This article appeared in the Proceedings of the 27th International Cycling History Conference, North Haven, Connecticut, USA, 2016
In 1974, Professor Shawn Buckley ran an M.I.T. Independent Activities Period course where participants, including Marc Rosenbaum and Harriet Fell, got to build their own bicycle frames. Marc Rosenbaum, then a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set out to create a bicycle that would give a rider an acceleration advantage by being ultra light without sacrificing stiffness. In this paper, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in the IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
In 1974, Marc Rosenbaum was a senior at M.I.T. majoring in mechanical engineering. The goal of his undergraduate thesis (Rosenbaum 1974) project was to create and describe a bicycle that would give a rider an acceleration advantage by being ultra light without sacrificing stiffness. Marc stressed stiffness over strength, pointing out that “frames never break in normal racing conditions, which indicates that strength is not a problem.” Clearly things have changed since carbon fiber bicycles have entered the racing scene though the problem is not their resistance to normal loads encountered during rides but to impact damage.
In 1974, normal track bikes weighed 18 or 19 pounds. There are lighter bikes today; the I.C.U. minimum weight limit is 6.8 kg, which is about 15 pounds. There were also some lighter bikes in 1974. A bicycle made for Eddy Merckx in 1971, which he rode to set the one-hour record (30.715 mi), weighed only 13.25 pounds. It had a very light steel frame, custom built titanium handlebars, stem, and seatpost, partially plastic pedals, 24-spoke wheels, and tires expected to last at most 4 hours on a smooth board track. The components were extensively drilled out. This bicycle was not designed for strength or to last (Rosenbaum 1974).