There’s a classic Mary Tyler Moore Show episode, in which Chuckles the Clown, while dressed like a peanut, is crushed to death by an elephant.
This episode came, quite naturally, to the incredibly-crammed mind of my sister Trish when she saw the article on Jimi Heselden, owner of Segway, Inc., who died in – you can’t make these things up – a Segway accident.
While I like the idea of Segways (for a motor vehicle, they are certainly more eco-friendly than an Escalade) as a city girl, I live in healthy fear of them. That’s because, tootling around downtown Boston, there are gawking tourists, gawking at tourist stuff, and not watching where the hell they’re going on their Segways. It’s just a matter of time before something dire happens in front of The State House or Old North Church, caused by gawking-while-Segwaying.
In any case, Mr. Heselden’s company, Hesco Bastion, bought Segway out last year, and he was, metaphorically speaking, eating his own dog food when he died.
The fatal accident allegedly occurred at Heselden's West Yorkshire estate, according to the Daily Mail. He was "using one of the machines--which use gyroscopes to remain upright and are controlled by the direction in which the rider leans--to inspect the grounds of his property," writes the Daily Mail. "A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said today: 'Police were called at 11.40am yesterday to reports of a man in the River Wharfe, apparently having fallen from the cliffs above.'"
Police told The Telegraph that a "Segway-style vehicle" was recovered at the scene of the accident. (Source: Huffington Post.)
Mr. Heselden’s unfortunate death will, no doubt, inspire comedians everywhere. (I am channeling the ghost of Johnny Carson as I write.) Not to mention sundry bloggers. For years to come, people will spot a Segway and think about the circumstances of Heselden’s demise. Which, on top of being a “gimme” of comedic material, also bring into question just how safe and easy Segways are to operate.
But what I find most interesting in this is the story of Jimi Heselden, himself. A former miner, with scant education (he left school at 15), Heselden founded an engineering firm, became one of the wealthiest men in England, as well as a philanthropist.
Just amazing.
The BBC had a small piece on him, and they reported that:
The tycoon grew up in the Halton Moor area of Leeds and worked down the local pits until he lost his job in a wave of redundancies in the 1980s.
Years later he created hundreds of jobs in the city when his firm developed the flat-pack wire mesh "blast wall" baskets, which have been used to protect soldiers in every major conflict since the first Gulf War.
His philanthropic efforts were centered on his hometown, and on the needs of wounded soldiers.
I am a complete sucker for any self-made-man (or woman) story, and someone who started out working in a colliery in Leeds, and goes on to build a successful engineering firm – using the opportunity of brought on by a pink slip, of all things…Well, a doff of the coal miner’s cap to Jimi Heselden. He sounds like he was one hell of a tough, practical, smart cookie. Plus a hands-on type of guy: he was testing a cross-country (non-city sidewalk) version of the Segway when he sailed over the edge.
The Guardian has his fortune at £166m, and his charitable donations at a hefty chunk of that: £23m.
Well played, Jimi Heselden. Good on ye..
And I’ll say one more thing about his death: because of the peculiar, yet fitting, circumstances of it, a lot more people will have heard his name than would have otherwise.
Not too shabby for a 15 year old kid from the mines.
As for Trish’s thinking “Chuckles the Clown”, what’s rattling around in my brain is this goofy bit of doggerel from my childhood:
By the sewer he lived, by the sewer he died.
They say it was murder, but it was sewer-cide.
The mind, so they say, is a terrible thing to waste.
It doesn’t sound like Jimi Heselden wasted his.
So he died when the Segway he was test driving went off a cliff and landed in the river.
ReplyDeleteLook for fevered work in the R&D department of Segway, Inc. on the next generation of their product, which will fly and float.