that matter, there's a little bit of Cave Johnson in this story too.
But throughout the article, while I was delighted by the concept, fascinated by the execution and impressed by his dedication, I still couldn't think of where his market for these lies.
This is quite an amazing story, love the persistence and passion.
One note. Just because the patents are expiring, doesn't mean this can't still succeed. Inventors and scientists sometimes think that legal defensibility is what allows you to monetize an invention (it echoes some of the debates I've had with my father, a scientist).
Instead, well after a Chinese knockoff is in market, I could see a niche product succeed when seeding it with the right early adopter community, using just Instagram/YouTube, and having great branding.
A product category is not "done" when there's a manufacturer in the market.
I think specifically the success he was looking for which is finding an investing/manufacturing/sales partner and he just does the invention is dead without a patent.
I would buy a pair of these things. Assuming they don't do something pathological to your bones or your joints, these sound like a mountain of fun. But he should take heart, the inventor(s) of inline skates suffered a similar fate with respect to the patent on them.
It does seem that he could sell probably 10-20 a month. I bet the Chinese knockoffs probably are poorly made, he could be on the high end of his product.
These use carbon fibre and if I recall correctly are proved to be a more efficient tool for running competitions than natural legs. There is debate if it should be allowed on regular competitions or if it counts as "doping".
A similar design adapted to able-bodied people might be a better solution than his metal structure design.
I think this is the downside of working solo and focusing solely on registering patents and getting rich. You miss how other people contributions could improve your product.
Those are great if you can wear stilts, which I can't (well, I did when I was a kid but I don't have great balance). What I'd like is just something small that makes my step bounce: kids get to have those little roller balls in their sneakers. Why can't I have a pair that just lets me jump a little bit with my step? It would make running and playing so much fun.
It'd be useful for me on mountain descents as well. I really love steep descents on snowshoes because the landing is so soft. Ice/rock descents hurt. Having a little spring at the bottom of your stride would go a long way to saving the knees.
More commonly, walking down stairs is a known knee-killer. This kind of product could be extremely viable for people who do a lot of walking at work – e.g. nurses, anyone in the hospitality industry, beat cops, etc.
Trekking shoes have a device to absorbs the shocks, which is usually a gaz or gel layer inside the sole. Unfortunately, this cannot absorb much, since a thick sole would reduce the stability of the foot. By the way, always walking with shock absorbers has bad physiological consequences on the feet and knees.
I think the best way to protect the knees, aside from soft snow and screes, is to lower the body when walking down, and absorb the shock using the thighs' muscles.
I remember "moon boots" advertised in Boys' Life when I was a kid, that promised something like this. So I googled a bit and found https://www.bounceshoestore.com/ , is that sort of like what you had in mind?
Frankly the entire set of products just terrifies me.
I can break, like, my entire face by falling wrong while walking at normal speeds, or twist my ankle or screw up my knee by stepping wrong while walking around the house.
I have to assume the failure cases associated with jumping stilts and magic running boots are just spectacularly awful, and I am way too middle-aged to deal with any of that.
The problem is that often middle-aged cannot deal with that anymore; an unlucky injury on/after that age can ruin the rest of your life and shorten it considerably. So many people who did things like ski/snowboard all their life but fell wrong and messed up their knee over 45 and now they cannot really do most sports they enjoyed anymore. People are not that into change usually when they get older so it's often quite physical but also mental issue for them.
For me the motivation can be hard to describe. The best I can do is to say I try to follow a path where it feels like I am improving the universe, but that starts to sound like the back of a smoothie bottle.
He's been at this for 30 years. If he had early patents, they've expired. If he didn't have patents, he had a product out before the patent and so there's prior art.
There was another parallel development as well, somebody who attached a rubber band to a large spur off the back of the heel. Might have been related to Nike's thing. Bit of convergent development.
Failed? There are very few top theoretical physicists (though still some) who still believe in collapse, and the rest believe something morally equivalent to an Everettian theory.
I agree, from the point of view of a layman, there seems to have been a reawakening in regard to his parallel worlds theory. The NOVA episode suggests there was nothing like that in his life time though. Sadly.
Sounds like he was too focused on inventing and forgot the production/sales aspect. He literally had the product and had thousands of people emailing him directly ready to buy! And he still complains that he couldn’t sell.
He should have realized his personal shortcomings and partnered with someone who had the qualities he lacked.
I don't know. There's many people that do practically nothing in that regard and become mega hits overnight. Happens all the time in software. How many sales people were marketing facebook back in the day?
Almost every social media site wasn't marketed. MySpace didn't have marketing, neither did Facebook, neither did Twitter, Snapchat is still popular even though it struggles to make any money. Those are just the few that come to mind.
I don't have an exact percentage, and percentage wise its probably low when factoring in all the websites in existence.
facebook type products are an outlier. It did not require traditional sales and marketing in the true sense as it did one thing right : creating a tool for college kids like me where I felt like part of the community. The idea was brilliant to keep it to college campuses only. I remember looking at fb for the first time (circa 2004 when it was only on college campuses) and going "wow, they have listed my dorm name" and immediately felt a personal connection. genius!! And of course, the UI was far more engaging than the incumbents. So fb was selling itself but most products don't.
Facebook practically implemented a worse version of MySpace. The only problem with MySpace was security issues which I think ultimately killed it in the end.
Facebook did things no one else did like allow you to import your hotmail contacts. They rolled out in small batches. At one point you needed a .edu email. The press was great. Facebook did so many things right marketing-wise in the beginning.. even now they always seem to be on the cusp of the next wave.
I think you're making an incorrect assumption. He had a series of prototypes, not deliverable products. Ramping up production for a complex product requires capital. As I read it He'd been seeking funding to get to the production phase and was using those thousands of emails as essentially M.O.U.s to show that a market existed and the product was desired.
> Ramping up production for a complex product requires capital
For a mass-market product, sure. But there’s no need to go from 0 to mass market. Had he priced his boots at $900 a piece and essentially sold prototypes, he may have been able to hit $100k in sales within a year. That’s the kind of traction investors look for.
Exactly. Going to market and being able to identify if his hypothetical quote “mid-30s” extreme sports enthusiast was his target market, and at the price they are willing to pay, was neglected in pursuit of the perfect product.
As Voltaire said, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”
This is precisely my takeaway as well. I wonder if there's more to the story than described in the article – maybe he's just really hard to work with? Maybe his prototypes are two expensive to put into any large scale production, and he's not willing to compromise? I feel like this story barely scratches the surface.
Agreed. The article also didn't really talk about what it was actually like after 30 years of pursuing his dream and failing. They just told a story without much detail. Seems like there would be a lot more interesting details.
Also, why didn't he start a Kickstarter campaign? I would imagine that crowd-funding would be the perfect approach to something unable to attract investors. He seems like a smart guy, I'm sure he must have considered it?
I agree too, the author really could have dug deeper and asked some questions instead of just focusing on his 30-years of failure (with some uplifting moments).
Based on the limited info we have, I would guess that he's a perfectionist. I've known a couple of people who have ruined great ideas and initial traction due to their perfectionism.
You can see an image of his later iterations later in the article [1]. It does look like there isn't much improvement between them, except what a perfectionist might find to tinker with.
I think it's even worse than perfectionism. It's a fear of success. Some engineers have this fear that they've only got a few good ideas in them and once they finish with this one, they'll never have a second one, so they've got to milk this one for all it's worth because once they're done they'll be all used up.
This guy is trying to milk it, because he thinks if he gives it up he'll have no more good ideas for the rest of his life. Mark Z. on the other hand is doing just fine and could start trying to do space travel like Bezos, but he doesn't really lose anything doing what he's doing because it's working.
But there isn't any milk. Zuck is milking it. Zuck could do other things, instead he continues to do Facebook and similar acquisitions. He is milking it.
This other dude isn't getting any milk. He's pulling a teet with nothing in it.
Perhaps it's that he believes he is eventually going to succeed and he's convinced himself of this since he also consciously or subconsciously believes that if he doesn't he won't have any other ideas so he might as well try forever to get this idea to work.
This happens sometimes to inventors who are not willing to cede control of the invention to investors. The investors aren't willing to put in $$$$ and not have control.
I think the only way that this guy could have won would have been to license the invention for a tiny royalty amount just to get the thing made and establish his personal brand. Then, once he had handed the invention off to someone else, he could have gone on to his next product and gotten a bigger development budget that would let him get out ahead of the competition before they could catch up.
Instead, he tried to do everything himself thinking he was a real business genius when he only had the idea and was a decent engineer. This is a typical engineering mindset. Engineers think they are smarter than all these genius marketers and hustlers out there. They think that being good at math means you're good at marketing, but they are really different skills and good marketers and promoters should be respected for the unique and genuine value they bring.
You have to love the journey, otherwise it isn’t worth the pain. The joy of entrepreneurism isn’t the huge check; if you want that, just become a doctor or dentist or corporate lawyer.
He knows about the manufacturing process, set up a kickstarter get orders of 10 make those 10 sell them, stream line your manufacturing process within the United states think 3d printing. Put out the next order of 100 hit the hundred then take it from there. Get the first 10 to make viral videos for you. Put made in the US on the outside.
This is difficult on multiple levels. Most people won't make videos no matter what (and they paid for the product so they would feel even less pressure), and those homespun videos are almost certainly not going viral.
"With it, you have the power to keep running With it, you will no longer waste the annual fee of fitness card. With it, you can use your footsteps to measure the length of your life. With it, there is health With it, walking on the road, you are the most special one."
this sounds like one of the chinese knock-off companies that just ignored the patents.
Really surprised that the article doesn't mention PowerSkips (aka powerbocks or jumping stilts), the remarkably similar product which were invented around 1999 and featured in the 2008 Olympic closing ceremony.
They're pretty common, with several manufacturers making them to this day under different brands. Several of my friends own a pair.
I knew these as Powerizers and my friend and I used to play around on them. They were a lot of fun. Indeed, this is what's missing from this article. My guess is that Seymour was trying to do it with extensional springs, and Powerizers replaced those with fiberglass compressional springs and they were simply way better.
I've always wondered what the efficiency of movement is on these things, specifically WRT fatigue of the user/rider... in that I have often wondered by soldiers arent equipped with things like this.
Would walking around on patrol in a place like Afghanistan be more or less better if you were wearing these.
Can they be added to the bottom of the exoskeleton legs which allow relief from part of the weight of a pack - but then adding faster movement when wearing the exo-legs+pack?
Walking around the rocky/hilly/mountainous terrain of Afghanistan you want to reduce carrying weight and keep a low, stable, very firm footing, rather than increase performance at a cost of considerable added instability.
The best thing the US military could do for soldiers in those circumstances over the next ~20 years, is reduce the enormous carrying weight they deal with now. Any sort of added foot instability (poor grip, too much boosted height, unnatural added spring force, wrong materials, too much cushion, etc) is very dangerous in a war zone.
I can't help but wonder if a technology that made it easier for them to carry the weight they do today, would just result in a heavier base load as additional items are suddenly identified as 'essential'.
This. Look at the historical average combat load of a soldier vs average height and weight of the same soldier. You’ll find the combat load is always just a little more than you think should be possible for extended periods of time.
Source: was in the infantry and spent some time reading up on it a decade ago
The best thing the US military could do for soldiers in those circumstances over the next ~20 years, is reduce the enormous carrying weight they deal with now.
I thought that was the point of the "dog" robot from Boston Dynamics. Are those too expensive for deployment?
it looks like jumping stilts allow you to deliver a lot more energy in a short period - for instance, running up to 25mph, or jumping over cars - but you pay for that with significantly increased calorie burn and the use of many more muscles.
So, probably really not what you want for endurance activities such as foot patrol.
In addition, the springs in them need to be calibrated for the weight they're supporting, and they top out around 240lb / 110kg. So you'd need extra heavy duty ones for soldiers with packs, and then you couldn't use those once the packs had been removed.
Maybe if you had a situation where you needed a couple of soldiers to dump their packs, don a pair of these that they'd been carrying, and run somewhere really fast ... ;)
In related news, the Russian Army investigated gasoline-powered 'rocket boots' for soldiers. Because of course they did. Sadly they didn't work out too well.
"One result of the Russian space agency testing was a calculation that the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine. That meant, it was more tiring to run with the motorized footwear than without it, undermining the original rationale. Only if the weight could be reduced to below 2 pounds per boot would the wearer have a net energy gain. So far they have failed at this."
Also,
" 'The worst situation is when the spark fires as the runner just lands, and the force of the blast is absorbed by his body,' Mr. Garipov explains flatly."
Maybe not the best idea. (Although I reckon if you outfitted them with modern electronic ignition and a sensor to ensure that they'd bottomed out and begun recoiling before ignition, you could do a lot better...)
> it looks like jumping stilts allow you to deliver a lot more energy in a short period - for instance, running up to 25mph, or jumping over cars - but you pay for that with significantly increased calorie burn and the use of many more muscles.
I wonder if they could be used for more efficient exercise.
Yep, one of the jumping stilts manufacturers actually uses that as a selling point: you burn way more calories, and wind up with a massive silly grin on your face :)
I've seen robots use brushless motors as replacements for springs, but with an adjustable spring constant. I wonder whether motorized jumping stilts would be practical. The motors could also add some power to your jumps.
Does the motor add force, or absorb force to regenerative-braking-->energy?
A fly-wheel-compression system on a brushless alternator would be an interesting addition to a spring-ish based stilt-prosthetic. Let it pump an alternator in the unit to create power for all the gear over time/distance?
I have a pair. You do move faster, jump higher, etc-- but that energy doesn't come out of nowhere. You're adding big weights to the ends of your legs and running, jumping, etc. It's definitely sports equipment, and it's a heck of a workout. It also works a lot of muscles that aren't especially large on the average human, particularly the anterior tibialis on the front of your shin, in order to control your movements.
Overall I can't really imagine it being good for the endurance-style activities for which humans are already quite well designed. In Afghanistan, at least for combat patrols, you might also have the problem of being taller (ie, a better target) and not being able to quickly take a knee, stumble, or go prone and get back up (ie, much much better target).
This article tells about Seymour's many failed attempts to get investors onboard, but nothing - not one word - about the inventor selling prototypes himself.
Yes, producing 100K units will require serious capital. But producing a few units and test-marketing them on Amazon should be well within reach.
There are so many ways to do this. For example, how about starting with a signature edition, produced as a series of 10 units. The guy's had crazy media attention. There are people who know about him and who might be willing to buy a first-run as a collector play or simply to fund a man with relentless drive.
I suspect the investors and other companies he's pitching to see this and that's why they refuse to invest. They don't believe Seymour is the man to bring the idea to market.
And they may be right.
Seymour can solve this problem by:
1. switching focus to marketing;
2. bringing on an associate who is focused on marketing.
Why marketing? According to the article, he already had the orders coming in via email, that's enough publicity to start.
Some others here said it already, but he could have just accepted the orders, start manufacturing a small batch and sell them. Why was that impossible to do? The article is completely lacking that detail. Why the focus on getting an investor?
I'm very surprised DARPA, ONR, or SOCOM didn't at least offer a startup grant for this. ONR has an entire office devoted to developing stuff exactly like this.
There is an art to writing DoD research grant proposals, just as there is (I presume) an art to pitching VC. So maybe a lack of understanding of how to go about securing these types of grants could explain him not getting one. But DARPA, in particular, goes way out of its way to take that out of the equation.
Which leads me to wonder whether there isn't more to this story.
It's possible that safety and/or energy consumption is the issue. As noted by others, there are similar products like jumping stilts out there. While they are effective, it is very easy to get hurt on them. Falling from that height is very risky. One Amazon reviewer broke a wrist for example.
It also sounds like it takes a tremendous amount of energy to use these. One guy was hoping to replace his bicycle with these but discovered that despite being in tremendous shape he couldn't handle more than 15 minutes.
Having been in combat situations, the safety factor and energy depletion factor would be a serious problem for military use, especially while wearing body armor and/or carrying a pack.
“More egregiously, a Chinese firm nicked Seymour’s design, mass-produced the product, and sold it under the “Bionic Boot” name on Amazon.”
This is the most important line to me. I’ve heard so many horror stories along these lines.
Yet, does anyone here know why companies like Sarah Blakely’s Spanx didn’t suffer the same fate? Spanx is now a billion dollar company that launched with an easily clonable product.
She talks about how she filed a patent on her idea on her own with no lawyer and that was the only explanation. I don’t think she had a lot of money to fight cases.
> does anyone here know why companies like Sarah Blakely’s Spanx didn’t suffer the same fate?
Spanx succeeded because they built a brand around convincing a wide swath of the population that their life would be better if they wore a fancy girdle. Their success was because of sales excellence and a smart customer engagement campaign, not proprietary tech.
Presumably you’re making the case that they grew quickly enough that by the time any competitors were aware of the potential of product they did have the money to fight infringement.
Even still, in the early days of their marketing campaign it would have been so easy for a foreign competitor to swoop in and make the same thing. I didn’t get the vibe that they grew that quickly, and I do get the vibe that there are foreign manufacturers on the hunt for ideas to copy.
I really don't think it's a question of proprietary IP, infringement risks, etc. It's not complicated technology. Spanx succeeded because they created a brand that massively expanded the market for slimming compression undergarments; they were especially effective in marketing to men.
I think the question is what prevented Amazon counterfeiters from selling their fake merchandise under the Spanx name on Amazon. But as said above, Spanx may have had the resources to fight this.
Yes absolutely this imo. I worked at Saks Fifth Avenue around the time Spanx we’re taking off. It was absolutely about the “lifestyle” and the brand. There might have been competitor and there might have been knockoffs, but they were just that: not Spanx. And that was very important.
I remember one of the top sales girls joking with her clients constantly after Christmas one year about how she’d had too much to drink at the Christmas party and she’d fallen and rolled or something and “next thing I knew my Spanx were hanging out”. And they’d all laugh uproariously as they held several pairs to buy.
It’s this magical sweet spot where they were just expensive enough to be special and “the real deal”. Competition didn’t matter. Price didn’t matter. Spanx mattered. I found it insanely interesting.
I think it also helps that when Spanx would go viral there was already a product available, so it would be less lucrative for a knockoff to enter a competitive market. When this guy's boots would go viral there was nothing to buy, so if a knockoff could get to market faster they'd get the sales.
I think things like [1], where YouTube electronics reverse engineering wizard Big Clive disassembles a fake "magnetic" shaker flashlight, shows that no pretty much no product is too cheap to bother pirating.
That people spend time to put parts together, including a fake circuit board with pretend-mounted components, to create a non-functional light, is just insane to me.
It's not free or fair trade, because the West does have copyright/patent enforcement. It's free-for-all on the Chinese side and self-defeating protectionism from the West. Now, if the West actively rolled back IP restrictions we'd get closer to a fair situation, and I'm confident that other mechanisms (prizes, research funding, targeted subsidies) would be expanded to restore the incentive towards innovation that IP used to provide.
I wish there were "ethical patent enforcers" (not patent trolls) who for a small fee/equity, go after these legitimate patent infringing cases and help people like Seymour.
Speaking about the product -- doesn't the weight of the boots make the body unbalanced? I mean, weight of hands is an important factor while running. So, my guess is that adding wrist weights might make running with these boots on less uncomfortable.
There are no hard and fast rules, but I've noticed that it always seems to take two personalities to create a new tech business: A hacker and a hustler. Sometimes these are two people: Jobs and Woz, Gates and Allen, Page and Brin, Moore and Noyce, Yang and Filo, Hewlett and Packard... Sometimes they are the same person (who are also generally a-holes): Ellison, Zuckerberg (but not always): Benioff. Sometimes a hustler hires the hackers: Ford, Bezos. Sometimes the hackers find the hustlers: Andreessen, Omidyar.
OK, these are probably generalizations, but it seems to fit a pattern, no?
This reminds me of the Moller M400 Skycar. Although the inventor behind it was likely years ahead of his time, after 50 years he is still trying to get it off the ground. Sadly at this point the company is characterized as “no longer believable enough to gain investors”.
One interesting thing I see in common between the two is a great deal of effort spent quite early on retaining IP (patents, etc), vs successful companies who seem to rely more on execution velocity and first mover advantages until they’re much more mature.
As the many drone-like flying vehicle prototypes have shown, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of a vtol aircraft.
Knowing what we do today about modern rotorcraft theory, it’s likely that the disc loading of the Moller prototypes was too high for the design to be practically efficient. It’s also likely that the Wankels didn’t perform anywhere near expectations for this reason... I don’t believe either of these to have insurmountable problems.
Rather, it seems likely that a disproportionate amount of effort was sunk into the software for the flight controller before software development practices had advanced enough to make it practical; if I recall correctly there was something like 10’s or 100’s of millions of lines of assembly code involved...
Just an idea that was ahead of its time, plagued by corporate missteps.
The average human running speed is 15mph. The record is 27.8mph, but that is the domain of a small set of outliers who train for a long time to get there. If you put these on Usian Bolt (the current record holder), he might end up closer to 40mph than 30. Or not, that record was ten years ago and he's retired now.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadBut throughout the article, while I was delighted by the concept, fascinated by the execution and impressed by his dedication, I still couldn't think of where his market for these lies.
One note. Just because the patents are expiring, doesn't mean this can't still succeed. Inventors and scientists sometimes think that legal defensibility is what allows you to monetize an invention (it echoes some of the debates I've had with my father, a scientist).
Instead, well after a Chinese knockoff is in market, I could see a niche product succeed when seeding it with the right early adopter community, using just Instagram/YouTube, and having great branding.
A product category is not "done" when there's a manufacturer in the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_skates
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex-Foot_Cheetah
These use carbon fibre and if I recall correctly are proved to be a more efficient tool for running competitions than natural legs. There is debate if it should be allowed on regular competitions or if it counts as "doping".
A similar design adapted to able-bodied people might be a better solution than his metal structure design.
I think this is the downside of working solo and focusing solely on registering patents and getting rich. You miss how other people contributions could improve your product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_stilts
I think the best way to protect the knees, aside from soft snow and screes, is to lower the body when walking down, and absorb the shock using the thighs' muscles.
I can break, like, my entire face by falling wrong while walking at normal speeds, or twist my ankle or screw up my knee by stepping wrong while walking around the house.
I have to assume the failure cases associated with jumping stilts and magic running boots are just spectacularly awful, and I am way too middle-aged to deal with any of that.
Seems like even less of a viable approach for a mass-market product.
Actually, Seymour would probably have been better off selling his boots in this price range as toys for people with too much disposable income.
Once you remove that motivation , isn't it much harder to endure and to win against more motivated competitors ?
Wouldn't lawyers take the case on a commission basis? (I just learned it's called "contingency fee")
His latest model doesn't look too different from the Olympic blade runners. Maybe it should have been marketed as a prosthesis.
I confess I initially watched it because I was interested in Hugh's son, Mark Everett of the band The Eels.
But it ended up being a poignant look at the also-rans in science. The ideas that failed.
Link: https://vimeo.com/eels/parallelworlds
He should have realized his personal shortcomings and partnered with someone who had the qualities he lacked.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/14/luck/
I don't have an exact percentage, and percentage wise its probably low when factoring in all the websites in existence.
That's exactly my point.
For a mass-market product, sure. But there’s no need to go from 0 to mass market. Had he priced his boots at $900 a piece and essentially sold prototypes, he may have been able to hit $100k in sales within a year. That’s the kind of traction investors look for.
As Voltaire said, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”
I agree too, the author really could have dug deeper and asked some questions instead of just focusing on his 30-years of failure (with some uplifting moments).
[1] https://thehustle.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/protos.png
Your description more aptly fits Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
This other dude isn't getting any milk. He's pulling a teet with nothing in it.
That's like trying to milk a starving cow, because none of the other animals on your farm are alive.
Instead, he tried to do everything himself thinking he was a real business genius when he only had the idea and was a decent engineer. This is a typical engineering mindset. Engineers think they are smarter than all these genius marketers and hustlers out there. They think that being good at math means you're good at marketing, but they are really different skills and good marketers and promoters should be respected for the unique and genuine value they bring.
The big lesson learn here is to seek help in the area where you failing in, in his case - closing those sales!
This is difficult on multiple levels. Most people won't make videos no matter what (and they paid for the product so they would feel even less pressure), and those homespun videos are almost certainly not going viral.
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=enchroma+glasses
this sounds like one of the chinese knock-off companies that just ignored the patents.
They're pretty common, with several manufacturers making them to this day under different brands. Several of my friends own a pair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_stilts
To be fair, jumping stilts don't use quite the same mechanism as Bionic Boots, but the results are almost identical.
There was clearly a market for this invention - and somebody else actually filled that market very successfully.
Would walking around on patrol in a place like Afghanistan be more or less better if you were wearing these.
Can they be added to the bottom of the exoskeleton legs which allow relief from part of the weight of a pack - but then adding faster movement when wearing the exo-legs+pack?
The best thing the US military could do for soldiers in those circumstances over the next ~20 years, is reduce the enormous carrying weight they deal with now. Any sort of added foot instability (poor grip, too much boosted height, unnatural added spring force, wrong materials, too much cushion, etc) is very dangerous in a war zone.
Source: was in the infantry and spent some time reading up on it a decade ago
I thought that was the point of the "dog" robot from Boston Dynamics. Are those too expensive for deployment?
it looks like jumping stilts allow you to deliver a lot more energy in a short period - for instance, running up to 25mph, or jumping over cars - but you pay for that with significantly increased calorie burn and the use of many more muscles.
So, probably really not what you want for endurance activities such as foot patrol.
In addition, the springs in them need to be calibrated for the weight they're supporting, and they top out around 240lb / 110kg. So you'd need extra heavy duty ones for soldiers with packs, and then you couldn't use those once the packs had been removed.
Maybe if you had a situation where you needed a couple of soldiers to dump their packs, don a pair of these that they'd been carrying, and run somewhere really fast ... ;)
In related news, the Russian Army investigated gasoline-powered 'rocket boots' for soldiers. Because of course they did. Sadly they didn't work out too well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/business/worldbusiness/17...
"One result of the Russian space agency testing was a calculation that the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine. That meant, it was more tiring to run with the motorized footwear than without it, undermining the original rationale. Only if the weight could be reduced to below 2 pounds per boot would the wearer have a net energy gain. So far they have failed at this."
Also,
" 'The worst situation is when the spark fires as the runner just lands, and the force of the blast is absorbed by his body,' Mr. Garipov explains flatly."
Maybe not the best idea. (Although I reckon if you outfitted them with modern electronic ignition and a sensor to ensure that they'd bottomed out and begun recoiling before ignition, you could do a lot better...)
I wonder if they could be used for more efficient exercise.
Speaking of which, did you see that he’s trying to develop a powered version?
A fly-wheel-compression system on a brushless alternator would be an interesting addition to a spring-ish based stilt-prosthetic. Let it pump an alternator in the unit to create power for all the gear over time/distance?
Overall I can't really imagine it being good for the endurance-style activities for which humans are already quite well designed. In Afghanistan, at least for combat patrols, you might also have the problem of being taller (ie, a better target) and not being able to quickly take a knee, stumble, or go prone and get back up (ie, much much better target).
Yes, producing 100K units will require serious capital. But producing a few units and test-marketing them on Amazon should be well within reach.
There are so many ways to do this. For example, how about starting with a signature edition, produced as a series of 10 units. The guy's had crazy media attention. There are people who know about him and who might be willing to buy a first-run as a collector play or simply to fund a man with relentless drive.
I suspect the investors and other companies he's pitching to see this and that's why they refuse to invest. They don't believe Seymour is the man to bring the idea to market.
And they may be right.
Seymour can solve this problem by:
1. switching focus to marketing;
2. bringing on an associate who is focused on marketing.
Some others here said it already, but he could have just accepted the orders, start manufacturing a small batch and sell them. Why was that impossible to do? The article is completely lacking that detail. Why the focus on getting an investor?
There is an art to writing DoD research grant proposals, just as there is (I presume) an art to pitching VC. So maybe a lack of understanding of how to go about securing these types of grants could explain him not getting one. But DARPA, in particular, goes way out of its way to take that out of the equation.
Which leads me to wonder whether there isn't more to this story.
It also sounds like it takes a tremendous amount of energy to use these. One guy was hoping to replace his bicycle with these but discovered that despite being in tremendous shape he couldn't handle more than 15 minutes.
Having been in combat situations, the safety factor and energy depletion factor would be a serious problem for military use, especially while wearing body armor and/or carrying a pack.
This is the most important line to me. I’ve heard so many horror stories along these lines.
Yet, does anyone here know why companies like Sarah Blakely’s Spanx didn’t suffer the same fate? Spanx is now a billion dollar company that launched with an easily clonable product.
She talks about how she filed a patent on her idea on her own with no lawyer and that was the only explanation. I don’t think she had a lot of money to fight cases.
https://mastersofscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mos-ep...
Spanx succeeded because they built a brand around convincing a wide swath of the population that their life would be better if they wore a fancy girdle. Their success was because of sales excellence and a smart customer engagement campaign, not proprietary tech.
Even still, in the early days of their marketing campaign it would have been so easy for a foreign competitor to swoop in and make the same thing. I didn’t get the vibe that they grew that quickly, and I do get the vibe that there are foreign manufacturers on the hunt for ideas to copy.
I remember one of the top sales girls joking with her clients constantly after Christmas one year about how she’d had too much to drink at the Christmas party and she’d fallen and rolled or something and “next thing I knew my Spanx were hanging out”. And they’d all laugh uproariously as they held several pairs to buy.
It’s this magical sweet spot where they were just expensive enough to be special and “the real deal”. Competition didn’t matter. Price didn’t matter. Spanx mattered. I found it insanely interesting.
That people spend time to put parts together, including a fake circuit board with pretend-mounted components, to create a non-functional light, is just insane to me.
1: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
Well, sounds like truly free trade.
No patents, no copyright, no BS.
If you can make it and sell it cheaper than someone else, you win (and people get it without artificial restrictions on its production).
Truly free trade would mean I could just take one from a store since the owner isn't using all the duplicates in stock.
Only when it comes to profit. There are other motives for invention...
>Truly free trade would mean I could just take one from a store since the owner isn't using all the duplicates in stock.
Only that wouldn't be trade -- because you don't pay (trade money for the product). So, no.
I wish there were "ethical patent enforcers" (not patent trolls) who for a small fee/equity, go after these legitimate patent infringing cases and help people like Seymour.
OK, these are probably generalizations, but it seems to fit a pattern, no?
One interesting thing I see in common between the two is a great deal of effort spent quite early on retaining IP (patents, etc), vs successful companies who seem to rely more on execution velocity and first mover advantages until they’re much more mature.
Knowing what we do today about modern rotorcraft theory, it’s likely that the disc loading of the Moller prototypes was too high for the design to be practically efficient. It’s also likely that the Wankels didn’t perform anywhere near expectations for this reason... I don’t believe either of these to have insurmountable problems.
Rather, it seems likely that a disproportionate amount of effort was sunk into the software for the flight controller before software development practices had advanced enough to make it practical; if I recall correctly there was something like 10’s or 100’s of millions of lines of assembly code involved...
Just an idea that was ahead of its time, plagued by corporate missteps.
A lack of commercial success != failure.
But, 25mph is still very impressive.