Articles worth reading

By MIKE ELIASOHN

If you missed these magazine articles when they were new, they're worth reading next time you're at your public or school library and maybe, like me, making photocopies.

"The Beastie Bike," Popular Science, January 2014 – Three pages and four photos of Graeme Obree, "The Flying Scotsman" (a movie worth renting), and the lever-drive, prone position two-wheel streamliner he built and raced at the World Human Powered Speed Challenge at Battle Mountain, Nev. in 2013. Popular Science might be accused of celebrity journalism. Obree went 56.62 mph, the fastest speed ever for a prone-position bike, but Sebastiaan Bowler of the Netherlands setting a top speed record of 83.13 mph in the Velox 3 streamliner at the same event earned only one sentence in the article.

"The Improbabable Flying Machines of Sywell," Popular Mechanics, February 2014. Eight pages and five large photos of the second Icarus Cup competition for human powered airplanes at Sywell Aerodrome in the United Kingdom, conducted by the Royal Aeronautical Society Human Powered Aircraft Group. Which leads to the question, why doesn't someone organize a similar competition in the United States?

Muskegon Chronicle, March 1, 1987. Jerry Mattson used  this article
as a source of information for his Michigan History article about the Bowden Spacelander.

"The Bowden Spacelander," Michigan History, January-February 2014. Five pages and seven photos (sort of).  The Bowden isn't a recumbent, but its molded fiberglass frame made it unique and it was manufactured in Michigan – hence the article in Michigan History. The bike is now highly prized by collectors. The author of the article is Jerry Mattson, who as a free-lance writer  working for the Romeo Observer newspaper, covered the Michigan Human Powered Speed Challenge, conducted by the MHPVA, in 2009, .

"How to Build a Bicycle-Powered Generator," Popular Mechanics, April 2014. Three pages and six photos or illustrations. The author, Rachel Arndt, started her project because she got tired of riding her bicycle trainer in her apartment in bad weather and going nowhere. When she finished, she still went nowhere, but had a cycle-generator that could put enough charge into batteries to power small electronics during power outages.