MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2001 — So "IT" was a scooter, after all.

Today, in newspaper interviews and an infomercial-like appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America, New Hampshire inventor Dean Kamen finally revealed to the world the nature of his secret creation (dubbed "IT" or "Ginger"): a two-wheeled scooter. He described his contraption to Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson as "magic sneakers."

"You think forward, you go forward, you think backward, you go backward," he said, as a skeptical Sawyer looked on.

"I’m tempted to say, ‘That’s it?’ " Sawyer replied.

Indeed. In our post–September 11, post–NASDAQ 5000 world, it’s hard to recall the level of hype that once surrounded Kamen’s invention. As the New York Times reminds us today, last January, Inside.com (remember them?) leaked details of a book proposal authored by Kamen and journalist Steve Kemper that alluded to the transformative powers of his invention.

The leak prompted speculation that Kamen had cracked the code of the Stirling engine, an externally powered engine that will run on many different types of fuel and generate little, if any, pollution. Web sites and discussion boards devoted to speculation about what Kamen was up to only goosed the hype. Kamen’s track record for brilliance also fueled rumors: he’s invented a wheelchair that can climb stairs, the heart stent used by Vice-President Dick Cheney, the insulin pump, and a portable dialysis machine. It also helped that technology It Boys Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and Jeff Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (the venture-capital firm that seemingly financed the dot-com boom) were early boosters of Kamen’s project.

Doerr’s firm invested $38 million in the invention; Bezos posted a Ginger site on Amazon.com with this message: " ‘IT,’ also known as ‘Ginger,’ has not yet been released by its inventor, but we’ll be glad to notify you by e-mail when we actually know what IT is and if IT will be available for purchase from Amazon.com."

And now we learn that the object of all this hype is a ... scooter. To be sure, it’s no ordinary scooter. For one, the consumer model expected to be available at the end of next year will cost about $3000. (The other technological marvel we’ve heard so much about in recent weeks — Apple’s iPod — now seems like a bargain-basement special at just $400.)

The 65-pound scooter, which will be sold under the name Segway Human Transporter, has thousands of sensors and gyroscopes that monitor the user’s center of gravity and respond to the slightest movement. "All the knowledge that went into learning how to walk is in this machine," Kamen told Sawyer and Gibson.

In a televised demonstration of the human transporter in New York’s Bryant Park, Sawyer and Gibson donned black helmets and took a Segway for a spin. They were chaperoned by Kamen’s associates, who walked alongside them, presumably to catch them if they fell off. They both seemed to get the hang of the contraption pretty quickly — leaning slightly forward to go forward, leaning backward to go backward, or tilting to one side or another to turn — although Sawyer ran over her chaperone’s foot.

It’s easy to see the appeal of the electricity-powered device to a company like Amazon.com or the United States Postal Service, another early sponsor. Amazon, for instance, could give the Segway to warehouse workers who must cover acres of distance every day. The device can go up to 12.5 miles per hour and, Sawyer’s accident notwithstanding, seems incredibly safe and simple to operate. This January, the postal service plans to give about 20 human transporters to mail carriers in Fort Myers, Florida, and Concord, New Hampshire (the device apparently goes over ice with no problems). The city of Atlanta, another sponsor, will try out the transporter in its notoriously traffic-clogged downtown. The hope is to get some of the commuters who drive only three or four miles to work out of their cars and onto a scooter.

As Kamen enthused to the New York Times: "We think if you could integrate the Segway technology into cities it would be a universal win for everybody." The human transporter, Kamen argues, could lessen our dependence on oil and redesign the urban landscape.

Maybe. It’s easy to imagine the device taking off in San Francisco, the city that gave us the formerly ubiquitous narrow scooter (remember those?) a few years ago. A city of trends and innovation populated by dot-com entrepreneurs, as described in Po Bronson’s 1999 buzz-seller The Nudist on the Late Shift (Random House), San Francisco is just the place for something like a human transporter to catch on.

Well, it was. The deep irony surrounding Kamen’s invention is that the very people who were hot to know what IT was earlier this year —new-economy hipsters with money to burn, the very people who would ensure the Segway’s success in our clogged cities — are now looking for work at old-economy companies. If Kamen had released his product a year or two earlier, there’d actually have been a demographic cluster of people who not only could afford a Segway Human Transporter, but would be willing to use it. But those days are long gone.