The Inventor Of The Hoverboard Says He's Made No Money From It

Hoverboard inventor Shane Chen in his workshop. Photograph: Natalie Behring

Shortly before Christmas, with sales of hoverboards surging as the must-have gadget of 2015, Shane Chen flew to China to confront his tormentors.

Chen is the man who developed and patented the hoverboard design in his lab on the US west coast four years ago. With its two wheels, the “hoverboard” doesn’t quite match up to the promise of its namesake in Back to the Future – but that has not put a dent in its popularity.

Hundreds of thousands of hoverboards have been flying off shelves; celebrities have posted videos of themselves riding – and falling – off them. Even a Filipino priest got in on the act – and was promptly suspended for riding one during Christmas Eve mass..

Someone was making lots of money, but it wasn’t Chen. He marketed his design under the brand name Hovertrax, which sold for about $1,000. Cheap imitations, made in Chinese factories, have flooded the market at about one quarter of the cost.

“We only made maybe a few thousand,” Chen said. “I got a report that there are over 11,000 factories making them in China. They made more than a million.” 

In December, Chen went to China to see for himself. “I visited some of the knockoff factories. They actually thanked me for having the imagination to invent it. They understand they’ve infringed my patent but they know there’s nothing I can do,” he said.

So he hasn’t gotten rich off his invention? “No, no,” he sighed. “If you look at history, inventors are usually poor. Other people make money. By the time we did the Hovertrax I was kind of used to it because there are about six of my inventions that have been copied over the past 10 years.”

The offices of his company, Inventist, in the small town of Camas, Washington, are littered with the carcasses of failed inventions that demonstrate Chen’s taste for trying to get people on the move. They include prototypes for various kinds of water craft, bicycles with odd limbs welded on, a cluster of cannibalised scooters and a device resembling a small first world war tank.

“It’s designed to pull skiers uphill. They stick it in a backpack when they ski back down. It works but I was never happy with it so I never put it on to the market,” he said. 

“I’m constantly inventing things. There are usually five or six different things I’m working on. Most of them fail but I’m getting better. In an earlier time, one in a hundred worked. Now maybe one in five or 10.”

Among those that have paid off is a human-powered hydrofoil, the AquaSkipper, which made enough to fund other projects. He also made money from a scooter called the Powerwing and his first marketed invention, an exercise device, the Bodytoner. But there’s been nothing like the hoverboard – and there nearly wasn’t.