Reinventing the Wheel

People just can’t seem to leave the basic bicycle design alone.

Now don’t get me wrong, FMFT are all for real solutions to real problems and for the advancing of design and technology in bikes, it’s just that there seems to be a remarkable propensity for engineers to fiddle with bikes purely for the sake of it and with no real purpose.

Take this design for a spokeless bike that some students from Yale have come up with. I guess it answers the eternal question of how to safely put your hand through the middle of the wheel while you ride along and maybe there’s some reason for it that I simply don’t understand because I’m not an engineering student at an Ivy League university, but it seems like reinventing something simply for the sake of it. It’s also not all that new, and there have been futuristic spokeless wheeled bikes all over the place, like the Peugeot concept bike we mentioned a few weeks ago. The only thing that seems to make this Yale bike stand out is its fantastic ugliness.

Some new innovations are worth the effort that’s been put in to them. While looking at the Yale bike I came across this training wheel. A system of helping kids to learn to ride without the stigma of stabilisers, and also teaching them to balance with a bit of assistance, is brilliant. It’s another way of coming at the idea of letting small children get their balance on the wooden balance bikes that are turning up in every middle-class home, but one which allows the little person to get used to pedals at the same time. If they make one big enough I think it could have a useful application in getting me home upright from the pub.

To finish today, it seems that riding a bike is the most popular celebrity fundraising tool. In what might be an effort to trump the end-to-end riders, rugby star Laurence Dallaglio is riding to all of the 6 Nations stadia, once again to raise money for Sport Relief. That means riding from Rome to Paris, Twickenham, Cardiff, Dublin and finishing in Edinburgh, and he’s doing it right now.

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