At the end of December, Emeritus Professor Kazuo Yamafuji of Tokyo's University of Electro-Communications had something interesting to add to the buzz of talk about the Segway Human Transporter, the self-balancing robotic scooter unveiled earlier in the month by U.S. inventor Dean Kamen.
The basic elements of the Segway, Mr. Yamafuji said, had actually been invented by himself and his colleagues back in 1986. These included its two-wheeled, single-axle design and the stabilizing mechanism device that keeps it from tipping over. The Japanese team did not, however, go so far as to develop their inventions into a transportation device, although their small, self-balancing, riderless "parallel bicycle" was granted a patent in Japan in 1996.
Mr. Yamafuji said that he does not plan to mount a legal challenge to the new product, which has been patented in the United States (the Japanese team's achievements were acknowledged in the Segway application, as required by law). Nor did he want money, other than maybe "a dollar, with Mr. Kamen's autograph on the bill . . . for recognition." He did not envisage building a competing product. All he wanted, he said, was public credit for having come up with the basic technology first: "It's a matter of pride for me as a Japanese scientist."