YouTuber's Hoverboard Prototype Takes Us One Step Closer to 'Back to the Future'

There’s a scene during the second season premiere of the magnificently over-the-top hip hop proto-Succession drama Empire wherein the Lyon clan marches into the company office for a board meeting. The camera pans across the group, lingering on each strutting Lyon, before arriving to settle on the youngest son, Hakeem, who is—gloriously—riding a shiny gold hoverboard. It’s the most 2015 moment imaginable, a callback to the last year of pre-Trump innocence, and it’s arguably also the apotheosis of the hoverboard, a fundamentally absurd device that’s nevertheless an iconic symbol of its brief era. The association between the year 2015 and the hoverboard existed long before Empire, though—the two have been linked ever since 1989, when Back to the Future Part II saw Michael J. Fox traveling to a fictional 2015 and gliding along the street on a hot pink sci-fi skateboard. But the thing with the real-life “hoverboard” that enjoyed its brief moment in the sun during the 2010s was that it didn’t actually, y’know, hover. At the end of the day, it was basically a Segway equipped with a gyroscope that compensated for the rider’s weight. Such devices are more correctly described as “self-balanc