For what it's worth, he did invent (or entrepreneured, it isn't clear) the hesco bastion, which according to the former marine sitting next to me was something the troops really liked.
We used HESCOs (Concertainer) in Fargo for flood control a couple of years ago. Not the perfect solution, but there's no way we would have been able to get up that much flood barrier in so little time without them.
It's one of those inventions that's so simple you wonder why it didn't already exist.
I remember when the Hesco barriers started showing up in Iraq. They quickly replaced lots of the concrete pouring in many area for explosives barriers. Amazing things.
Plus, their booth at various tradeshows is basically an open free bar with unlimited beer.
Mr Heselden grew up in the Halton Moor area of Leeds, leaving school at 15 and working down local pits.
He worked as a miner before losing his job in a wave of redundancies in the 1980s.
His engineering business went from strength-to-strength and he had a fortune reported to be £166m, making him one of the top 400 richest people on the UK.
I took a Segway tour in Chicago this summer. Part of the tour takes you by the water. I asked out guide if a segwayer had ever fallen in - the answer was yes, sort of. They did lose a Segway in the lake, but the user jumped off before going in herself. The worse accident they had ever had was when a guy went over the front, smashing his face, after using it incorrectly and accidentally enabled an auto-stop mechanism, where the Segway basically shuts off.
You have to lean forward to move forward, which makes me think this guy either passed out or hit some rough terrain and the machine just slid off the cliff.
In 2008 I had just founded a textbook-selling website, and one of the first schools we went to was University of Illinois- Urbana/Champaigne. We had a genius marketing idea: rent a Segway and ride it around campus handing out fake dollar bills that had our information on it You can see the example here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4971801/Illinois%20Heads1.jpg ). Not only could we move around campus faster, but we would stand out!
After arriving in Chicago, I went to the Segway store you mentioned. They didn't rent Segways out. Two hours later, I emerged with a $500 bill and a Segway for 7 days.
I went to Kinkos and printed out a thick cardboard front with "BrunoBooks.com" on it and taped it to the front of the Segway. I gotta say, riding those things is a LOT of fun.
Unfortunately, I underestimated how bleeping cold it is in Illinois in early January, and therefore failed to realize the implications of what I'd done. For the next week, I rode around in sub-zero temperatures handing out fliers. I'd had the choice between University of Texas and Illinois, and I'd made an unforgettable mistake.
Follow-ups to this story:
1) It didn't really work. Of 40k students, ~500 visited our site. After conversions, this was terrible for business.
2) Everything is negotiable. For the right price, you can rent anything. In a larger sense, don't take no for an answer.
3) Don't be an asshole to people handing out fliers. Usually they're just doing their job, but even if it was their idea there's no need to be a dick about it.
> 4) Don't ride a Segway around U of I in January.
I'm so very sorry for you! Didn't it ring a bell for anyone where you work that outdoors + Chicago area + January = frostbite? No wonder the place rented you a Segway! You don't see a lot of Segway tours in January (or people outdoors if they don't have to be).
It was my idea to go there and Segway it up. We chose the U of I for reasons other than the weather, and being from the south it just didn't occur to me that cold + Segway riding = really really cold.
I think one of the Roger Moore Bond movies starts with the villian trying to kill him in remote controlled helicopter so there is definitely a precedent.
The common use of tragic is more general than the literary term, and any premature death of an admired or innocent person is reasonably tragic.
This situation is arguably ironic, with a few reasonable assumptions: the Heselden believed and promoted the Segway as safe, that one motivation for his fatal final excursion was to be ready with personal experience and stories about its safe and exciting use, and so forth. "I have so much confidence in this product, I bought the company!" And now, he's also bought the farm.
I'm familiar with the common use, and even there I demur. He was a mature man who was using and adventure model segway to travel off-road. Death by misadventure may be statistically unlikely, but it is not unexpected. Furthermore, in his life he was able to accomplish a great deal, and while he may have gone on to accomplish even more, I trust that we can look at his life without a massive sense of what-might-have-been.
Compare and contrast to the "tragic" death of Jimmy Blanton, Duke Ellington's bassist for just two years. Blanton is credited (or blamed if you prefer) with inventing the Bass Solo, but at age 23 he died of tuberculosis. Thus, the world was deprived of the bulk of his career and looking at his short life one wonders what Jazz might have been like had he played for five decades like Ray Brown, a man he inspired.
The tragedy of Blanton's death was that it was significantly premature. Naturally the bereaved think that Mr. Heselden's death was also premature, but we must draw a line somewhere, otherwise every death is tragic and the word means nothing at all.
So Blaton's death was tragic in comparison because of how premature it was and how much of his productive genius was lost. That being said, the cause of Jimmy Blanton's death was not extraordinary given the health issues affecting many from his social class at the time.
This is different than Scott LaFaro, another pioneering Jazz Bassist who died "tragically," however Scott's death was in an automobile accident, an unexpected incident. Scott's career was cut short and it was cut short in an unexpected fashion, another mark of a "tragedy" in the sense you promote. Mr. Heselden's death was anything but unexpected. If a man sets out to seek adventure in wild places, he and everyone around him must accept the risk that he will not survive.
If I am to die while Scuba diving, could we really call that a tragedy? What caprice of fate can we blame for a man who is killed when he deliberately immerses himself in an environment hostile to air-breathing life?
This watered-down use of the word "tragic" no longer carries much meaning, if any. I get that it's the style (especially in America) to say that since English is a "living language," it is defined by whatever meaning the vox populi care to give it. But while I respect your point that there's more than one way to use the word, I feel that even this lesser meaning does not apply to a mature, accomplished businessman who died while knowingly engaging in a risky activity.
Sounds intentional to me. If you were on a runaway scooter about to go off the cliff, you could just jump off the scooter back onto the ground. Sure, you'd eat some dust, but you wouldn't die in a river.
It seems like it'd be pretty hard _not_ to do this even if you were trying not to do it. Something is definitely fishy here.
You can't infer anything "intentional" here. I imagine he was close to the edge and he let it get away from him for whatever reason. Maybe he slipped in some loose gravel or mud, or his dog blocked one of the wheels, or he simply wasn't paying attention. Those machines are deceptively easy to operate, but they are still machines and you pay dearly for your complacency. I have 5000+ miles experience on mine, and I still planted a facer last month (my own fault, not the seg's). All I can say is that it's a good damn thing I don't live on a cliff.
I have a Segway. I actually got it for my son and he rode it to school his senior year in high school and had a great time with it (he even got in the Wall Street Journal because of it).
After he got a girlfriend he was more interested in a car so I took the Segway to work and we had a lot of fun ridding it around the office.
After about a month or so, after the novelty had worn off, our CTO was riding it around when he had an accident. He was getting off it but left one foot on the platform and accidentally twisted the handle bar to one side. The Segway took off in a circle throwing him to the ground, nearly throwing him through a plate glass window and running over him.
Your reaction if you get off the thing wrong and it keeps going is to grab it by the handle and try to stop it. But it's heavy, the handlebar is the controller, and it has a lot of torque.
I don't think it's more dangerous than anything else (like a bicycle), but it works in a way that's different than anything else and after a while you get complacent only to get bitten by it.
We cannot know for sure. One commenter over on the article site brings up the point of a heart attack while driving.
Would (just like in any other vehicle, granted) cause a loss of control and might explain a great deal.
But again - we cannot know and shouldn't judge without more details, imo.
You're right of course, that's a possibility. I don't mean to be passing absolute judgment on the matter. Just saying there's got to be something more than "I accidentally drove off a cliff, sry", as the article seems to imply. I don't really understand why I'm losing karma at such a clip for it. :(
I don't see why there does have to be more to it. People make mistakes while driving vehicles all the time. How many of the recent Toyota crashes were caused by people stepping on the gas when they meant to step on the brake?
I'm not saying that anyone claimed it was, but just pointing it out to avoid confusion.