I don't know if it's different from country to country, but
I think patent applications usually (or used to) require a
working model of the idea (assuming it's for something you
can build a model of).
Though one person might get the basic idea in their head,
another person might be the one to actually build it, then
do all the tweaks and rethinks necessary to get it to
finally work. Who deserves the credit then?
An example of this is the Unicycling Society of America.
Charlotte Fox Rogers (one of the charter members)
indicated to Bill Jenack in a letter in the late 60s that
this would be a good idea. Bill started the organization
in 1973. He gets the credit. Though somebody else may have
thought of the idea years before, she didn't do the work
to make it happen. Plus Bill may have thought of it 10
years before that.
Same applies to selling unicycles online. I thought that
would be the best way to get quality products to people with
actual useful information about unicycling. But I didn't do
it. When John Drummond contacted me in early 1999 about
doing it, I jumped all over the idea and offered to help.
But he did all the work, and deserves all the credit.
The parallelogram idea looks interesting, but I'm not sure
how those parallelograms are supposed to work. Do they
eliminate the problem of windup?
So far, suspending the axle within the wheel looks like a
fascinating engineering challenge, but I don't see us
getting to a solution that doesn't weigh as much as several
Coker wheels. To combine the shock-absorbing abilities with
the necessary lateral and drive-direction stiffness, it
seems like lots of materials will be required.
So, at risk of taking this already-long post in a different
direction, how about we use some kind of conventional
suspension on the wheel, and run the pedals off a drivetrain
that can compensate? In other words, keep the pedals on
either side of the wheel, but have the wheel suspended. This
would still probably be quite a bit heavier than a normal
wheel, but might be easier to figure out mentally without
building working models!
I thought of it first...
--
johnfoss - Walkin' on the edge
John Foss, the Uni-Cyclone
"jfoss" at "unicycling.com"
www.unicycling.com
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard." -- John F. Kennedy,
1961
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