Patented wheel designs – get around this one!
Every now and then a design comes out of the shadows and it becomes a golden standard of near perfection. There’s hardly anything to improve on it. It can simply be. The modern day rear derailleur is an example of this. The first example came about in 1964 from Suntour. Nearly 46 years on, the cycling world is still using this design. There were refinements in materials and indexing but the invention itself hasn’t changed. Suntour hit a grand slam.
Another grand slam is the modern day HED H3. The H3 is a rather old wheel in today’s world of dimpled 404′s and torodial Stinger 9′s. It was developed back in the 80s by Specialized and duPont. duPont filed a patent for the wheel on October 12th, 1988. The patent was issued on April 24th, 1990 as US4,919,490.
From concept:
Here is the HED H3 on paper.
To reality:
And here it is in reality.
The H3 was a gold standard of aerodynamic performance for a long time and the design hasn’t changed in 20 years. Sure, the carbon is lighter and the hubs are smoother but the shape of the wheel today is the same as it was back then. It’s still considered to be very aerodynamic. You can buy a 10 year old used H3 for way less than the cost of a new one today and you will get the same aero performance.
Everyone wanted to copy it but they couldn’t because the design was patented. Patents are really interesting documents. If you can get past all the legal mumbo jumbo then you can learn a lot about a product, an industry, or an invention. I like to think of them as mini instruction booklets on how to build something. The patent protects the inventor from being copied for a period of about 17 years, assuming the inventor/assignee pays the patent renewal fees. After 17 years, technology and thought should have progressed enough to make the patented material obsolete. It becomes “prior art” and sort of enters the public domain. It is impossible to renew the patent beyond that. At that point, the invention can be copied.
Planet-X has picked up on this well known fact and they made their own version of the H3. They don’t hide the fact that they made a replica. In fact, they advertise it!
The H3 isn’t the only patented wheel. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of patents for bicycle wheels. Does this image look familiar?
It's not the most popular wheel on the race circuit but it is in production.
It should. This wheel is Nimble’s Crosswind trispoke wheel.
As you can see from the patent, the wheel is protected by patent US6,086,161. The novelity is the tapered spokes that start wide by the rim and get narrow by the hub. Is there any data that shows this wheel is aero?
Not all inventions are good inventions, at least in their time. Sometimes an idea is great but the implementation is poor. Check out this graphic from US5,104,199.
Famous or infamous?
Everyone ought to recognize this as the Spinergy Rev-X design, or some close variation thereof.
You have to admit that if you didn't know about this wheel you'd think it's prety cool.
It was a great concept and the wheel was ridden by Francois Simon in the 1999 Tour de France. Everyone wanted one until they all started to fail.
Is that blood on his fingers? It could be from crashing after a Rev-X failed him!
Ooops! By the way, you can check out more gory carbon breaks at the Busted Carbon blog.
Take note that the patent was filed in 1990 and issued in 1992. The wheel came about around soon after but production officially ceased in 1999. This technology, at least conceptually, is at least 20 years old. What could be done differently today with that same design? Alas, I think we will never know since the design now has a huge prejudice around it.
I’ll put up one more example and then I’ll bring this to a close. Here’s a design that’s been around for while.
This one may be a little less familiar.
This is the very familiar shape of the old Zipp 3000 as seen in US5,090,776.
From Velonew's historical review of ZIPP. Here is their 3000 wheel.
You can find a similar design in the Corima trispoke.
The design is still around.
The ZIPP 3000 was ZIPP’s attempt at copying the H3. After seeing they could not overcome the patent or the loss of power from the spoke passage by the fork blade, they took a new route. We all know where that led them.
Despite patents protecting the inventor from cheap copycats and infringement, it really isn’t hard to get around a patent. In the case of the wheels, you can see how many variations there are of the spoked aero wheel. All you need to do is change one thing and suddenly you have a new invention. The Corima wheels are obviously not identical to the Zipp 3000. There is enough of a difference between those two and the Crosswind and the H3 so that all four are unique inventions. Yes, they are similar and I’m sure they were inspiration to each other but they are different. The question is, which one is really novel? Is one better than the other? Only HED publishes some kind of data and ZIPP has proved their performance in the races. Who really knows?
Sometimes the patents you find aren’t even the actual invention you may be researching. Patents are bought and sold all the time. Some patents are “improvements” on older designs and the figures will look very similar. Even the patents I reference here in some cases are not the actual patents of the wheels shown. For example, the ZIPP 3000 patent is was not a ZIPP patent. It was issued to someone in the Netherlands. You need to read through the claims to see what the novelty is.
I invite you to do some patent searches and see what you can find. Search with keywords that you think make sense but be careful. Some inventors purposely use arcane titles and keywords so that their patent is hidden. Then they can spring on the unsuspecting. Would you have known to search for “Vehicle Wheel” if you were looking up the H3 patent? It’s a complicated world and I do not profess any expertise here. All I have is enthusiasm.
