About Us

by Grant Ryan, inventor

The basic idea for the mini-farthing was inspired by some publicity I saw about a revolutionary transport device that was later revealed to be the Segway (www.segway.com). I was intrigued by the idea that something could dramatically change our transport system. I had long scratched my head about why we transported 1-2 tonnes of metal and other materials with us whenever we drove to work or to the local shops.  I started thinking what this new innovation could be and have to admit I was a bit disappointed when it was revealed. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Segway is a fantastic engineering feat and is very cool to ride, but it seems to me a bit overly complicated to be mass-market.

Our team has a successful track record of inventing, with some of our products used hundreds of millions of times per year. We were bold enough to think that we could turn our minds to this problem.  More about our approach is detailed on the home page.

While there are a lot of new bicycle designs put out every year (click here for examples) most of the designers do not have the luxury of building, testing and tweaking to see if they actually work. We are strong believers in rapid prototyping and designed our early models so that we could rapidly test lots of configurations. We were not sure that there was another configuration that was as stable and easy to ride as the modern bicycle but after years of applying basic principles of engineering, trial and error we have discovered a new and dramatically smaller one.

Why others believe that compact and efficient transport devices are important

The reason this part of the transport market is so important is summarised nicely by some other inventors who have tackled this problem.

Famous British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair has had a number of attempts at a compact transport device. "I first started looking into bike design around 18 years ago," Sir Clive said. "I started on the principle that if a bike could fold dramatically, it could fit a lot of needs that are not yet met by current bikes on the market. The bicycle in the form of today has existed for just about 120 years.  For all that time you have been able to buy standard bikes weighing around 15 to 20kg and especially light-weight bikes, often at a price, weighing around 10kg. And if you look at today's lightweight bikes, they still weigh the same. If the bike is carrying you that doesn't matter, but if you're the one carrying the bike then that changes completely."

Dean Kamen identified a very real and pressing need for some sort of personal transport device.  Despite inventing the Segway, he was humble enough to say it won’t necessarily be the single solution.

“You might say to me, ‘It won't be Segway, someone will come out with a better technology’. And I'd say to you, you know, I'm almost rooting for the entrepreneurs’. Maybe they will. So I'm not prepared to tell you in 10 years Segways will be the predominant alternative to walking. But if it's too far to walk or you need to go three or four times faster than walking, which is as fast as you can go in a downtown, I can't say it will be a Segway. But one thing I bet you right now, anything you wanna bet, there is no chance that we will still have 10 or 15 years from now the majority of our society, in developed parts of the world, in big cities, consuming fuel, creeping along, sucking up each other's exhaust at 6 miles an hour, when 3 billion people live in cities. That is not going to be the way we live.”