The G4 is a fundamentally new and different type of bicycle. The ability to add upper body power by pulling the handlebars into the pedal stroke changes everything. The effect is BETTER than standing to pedal an upright. Input is immediate and the responsiveness is very satisfying. You stay comfortably and aerodynamically seated. You know as soon as you ride a G4 that the improvement is historic...
But short of riding a G4, how can I help people understand this historic improvement?
Just so happened that the 31st meeting of the "International Cycle History Conference" was to be held in July of this year at the downtown War Memorial Building in Indianapolis, Indiana. Just like you might expect, this is a meeting of an international group of bicycle historians. I submitted an abstract, they accepted my paper, and gave me an hour on the agenda to make the following presentation.
Peggy and I went to Indianapolis for vacation this year. We actually rode our G4 Sports to the conference. They let us display them with the historic bikes. The bikes got a lot of attention.
Spoiler alert - going in, the comment was, "Those are some bold assertions." After the presentation, and demonstrating the bikes, the comment was, "You made some bold assertions, but you backed them up".
Take a look at the charts. Judge for yourself.
This is the companion paper to the ICHC presentation above, followed by a brief Author Introduction.
The following paper is on bicycle historian Tony Hadland's blog. The title is "Ron Thompson’s G4 Recumbent Bicycle". See the link below for that site and Tony's introductory comments.
I wrote this in the fall of 2016 to record, for my own use, the Generation Four Bicycle as I then knew it. I only made this paper public in 2021 as the G4 Bike patent was being approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
https://hadland.wordpress.com/2021/05/05/ron-thompsons-g4-recumbent-bicycle/
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