Indeed, the idea of oversized aluminum tubes originated in an MIT IAP (January Break) class offered by one of the professors of mechanical engineering who was trying to get the idea across that you could increase the strength of aluminum tubes by making them oversized.
Gary Klein was a student in this one-time class. He was THE ONLY student who took it to heart and decided to try to found a business based upon the idea.
I saw one of these frames in 1981 in the mechE department. It was being used as a paperweight. I immediately asked if it was a Klein frame and I was told "no" and I was told the whole story. There were about 20 frmaes made - no forks - in about 1974. I've read the biography of Klein and it strives to obscures the history of the fat-tubed aluminum bike. Klein was the guy who commercialized it - not the inventor.
In our capitalist system, all spoils go to the one who commercializes something. The originator 9 times out of 10 gets nothing. I have watched friends get rich on software that I wrote.
And, many professor jobs don't pay enough to live in the cities where the jobs exist, and there's an unspoken rule that to make ends meet many professors HAVE TO run a company based on ideas funded by research grants from the government. This is how modern universities get a second faculty subsidy from the government, which allows them to hire the thousands of administrative paper-pushers needed for the heavy lifting of administering a university *snicker* ...
- Don