The Hill Opinion: Don’t hit the brakes on small inventors, by Jeffrey Birchak
This post originally in The Hill on January 12, 2016.
Donald C. Miller wanted to make the world’s fastest bike. A cycling enthusiast, he embarked on this quest in 1998 and quickly realized the transmission was the problem he needed to fix. The traditional gears and chains that transferred pedaling power into forward momentum were very inefficient. So he set out to make something better.
Less than two decades later, the continuously variable transmission (CVT) he developed – and that our company, Fallbrook Technologies, continues to improve, manufacture, and license – has drawn praise from customers and biking enthusiasts across the world. It’s unclear whether he had created the fastest bike. But Don’s technology has succeeded in making bicycles, lightweight electric vehicles and even electric cars and wind turbines better and more efficient.