How old are bladed aero-spokes?

http://www.google.com/patents?id=qlV...=PP1&dq=614670

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

In article ,
wrote:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=qlV...=PP1&dq=614670

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Okay Carl, go for the gold. I want to see a 19th c. patent for wheels
made from "fibrous carbon."

--
Ryan Cousineau http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 20:08:42 GMT, Ryan Cousineau
wrote:

In article ,
wrote:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=qlV...=PP1&dq=614670

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Okay Carl, go for the gold. I want to see a 19th c. patent for wheels
made from "fibrous carbon."

Dear Ryan,

A typical fibrous carbon bicycle wheel patent, circa 1895:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=yPp...=PP1&dq=537188

Note the canvas outer layer.

Fibrous carbon wheels became popular when after the safety bicycle
replaced the highwheeler. The large highwheeler rim had standardized
on metal, but fibrous carbon was well suited to the smaller wheels.

Many bicycle wheels were made from "fibrous carbon" back then because
it was light and strong:
http://www.fixedgeargallery.com/morley/37.jpg

Indeed, racers preferred fibrous carbon wheels back then.

Fibrous carbon wheels were popular in the U.S., but not in the U.K.,
where the damper climate caused problems.

Also, fibrous carbon was much cheaper in the U.S. with its huge
forests. Most of the good trees in the U.K. were cut down and used to
build ships to fight the Spanish Armada and Napoleon.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

wrote:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=qlV...=PP1&dq=614670

Maybe I missed something. What about that gives "suspension" as the
title suggests?
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

In article
],
Ryan Cousineau wrote:

In article ,
wrote:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=qlV...=PP1&dq=614670

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Okay Carl, go for the gold. I want to see a 19th c. patent for wheels
made from "fibrous carbon."

would wrought iron qualify... it is a significantly different material
that cast iron or steel, and I'm sure that out there somewhere on the
Web someone has as evidence of its use in a wheel...

In article ,
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 20:08:42 GMT, Ryan Cousineau
wrote:

In article ,
wrote:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=qlV...=PP1&dq=614670

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Okay Carl, go for the gold. I want to see a 19th c. patent for wheels
made from "fibrous carbon."

Dear Ryan,

A typical fibrous carbon bicycle wheel patent, circa 1895:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=yPp...=PP1&dq=537188

Note the canvas outer layer.

Hee hee! That's one way of creatively misinterpreting my joke.

The canvas outer layer doesn't seem like a ridicuous idea, actually.

Fibrous carbon wheels became popular when after the safety bicycle
replaced the highwheeler. The large highwheeler rim had standardized
on metal, but fibrous carbon was well suited to the smaller wheels.

Many bicycle wheels were made from "fibrous carbon" back then because
it was light and strong:
http://www.fixedgeargallery.com/morley/37.jpg

Indeed, racers preferred fibrous carbon wheels back then.

Fibrous carbon wheels were popular in the U.S., but not in the U.K.,
where the damper climate caused problems.

Hm. Does this reflect the climate, or the usage? It occurs to me that
much of the racing in the US was concentrated around board-track events,
while I don't hear of a similar history in the UK.

Also, fibrous carbon was much cheaper in the U.S. with its huge
forests. Most of the good trees in the U.K. were cut down and used to
build ships to fight the Spanish Armada and Napoleon.

Seems like a fair deal.

--
Ryan Cousineau http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 16:56:15 -0600, A Muzi
wrote:

wrote:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=qlV...=PP1&dq=614670

Maybe I missed something. What about that gives "suspension" as the
title suggests?

Dear Andrew,

"Suspension wheel" was just one of various odd terms for bicycle
wheels.

Wagon-wheels with wooden spokes were considered solid wheels, with the
axle standing on the spoke--no suspension.

Ignoring our modern RBT squabbles, the general attitude was that the
axle was suspended in the middle of a wire-spoke wheel.

So any wheel that put spokes in tension back then was likely to be
called a suspension wheel to differentiate it from the familiar wagon
wheel.

Similarly, the first radial tension-spoke wheels were called "spider"
wheels, meaning that the spokes radiated outward. We still use the
same image when we speak of attaching the front chain rings to the
spider.

Calling radial-laced wheels "spider wheels" helped to distinguish them
from the improved "tangent" wheels.

(Both radial and anywhere from 2x to 8x tanget lacing were considered
"suspension" wheels. Highwheelers used radial or tangent lacing
according to whether patent rights were in dispute or marketing
thought that it was worth the trouble. Safety bikes didn't really
settle down to tangent lacing before 1900 and happily mixed radial and
tangent, front and rear, on the same bicycle.)

The odd nomenclature of early bicycles can be confusing at first.

The earliest bikes were just two-wheeled push-bikes. You straddled a
hobby-horse and rode it, not very fast.

In the late 1860s, the velocipede appeared, so named because putting
pedals on the front wheel gave it more velocity. It still looked much
like a modern bicycle, only bigger and awkward, with pedals on the
front wheel. The name stuck, with patents for "velocipedes" filed
after 1900--there was no legal definition of the term and no RBT to
squabble about it.

Then came the highwheeler of the 1870's, which enlarged the front
wheel to provide practical gearing for the front-wheel pedals and
reduced the rear wheel to save weight. It was so superior that it
became the normal bicycle and was soon known as the "ordinary"--which
perplexes us because the silly things hardly look ordinary.

Finally came chain drive to the rear wheel and the reduction of the
wheels back to what we consider normal sizes, along with the happy
side-effect that the modern design is much safer--you don't pitch over
the handlebars from five feet up in the air if you hit a bump.

Annoyingly, the first commercially successful "safety" was not built
in pursuit of safety. Starley wrote that he was actually looking for
better gearing when he created the chain-driven Rover in 1885.

Just before 1889, Dunlop patented his inflatable tire.

By 1890, the unsafe "ordinary" highwheeler was dead, though its corpse
gave a few curious twitches. There's a picture of an 1892 highwheeler
with an inflatable tire in Pryor Dodge's "The Bicycle."

By 1895, the first hard-tired safety bicycles had joined the
highwheelers in bicycling's cemetery, and everyone who bought a new
bicycle was riding on small, inflatable tires.

Highwheelers were so awkward and expensive that there never were very
many of them, and most of them vanished during the scrap metal drives
of the First World War, being good for nothing else. A good parallel
would be the early CPM computers--they were made in tiny numbers
compared to x86 machines and were usually thrown away when faster
systems became available.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:33:05 GMT, Ryan Cousineau
wrote:

Fibrous carbon wheels were popular in the U.S., but not in the U.K.,
where the damper climate caused problems.

Hm. Does this reflect the climate, or the usage? It occurs to me that
much of the racing in the US was concentrated around board-track events,
while I don't hear of a similar history in the UK.

Dear Ryan,

The dislike of wooden wheels seemed to reflect the U.K climate and
cost of wood. In the drier U.S., everyday bicycle wheels were made of
wood and it was a common observation that U.K. bicyclists didn't think
much of wooden rims.

Beyond the weather problem, there was protectionism. Importing wood
(say from Canada) to the U.K. just to make ordinary bicycle wheels
would have been expensive, given the lack of native lumber.

Here's a post about how the 1906 Australian parliament worked itself
into a lather over import tariffs and how _all_ wooden bicycle wheels
came from the U.S., not the U.K.:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...538c9ca27554b2

The U.S. also made the best spokes and brakes at the time, at least
according to the more rabid members of the Australian parliament, who
were probably lucky that RBT members weren't available to point out
some of their more glaring mistakes.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:31:18 -0700, may have
said:

Highwheelers were so awkward and expensive that there never were very
many of them, and most of them vanished during the scrap metal drives
of the First World War, being good for nothing else.

Another round of this took place in World War 2, with similar results
for a variety of the quirky inventions of the '20s.

A good parallel
would be the early CPM computers--they were made in tiny numbers
compared to x86 machines and were usually thrown away when faster
systems became available.

And yet they still turn up from time to time. recently, someone tried
to give away three complete old Apple IIe systems nearby, and I know
of someone who still uses a TRS80 Model 3 for business purposes. (As
for why, I will state only that I have known few people who could
leave fingerprint ridges in a penny, but I think this guy would have
no problem doing so.)

--
My email address is antispammed; pull WEEDS if replying via e-mail.
Typoes are not a bug, they're a feature.
Words processed in a facility that contains nuts.

Werehatrack wrote:
...
And yet they still turn up from time to time. recently, someone tried
to give away three complete old Apple IIe systems nearby, and I know
of someone who still uses a TRS80 Model 3 for business purposes. (As
for why, I will state only that I have known few people who could
leave fingerprint ridges in a penny, but I think this guy would have
no problem doing so.)

Do you refrain from calling it a "Trash 80" in his company?

The first computer I ever used was a Trash 80 Model 1.

--
Tom Sherman - Holstein-Friesland Bovinia
"And never forget, life ultimately makes failures of all people."
- A. Derleth