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Segway OWNER (not Kamen) who passed away invented a system for stopping floods and bullets

By Rain Noe - September 28, 2010

in Materials | Object Culture

Amid yesterday's frenetic and often badly-worded Tweeting, you could be forgiven for thinking that Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, had died. In fact British businessman James Heselden, who owned the Segway company, was the one who met an untimely demise.

Who was James Heselden? Turns out he was an inventor too, and he made his fortune developing the Hesco Bastion, a clever system of constructing barriers that is used for both flood control and military fortifications.

Before the Hesco Bastion people used sandbags for these purposes, but it takes one worker an hour to fill roughly 20 bags. Heselden's innovation is a collapsible system of mesh crates, lined with fabric. A worker then uses a frontloader to fill the boxes with sand, dirt or gravel, increasing productivity by a factor of 10.

Hesco Bastions are currently in use around the world for both erosion/flooding control and as quickly-erected military barriers that can stop small arms fire.

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Charlie xu

14 years ago

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So cool!! it is really useful. I'd love to know the material and its price compared to normal bags?
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atohms

14 years ago

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And very fast to deploy as the following movie shows:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up-ozEcAX8k

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