Hoe to Make Millions of Hoverboards (Almost) Overnight

[LiberalArkie]

The 16th-century Chinese novel Fengshen Yanyi tells the story of Nezha, a child deity who can’t quite keep from killing people. First, he nearly kills his mother, who carries him in utero for four agonizing years before birthing “a huge meatball” that rolls around “in mad circles like a wheel.” As a boy, Nezha kills a series of important people with his toys, which he keeps forgetting are lethal weapons, and to avoid retribution against his family, he disembowels himself, absolving them of responsibility. After Nezha’s death, his father burns down a temple built in his honor, calling him “impudent,” a troublemaker. This enrages Nezha’s spirit, who beseeches his master, Superiorman Paragon, for help. Superiorman Paragon obliges, crafting Nezha a new body out of lotus flowers and bestowing a gift: two “wind-fire wheels,” aboard which Nezha sets out to seek revenge.

The Chinese have lots of names for hoverboards, which are all made here, mostly in the vast southern province of Guangdong: They call them huaban, “skateboard,” or pinghengche, “balancing wheels,” or diandongpinghengban, “power balance board.” But people in the know, young people on the internet, cool people, call those goofy two-wheeled scooter thingies feng huo lun or fung fo leon: wind-fire wheels. The name doesn’t just describe the board; it also describes the rider: someone young, someone who likes to show off, someone who is maybe a little bit of a punk.

Also, someone incurious. Nezha doesn’t wonder where Superiorman Paragon actually got the nifty wheels — he just uses them. They’re just there.

And so, almost overnight, are hoverboards. They’re in MTV awards shows and Justin Bieber videos; in suburban high schools and on city sidewalks. They’re a physical commodity, but they’re also a meme — popularized by celebrities, shared endlessly on Twitter and Instagram and Vine, discussed to death by the chittering idea factory that is the English-language internet. Wiz Khalifa’s tweet calling the boards “the technology everyone will be using in the next 6 months” has been retweeted some 34,000 times; when Kendall Jenner posted a video of herself flailing around on a model called the PhunkeeDuck this summer, more than 1.1 million Instagram accounts liked it. According to Alyssa Steele, divisional merchandising manager at eBay, the site currently has about 10,000 listings for hoverboards; in the first two weeks of November, one was being sold there about once every two minutes. Over the past week and a half, that number has ramped up to one board every single minute of the day. Hoverboards are clearly, loudly, definitely here — but still, most Americans have only the faintest idea about where they actually come from.

Snip

http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/how-to-make-millions-of-hoverboards-almost-overnight#.acxlK02Wm

[Octafish]

1. If they go around on two wheels...

...Unless they're fire wheels spewing anti-gravity, the board's really not hovering. It's a plank on wheels. Hope the "punks" remember to wear a helmet.

Thank you for a great story and a great history, LiberalArkie! I'd ask, what will they think of next? But post-TPP, who knows what the market will demand?