Technology · 2

In a widely reported 2010 accident, the owner of Segway Inc. died after riding one of the company's own vehicles off what kind of geographic feature?

Answer

A cliff

British businessman Jimi Heselden, who owned Segway Inc. at the time, died in September 2010 after riding a Segway off a cliff into a river on his estate in West Yorkshire, England.

💡 Did you know?

Segway, hyped as a city-transportation revolution, sold fewer than 140,000 units total. Its inventor died riding one off a cliff—the company itself was sold for less than initial estimates.

Other options people guess

  • A pier
  • A rooftop
  • A bridge

Topics

  • failed-products
  • segway
  • business
  • accidents

Know your technology trivia?

Play a free Technology quiz and see how many you get right — no signup needed to start.

More Technology facts

Technology

Despite early hype that it would revolutionize urban transportation, how many total Segway personal transporters had been sold when the company halted production in 2020?

Segway, hyped as a city-transportation revolution, sold fewer than 140,000 units total. Its inventor died riding one off a cliff—the company itself was sold for less than initial estimates.

Technology

What specific feature of the 1993 Apple Newton was so error-prone that it became a recurring target of comedic ridicule in the 1990s?

The Apple Newton pioneered handwriting recognition but failed partly due to SNL's parody mocking its errors. Pop culture ridicule genuinely damaged sales perception.

Technology

Which web browser, released by Microsoft in August 1995 and bundled with Windows 95, rapidly eroded Netscape Navigator's dominant market share during the 'browser wars'?

Microsoft licensed the original code for Internet Explorer 1.0 from Spyglass, a company that had commercialised the NCSA Mosaic browser — meaning IE's earliest DNA traced directly back to a university lab.

Technology

After finding the moth causing a fault in Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947, what did the technicians do with the insect to document the incident?

A moth trapped inside Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947 became the first recorded 'bug'—researchers taped the actual insect into their logbook as evidence.

Technology

What name was given to the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, completed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945?

ENIAC consumed roughly 150 kilowatts of power — a load so large that legend holds it dimmed the lights across West Philadelphia when switched on.

Technology

What name was given to the feared computer bug that many believed would cause widespread system failures when the calendar rolled over to the year 2000?

The U.S. government spent an estimated $100 billion preparing for Y2K — more than the Apollo program's inflation-adjusted total — and the clock struck midnight largely without incident.