New York Times September 11, 2003
Election Race? First, Check Out This Bike
By NOAH SHACHTMAN
GEN. WESLEY K. CLARK is a hot topic in the chat rooms and clubhouses of Democratic politics, where pundits and activists are sizing up his possible presidential candidacy. More than $1 million and 13,000 volunteers have been pledged as part of an online movement to draft General Clark, the former NATO supreme commander and CNN military analyst, to enter the 2004 race.
But right now, General Clark wants to talk about bicycles.
The retired general has been devoting much of his time to running a company making a new kind of electric motor that does not require gears or a transmission, but uses computer algorithms to maximize torque and efficiency.
The company, WaveCrest Laboratories of Dulles, Va., hopes to put these motors into hybrid gas-electric cars or even hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars one day. But for now, WaveCrest is focused on bikes.
By adding one of its "adaptive motors" to a conventional bicycle frame, WaveCrest claims that its two-wheeler can go Lance Armstrong speed - 30 miles an hour - with hardly any pedaling at all.
With General Clark in command, WaveCrest is looking to the military market first.
"The military always needs transportation for its men, but there are lots of places like tight alleys in urban areas where you don't want to be in a Humvee, which is big and noisy," said General Clark, the company's chairman. The electric bike is light and simple, he said. "You turn the handle, and it just scoots. There's no sound. Just acceleration and speed. Just a shoosh on the pavement."
Infantrymen could ride the souped-up bikes to battle rather than marching, he said. Downed pilots could zip away on an electrified 21-speed bike instead of waiting to be captured.
Bicycles have been used in the military for more than a hundred years. Six percent of British troops in the Boer War in southern Africa at the turn of the 20th century were on bicycles. Bicycles were common during World War I.
In World War II, the Japanese were able to take over the Malaysian Peninsula in 70 days largely because of the speed of its cycle-mounted troops, according to Jim Fitzpatrick, author of "The Bicycle in Wartime'' (Bassey's, 1998).
In the 1960's General Clark witnessed the use of bicycles by the Vietcong to carry supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Vietnam War. The Special Forces Command is trying out a half-dozen prototypes of General Clark's folding-frame bikes, which are powered by two 36-volt nickel-metal-hydride batteries and have a range of about 30 miles. Several other Army units and law enforcement agencies, including the police department in General Clark's hometown, Little Rock, Ark., are considering using them as well.
But some military analysts doubt that the electric bicycles will fit into American war planning.
"Bicycles have worked because they're simple, light, and could be maltreated," Mr. Fitzpatrick saidt. At 64 pounds, the WaveCrest bikes are far heavier than ordinary models, he said, "so I'm somewhat dubious that they'll work."
Tim Brown, a senior fellow at the public-policy group GlobalSecurity.org, is not convinced, either. "I'm skeptical that someone like Scott O'Grady would have this in his ejection seat," said Mr. Brown, referring to an American pilot who was shot down over Bosnia in 1995.
WaveCrest is one of many companies developing advanced electric motors. What makes its motor different is how it is controlled, said Mike Fritz, a WaveCrest engineering executive. Most motors of this kind fire a predetermined sequence of electrical pulses that activate a series of electromagnets. These electromagnets repel and attract a set of standard, or permanent, magnets, making the motor spin.
WaveCrest puts six optical sensors in its motor, which inform a customized central processor thousands of times per second how fast the motor is rotating and how much torque it is generating. The chip then uses algorithms to determine precisely what kind of electrical pulses are needed to make the motor run most efficiently at that speed and at that torque.
© Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
