SOME CONSTANT FALLACIES.
There are several fallacies which recur, year after year, and necessarily lead to wrong conclusions. One of these fallacies is that there is a large reserve power in the body which is not ordinarily afforded means for expending itself, especially that the arms do not have a chance given them. Another is the twin brother of perpetual motion by means of gravity, and it imagines that a cycle can be driven continuously by the [weight of the rider]. Another assumes that the coveted mile-a-minute speed can be attained by speeding up the wheel with relation to the foot action by means of gears. Another assumes that a combination of enough gears, levers, clutches, straps, cams, etc., can be trusted to go of itself; inventors along this line seem to read the term “mechanical powers” as in the singular, and as meaning that a combination of devices can create power, whereas the fact is that a man who moves a big stone by means of pulleys actually expends more energy than if he raised the load by his own muscles unassisted. There is also an endless line of cranks, utterly ignorant of or acting in defiance of the most elementary natural laws, whose propositions are as destitute of practicability as dreams in sleep, in which, as we all know, nothing seems preposterous, and to follow Alice down the rabbit’s hole or to unscrew our own legs and eat them for lunch with condiments would be in the regular order of things.
SOME EXAMPLES OF
USELESS CONTRIVING.
Examples may be cited almost at random and without care for chronological order. A mild case was that of the Hunt patent, December, 1890. Mr. Hunt was aware “that a chain is often used to transmit power from the pedals to the wheel,” but he proposed “a frictional gearing connection.” His device was the same mode of chainless driving as on the [Humber chainless] of today—that is, by an intermediate wheel, but with a difference; his drive-wheels on the wheel axle and crank axle had toothed or corrugated edges, and his intermediate had a rubber band or tire on its rim. “It will be evident (he says) to the student of this bicycle that the corrugations on the peripheries of the drive-wheels K and M will take firm hold of the rubber band of the intermediate wheel N and thus prevent any possibility of slipping; in this way an easy, regular motion will be produced.” He also claims that this connection, while being firm enough, will also be elastic, with “yielding characteristics.” What really is evident is that if his device succeeded in driving the bicycle at all, the rubber band would retain its integrity at least fifteen minutes.
The same notion reappeared, a year ago, in the patent of Mr. Langbridge, an Englishman, who proposed chainless driving by two spur gear wheels carried on the seat-post tube and meshing with one on the pedal axle; “a pneumatic-tired friction wheel,” borne on stays in the triangle below the saddle, was to work on the tire of the rear wheel near its top, and this frictional contact would impart “the same, or practically the same, velocity” as that of the friction wheel itself. This was a conservative way of stating it, for “practically” is a rather flexible term.
THE “SWEEPER” IDEA.
In 1893 a Hartford man patented a bicycle fitted with a large cylinder, borne on either side below the wheel centre, for compressed air. Having previously filled these, either by a foot pump, which takes the place of the usual pedals, or by a curious rotary hand pump carried under the upper tube, the rider climbed to his place, opened a convenient throttle valve and sped along gayly. On a down grade he could use the momentum to repump air, getting brake effect by so doing, or he could use the air pressure to work a brake direct; as the gas tanks carried two little wheels on spiral springs underneath them, the rider could step off and leave the whole construction upright, leaning down on one of these stop-wheels.
Five years ago Mr. Gundelach of this city patented “a convenient gear mechanism by which the machine may be speeded high on a good road and may be changed to a low speed for hill climbing.” He placed a series of spur gears with pinions thereon in a frame, the last of them working on the rear wheel by sprocket and chain; when the rider came to a tough hill or a piece of bad road he had only to get off and carefully loosen the shaft so as to make a shift for power on the familiar method of the coned pulley in machine shops and he was all right; a flywheel on the shaft, for equalizing motion and for using the reservoir of power which some imagine is contained in flywheels, was not omitted. The public seem to have respected Mr. Gundelach’s patent rights.
In 1890 Mr. Toense of Cleveland patented a man-power combined with a pair of hydraulic cylinders. The rider began by climbing to a high seat, which sank under him and thus thrust back the piston of a horizontal pump, which gave the wheel a forward impulse by a rack and pinion. As the seat sank, it moved L-shaped levers, and thus lifted the piston in a vertical hydraulic cylinder; then the rider pushed down on the treadles, “at the same time raising himself in the seat,” and the piston just raised was pushed down, giving the wheel another impulse. “The driving wheel is thus acted upon alternately by the two driving cylinders, one acting when the seat descends and the other when the treadles are forced down.” This may seem a little obscure, but we have never had opportunity to see the device.
Mr. Hansel, of Zeitz, in Germany, only recently rediscovered and patented the idea of driving by the rider’s weight. There are two saddles, each on its post, arranged to slide up and down see-saw fashion, and geared, no matter precisely how, to a very big pulley belted to a very small one on the rear wheel, the gear ratio being evidently enormous. The rider gets up on the seat which is at the top, slides down with it, thus starting the wheel; then he is to hop off that to the other seat (which has meanwhile gone up) and so on. Expressive silence may be left to “muse the praise” of this invention.
Mr. Osborne of Brooklyn recently offered a carpet sweeper belted to the front wheel, which “will thrust aside small objects, such as nails, tacks, glass, sharp stones and the like, and leave a free path for the passage of the wheels of the bicycle.” This we respectfully refer to the Department of Street Cleaning.
Mr. Livingston of St. Louis takes the locomotive double-rod chainless driving of the 1896 Twentieth Century and the Dayton of this year, and improves on it in his own way. Instead of driving his pinion by a chain and so running it forward, he makes a spur gear of it, so that the motion is reversed from that of the pedals. As the two connecting-rods to the wheel are worked by this pinion, he is compelled to pedal backward, or else run the bicycle itself backward. Presumably, he intends the former, and is not disturbed by the prospect; but as this mode of pedalling would involve an excessively vertical action it is not probable that this particular chainless will ever be seen on the road.
Going back sixteen years, we find Mr. Amess, a Canadian, turning the first Columbia model into a lever-driving wheel, as shown in the cut. His patent claims only speeding up and vertical position, and does not allege safety from headers, very properly. For not only was his contrivance clumsy and subject to great friction on the sliding fulcrum, but added weight where weight would be dangerous; moreover, as a careful examination will show, the mode of driving had no tendency to hold down the back wheel.
A NOTION OF 1881.
Only a year ago, Mr. Harrison, an Englishman, patented a lever contrivance with oscillating fulcrum, in combination with planet gearing. Every disadvantage of lever-driving attached to this, and he also took up again our old acquaintance the much-heralded elliptical sprocket, which had its trial in this country some years before. Substantially this device was at the National Show, November, 1896.
At that Show was the Alert, a chainless using substantially the “chain disk or cam,” just patented by a Swede and said to have been sold (a few countries excepted) for $600,000. It is an L-lever pivoted at the crank bracket, the forward arm carrying the pedals, and the upper arm drawing by a cord upon a sort of snail cam or scroll on the rear axle; the driving is on each side necessarily, and there is no back pedalling. The leverage is changeable by shifting up or down the place of attachment of the cord to the upright lever arm.
A year before this, another Englishman patented a device for chainless driving by a lever with sliding fulcrum at the rear of the wheel; the lever was to be pivoted to a wheel with internal spur teeth meshing with a pinion on the axle, and the device was on both sides.
Five years ago Mr. Mahoney of this city patented a contrivance as [shown in the cut]. He overlooked such considerations as enormous width of tread and the fact that his driving wheel was not central in the frame. He premised that, “as a general thing, a bicycle rider has a reserve supply of strength which he cannot use to advantage in running the ordinary bicycle, from the fact that he cannot make his feet go fast enough to get a speed from the bicycle proportionate to his strength.” Having thus announced the discovery that twice two are five, Mr. Mahoney described his invention by which “a person may drive the machine very rapidly without making his feet move very fast.” If Mr. Mahoney had not been bent on inventing something, he might have perceived that speeding up ad libitum could be had by omitting his gears and using a front sprocket large enough. Later inventors have seen more clearly. For instance, only a few months ago, Mr. Papperdykes of New Haven “patented” a bicycle warranted to carry a rider a mile in seven and a half revolutions of the pedals, thus giving outlet to the reserve supply of strength mentioned by Mr. Mahoney. There is a train of gears, combined with sprockets and chain, making a gear ratio of 8,448 inches. This is as the story was told, since we have not seen the patent; but there was an error in expression The equivalent circumference of wheel is 8,448 inches and the diameter 2,680 inches, or 224 feet, as nearly as can be figured, making an equivalent wheel only forty feet smaller than the great Ferris wheel of the World’s Fair. Here is a little object lesson in gear ratio as heretofore explained; the actual wheel was to be 28 inches, while it was to run per each pedal revolution as far as a directly connected wheel of 224 feet would run. Such a construction might be a little heavy, but there would be a difficulty with it in practice; it would probably require ten or twelve horse-power to drive, while a bicycle rider has only one man-power. A like difficulty prevents our flying with the birds, for wings could be easily made and attached.
What could anybody expect to accomplish by carrying a long chain from the usual front sprocket to an extra sprocket below the saddle, from which a second chain ran down to the rear sprocket? Yet the writer encountered precisely this fixed-up contrivance in the street, and surveyed it with feelings which forbore utterance. Or consider the very recent patent of Mr. Scott of Philadelphia, as shown in the cut. He knew that an electric motor for driving the wheel would be delightful for a lazy rider; so he put one on behind, in what is evidently a good place for it. A motor must have current; so he put a small dynamo on the diagonal tube to supply it. Then, to make that go, he had only to put a large band wheel in place of the front sprocket and belt it on, and the deed was done. Granting that there would be no electrical difficulty in transmitting energy from one point to the other, this contrivance would simply waste a considerable power which might be carried directly to the wheel; but Mr. Scott does not know this, and he felt he had a call to invent something.
Yet Mr. Scott is put in the shade by Mr. Turner, out in Indian Territory, who has patented a contrivance for making a [head wind drive] instead of retard. He proposes to mount a small windmill with four vanes on a horizontal shaft in line with the top tube, and this, by a pair of bevel pinions, is to run a shaft leading straight to a crown wheel on the rear wheel, which is to be driven by another bevel pinion. The usual driving is prudently retained for emergencies, and the relative size of these pinions indicates that the windmill will need to whirl with great velocity. He somehow omits to claim the windmill and asks protection for a peculiar brake on its shaft. As the shaft is rigidly fixed in line, he must intend to run dead into the wind. The school text books used to tell of a man who put a large bellows in the stern of his pleasure boat, so that he could always have wind for his sail, and a contributor relates in the Youth’s Companion how he once saw an attempt made to work a wood scow by a windmill carried on it. Yet, if the winds that blow in the far West are not peculiar, and if Mr. Turner is not ignorant of what most children think they know, navigators have been wasting time for a thousand years in trying to sail by tacking instead of making the wind drive against itself.