Telescoping Forks on Bicycles

If you ride a mountain bike on off road trails, you soon learn that telescoping forks can absorb some of those hard knocks that your front tire finds.  So telescoping forks must be a product of the age of mountain bikes, right?  The earliest one I found was from 1922, but I found plenty of other schemes for absorbing shock dating from the 1890s.  The forks below are definitely telescoping forks, however.

Comments

[Arthur]

I just took telescoping forks to a new height a while back by turning them into an electrical generator. Strong magnets attach to the ends of the pistons and pass back and forth through an induction coil, in responce to rough terrain. The electricity generated in that circuit is stored within the 44 nickel hydrite batteries situated within the connecting square tubes of the bike frame between the steering column and the crank. This power is then used to propel the bike through a very thin homebuilt DC pancake motor mounted arround the rear hub, extending outward to the inner diameter of the wheel's rim. The motor kicks in only when crank torque exceeds a given but adjustable threshold, there as indicated by a load cell within the crank. This electric motor also serves as the primary componet to a regenerative braking system.