CHAPTER XV
FREAKS AND USELESS DEVICES.
Some one has defined a rebellion as a revolution which has not succeeded. Similarly, the freakishness or non-freakishness of an idea in cycle construction may be deemed to turn on its fate in the struggle for survival; yet there may be some exceptions to the rule of survival of the fittest, and, on the other hand, there are myriads of notions that are visionary as to possible practical results or even go counter to the most elementary of natural laws. A cycle show always brings out a few of the milder sort. For example, the Upright, devised by a non-rider who had observed with pain the “monkey-on-a-stick” position and perceived that this would be impossible if the hands must be at the sides; so this one-idea reformer devised a frame which placed the handle bar behind the rider, and the uprightness was complete. A few bicycles on this plan were made and went into use. The least that can be said is that the idea was effectually embodied; the most is that if one idea was enough in a bicycle this would have been triumphant and permanent. The last show had a freak or two in tires, a spur-gear freak in chainless driving (since remade into a form capable of operating), a device for driving the front wheel by a see-saw handlebar working straps and ratchets simultaneously with regular driving on the rear wheel—and some others we do not now recall. In the lack of a show, freaks do not come to the front as prominently this year, and yet they are still to be numbered by the thousand. They are to be found in witless, non-workable patents, besides many more by cranks who cannot raise the patent fees and are thus cruelly barred out of the Eden rightfully theirs if fate had been less unkind. Whether as much money has not been sunk in such patents and in barren experiment in the aggregate as has been made out of the bicycle is doubtful; at least, it is within bounds to say that the worthless patents in the cycle line taken out in the United States alone during the last twenty years could not be adequately described and illustrated in a month, even if this journal were entirely given up to the task. Yet we can sketch a few as samples; also indicating the lines along which barren contriving constantly runs.
DRIVING BY THE “RIDER’S WEIGHT.”
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.