Magnets and Other Attractions

It has been an interesting week or so in cycling news, with some important issues cleared up along the way.

Firstly it turns out that any effort to register bicycles seems doomed to fail, even if the benefits are touted to cyclists in terms of getting your bike back if it’s stolen. It seems that it’s pretty hard to make sure that all bikes coming into a city are all officially registered, and I’m not sure how many times you might be expected to register a bike in any city you might pass through on a long ride. Anyway, it seems that Medford in Southern Oregon has scrapped a law that required bikes to be officially licensed, although I’m not sure what they’re going to do about the “one or two citations … issued a year” and the cyclists who might be justified in asking for a refund of the $200 fine they’ve had to pay.

Sticking to a legal theme, this was also the week when it was confirmed that very few people are likely to confuse a bottle of wine with a bike (unless they’ve drunk far too many of the bottles of wine). A small winery in Northern California has been cleared of trademark infringement after it shipped a few orders of its wine, branded as "Trek Winery", to the same state as Wisconsin-based Trek Bicycle Corporation. There might be another lawsuit based on the touring holidays the bicycle manufacturer runs in Napa wine country, but for the moment it seems that people are unlikely to get the companies confused. If you have made an order recently and been shocked to find booze turning up when you expected a bike, and then been unable to go for a ride as you found yourself too drunk on the unexpected delivery, or something, then maybe you should contact the bike-makers?

It’s also the week where there’s been loads of news about the possibility of Hitler Youth cycling tourists in the late 1930s collecting information on Britain as they went around, as the National Archives go on the press offensive again with records that are being made public for the first time.

They would have got a lot further and continued well into the night if they’d had access to this dynamo which uses magnets instead of friction with the wheel to generate electricity for lights (and probably any other gadget you might have to hand, soon). I’m just amazed that it’s not an idea that’s been dreamt up before. It seems so simple, taking away the wear on tyres and extra friction to pedal against of a traditional dynamo.

A