Inventor of 'IT' Interviewed On 'GMA'

March 13 -- In his mountain-top house of dreams, Dean Kamen wants to show me something.

The problem is he can't find it.

It's easy to see how things could get misplaced in an 18,000 square foot house, which, of course, he designed himself.

The Man Behind IT

Kamen is the man behind the story of "IT", a mysterious invention that has been the subject of wild speculation in the past two months. The latest reports say IT might be a personal scooter, possibly with a hydrogen engine.

But Kamen isn't saying.

His prior inventions are the portable insulin pump, the heart stent used by Vice President Dick Cheney, and a radical improvement on old wheelchair designs.

Kamen scours his house for an Ibot, a go-anywhere machine that has changed the lives of many who use it. Like so many of Kamen's other inventions, the Ibot is all about personal freedom.

"People would get in this machine and they'd go up a curb and they would say, wow that's pretty neat," he said. "And they'd go up a flight of stairs, wow that's really neat! But they could deal with that, this is really neat! But then they'd just stand up and look you in the eye, and they'd lose it."

Kamen is the son of a cartoon artist who once advised him, make sure you pick a job you love. Even as a successful inventor, Kamen says there are inventions that he has in mind, but hasn't been able to achieve. But he doesn't give up.

"I will never take defeat," he says. "I may go down in a ball of flames, but I am not going to suffer the warm death of mediocrity."

Smart Is Cool

Apart from the inventing, Kamen's mission in life is to show young people that being smart is cool.

Kamen invited Good Morning America into his home to talk about F.I.R.S.T., the foundation he created to lure high schoolers into careers like his. For the last nine years, high-school students from all over the United States compete in specific tasks with robots they design themselves. Kamen gets top-notch engineers and scientists to help out.