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.

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