Andrew Ritchie,
inventor of the Brompton folding bicycle, once said that the perfect portable
bike would be “like a magic carpet…You could fold it up and put it into your
pocket or handbag”. Then he paused: “But you’ll always be limited by the size
of the wheels. And so far no one has invented a folding wheel.”
It was a rare —
indeed unique — occasion when I was able to put Ritchie right. A 19th-century
inventor, William Henry James Grout, did in fact design a folding wheel. His
bike, predictably named the Grout Portable, had a frame that split into two and
a larger wheel that could be separated into four pieces. All the bits fitted
into Grout’s Wonderful Bag, a leather case.
Grout’s aim: to
solve the problems of carrying a bike on a train. Now doesn’t that sound
familiar? Grout intended to find a way of making a bike small enough for train
travel: his bike was a huge beast. And importantly, the design of early
bicycles gave him an advantage: in Grout’s day, tyres were solid, which made
the business of splitting a wheel into four separate parts relatively simple.
You couldn’t do the same with a wheel fitted with a one-piece inflated (充气的)
tyre.
So, in a
21st-century context, is the idea of the folding wheel dead? It is not. A
British design engineer, Duncan Fitzsimons, has developed a wheel that can be
squashed into something like a slender ellipse (椭圆). Throughout, the tyre
remains inflated.
Will the young
Fitzsimons’s folding wheel make it into production? I haven’t the foggiest
idea. But his inventiveness shows two things. First, people have been saying
for more than a century that bike design has reached its limit, except for
gradual advances. It’s as silly a concept now as it was 100 years ago: there’s
plenty still to go for. Second, it is in the field of folding bikes that we are
seeing the most interesting inventions. You can buy a folding bike for less
than £1,000 that can be knocked down so small that it can be carried on a plane
— minus wheels, of course — as hand baggage.
Folding wheels
would make all manner of things possible. Have we yet got the magic carpet of
Andrew Ritchie’s imagination? No. But it’s progress.
1.We can infer
from Paragraph 1 that the Brompton folding bike .
A. was portable
B. had a folding
wheel
C. could be put
in a pocket
D. looked like a
magic carpet
2.We can learn
from the text that the wheels of the Grout Portable .
A. were
difficult to separate
B. could be
split into 6 pieces
C. were fitted
with solid tyres
D.
were hard to carry on a train
3.We can learn
from the text that Fitzsimons’s invention .
A. kept the tyre
as a whole piece
B. was made into
production soon
C. left little
room for improvement
D.
changed our views on bag design
4.Which of the
following would be the best title for the text?
A. Three folding
bike inventors
B. The making of
a folding bike
C. Progress in
folding bike design
D.
Ways of separating a bike wheel