I think there have been a lot of accounts about Gary Klein "hijacking" a university student design project, perhaps one he participated in as a student. Don't know the truth of this. Certainly, he was one of the first to market such a design, and often gets credit for it, right or wrong.
Not that this is unusual. I worked for three yeras for a software company founded by some MIT professors based on selling an engineering software program they had developed with public funds under a DOE grant. Struck me as misappropriation of public property, but they got away with it. And of course Bill Gates had nothing to do with developing MS-DOS. But he bought it fair and square.
Regards,
Jerry Moos Big Spring, TX
HM & SS Sachs <sachshm@cox.net> wrote: thanks, Jerry. Let me focus on just one point, which is in the CR time range even if further afield than the Alan/Vitus. You wrote:
"As to tube size, ALAN's conventional OD was partly compensated by thicker tube walls, thus the 25.0 seatpost. Probably not as good a technical design as Gary Klein came up with using oversized tubes, but Vitus also used conventional OD tubes, and it seem to work OK for a rider as powerful as Sean Kelly."
I was not there, and I don't know the outcome of the Cannondale - Klein patent infringement lawsuit, but it's not clear to me that Gary Klein was the source of the idea of welding oversized aluminum tubes. One day about 1980, a student at Princeton brought me an aluminum chainstay of constant diameter, to see if I could help out. The problem was that he had welded the wrong stay on the wrong side... It seems that he had gotten the kit for one of the student shop projects at MIT, welding up an oversized aluminum frame. It is the only one I saw, but the conventional wisdom in my circles was that there were lots of these on the streets of Cambridge. I think Counselor Joe B-Z might call these "prior art," but I'm not sure how the courts saw it....
thanks again,
harvey