http://www.ft.com/cm...?nclick_check=1
Alex Moulton’s daily life may lack the love and care of immediate family, but otherwise it is as packed with interest and activity as any 88-year-old’s in Britain. Moulton, a tall, trim man with the ice-green eyes of a hawk and the nose of a Roman emperor, rises each morning in the third-floor bedroom of his 20-room mansion – a 17th-century house in Bradford-on-Avon that looks like a mini-Longleat and has been described by Country Life as one of the most exquisite in Britain. He enters his adjoining workroom, where he pores over papers, manuals and books piled on long tables. For the next few hours, or “as long as I feel inspired and interested”, he works on the designs for his latest engineering creation, a machine “more radical than anything I have ever done”.
In the middle of the morning, with steady steps, Moulton descends the broad oak-panelled staircase – hung with scores of pictures and photographs of his life and achievements – and starts to take an interest in his business affairs. He sits down in another big room filled with old furniture and jammed with books and papers (his bachelor’s palace contains several rooms in this identical pattern on all its floors) and gets to work with his secretary Gillian, who has been with him for, she says, “more years than I care to remember”. There will be correspondence to answer and telephone messages from all over the world, invitations to speak at learned gatherings of engineers, offers of consultancies with major companies. Moulton is also entering the final stages of producing an autobiography, due out by Christmas. This means proofs to correct, artwork to approve. Meanwhile, reverential deputations, especially from Japan, regularly arrive at the house to pay homage and seek counsel. They often include the most senior management of global manufacturing corporations, including chief executives and the directors of engineering and production.
What has drawn such high-flying visitors? And what is this radical new invention Moulton is working on? The answer to the first, is Moulton’s engineering genius. To the second, a bicycle. In converted stables near the house, four or five men in blue factory coats are assembling the bikes that Moulton has been designing and refining for 50 years. All of these craftsmen have been working for Moulton for decades. They make about seven bicycles a week, many of which are exported to Japan. The cheapest Moulton bike costs £2,200. The top price is £7,200. Potential customers must take their place at the back of an 18-month waiting-list – longer than it would take to get certain models of Porsche – because among cycling enthusiasts, Moulton’s small-wheeled spaceframe bicycles are the ne plus ultra of two-wheelers. For designers and engineers, the Moulton bicycle is also an object of wonder. Sir Norman Foster, citing its “sparse beauty”, nominated a Moulton as “the greatest work of 20th-century British design”. The Moulton also beat the iPod into second place as “an icon of our time” in a recent poll of industrial designers.
The old man does little more than potter with the business these days, leaving its management largely in the hands of his middle-aged great-nephew Shaun. They recently concluded an amalgamation deal (a partnership rather than a full merger) with Pashley – a maker of similar bicycles based in Stratford-upon-Avon – which relieves the tiny Moulton firm from much of the burden of marketing and distribution, thereby allowing its founder to concentrate on the work of design and innovation.
When Moulton is ready to eat, his cook lays out his lunch in the great, shabby dining room. Around the 17ft-high walls runs a tableau of contemporary paintings including scenes from the history of the house and portraits of leading figures from his own life. After lunch, he takes a nap in an armchair in his study. Then he is ready for his daily constitutional, riding a bicycle of his own design.
He cycles round the many acres of manicured gardens that surround the house. Then the track leads out, beside the river Avon, into farmland, ancient woods and the shoots which his family has owned and cultivated for more than 150 years but which he has now abandoned (“you become more reluctant to inflict pain as you get old”). If the weather is good, he might stop at his lake to take out his kayak and paddle for an hour or two, remembering the steam boats he himself designed, built and sailed on these waters.
In the evening, friends might visit. If he is alone, he reads or watches DVDs and videos. The racks beside his television are packed with tapes about cars, speedboats and warplanes – many of which he had a hand in devising. “I keep my friends close and keep myself busy because I don’t want to get senile,” he says. “I don’t want to die like Issigonis, who had a dreadful end, alone and without friends. All his own fault, really, because he had cut himself off.”
. . .
Alec Issigonis designed the Morris Minor, the Mini, the BMC 1100, the 1800 and the Austin Maxi. The Morris aside, Moulton designed the suspension systems for all those cars – suspension systems as revolutionary as the cars themselves. More than 12 million cars were produced with Moulton suspensions. Few creative engineers of the 20th century have affected the lives of more Britons – except, perhaps, Alec Issigonis.
The partnership between these two proud and self-confident men was always brittle. They didn’t speak to each other for more than a decade before Issigonis died – but you won’t hear a mean word about Issigonis from Moulton. “In no way would I want anything said against Issigonis,” he says. “I owe him a tremendous amount. Everything I learnt about innovative design came from him.” However, at various times during two half-days of conversation, Moulton described Issigonis as “supercilious”, “arrogant”, “dismissive”, “self-righteous” and “self-centred”. He also made it clear that after he (Moulton) agreed to do some work for the British Motor Corporation (BMC), Issigonis cut him off as a friend and colleague. But, at all times, Moulton’s judgments on his former mentor emerged as the respectful views of one who considered himself uniquely favoured to have worked beside a genuine genius.
He even indirectly credits Issigonis with the intellectual impetus that led to the creation of the Moulton bicycle – the first completely new approach to the design of a bike in the 20th century and arguably Moulton’s most enduring invention. “I never had any intention of making a bicycle,” he says. “But I was so swept up in the mood of fundamentalism of the postwar period – a mood which Issigonis personified – that it emerged naturally from the unorthodox thinking of that time.”
During the fuel shortages of the Suez crisis and its aftermath, Moulton started riding a “lovely, handmade Hetchins bicycle” of conventional design. “My interest in cycling was reawakened,” he recalls, “and I started thinking of ways to improve upon that machine.” His first revolutionary discovery, following a spell of intensive research with Dunlop, was that small wheels with high-pressure tyres allowed a bicycle to go faster with less effort than the 26in-28in wheels on a conventional bicycle. From this insight came many other key Moulton features – their rubber suspension systems, their immensely strong construction and their space-saving adaptability. Often mistaken for the urban bicycles subsequently made by Brompton and others, Moultons have never been folding or collapsible. Some models do, however, come apart for stowing in the boot of a car or other small spaces.
Moulton has always been obsessed with structural rigidity and performance – with the result that his bicycles have set a clutch of performance records, including a world speed record and a record time for a bicycle ride from Cardiff to London. Moulton has never yet designed a bicycle made from carbon fibre – immensely strong but expensive, and impossible to repair when damaged – but he dropped a few hints in our interviews that carbon composite materials might be included in the new, radical bicycle he is presently designing. “Watch this space,” he twinkled.
. . .
Moulton’s is an unlikely background for a radical. In many ways, he is a scion of old England rather than a flower of the swinging Sixties. In the middle of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution was running at full steam, Stephen Moulton, Alex’s great grandfather, set up a rubber factory beside the river Avon in the grounds of the house where Moulton still lives. Licensed by Charles Goodyear himself, this factory – which employed as many as 1,000 people during the second world war – was one of the most important developments in the British rubber industry. The works was still in full production when the eight-year-old Moulton and his parents moved into the house in 1928. After school at Marlborough, Moulton underwent a pupillage at Central Works in Shrewsbury and then studied mechanical sciences at Cambridge for a year before war broke out in 1939. “I wanted to fly with the RAF, as so many of my generation did,” he remembered – but instead he was sent to work at Bristol Engines, where he contributed to the development of the mighty 18-cylinder Centaurus engine. It was intended for bombers but barely entered service before the war ended. Working under wartime conditions gave Moulton misleading expectations for later life. “Everything we did in that period had to be perfect,” he explains. “My experiences in commercial life have not always equalled that standard.”
At Bristol Engines, he worked under Roy Fedden, the company’s chief engineer with whom he helped to develop a rear-engined car (designed by the renowned motoring journalist Gordon Wilkins) – the Fedden. It was, he says, “a chastening experience. We were tormented by the Volkswagen, and were inspired to have a go at emulating it. Soon, it became apparent that the Fedden was a disaster. It demonstrated itself to be crazily wrong when it had a most appalling accident [during early testing]. From that day onwards, I felt rather reluctant to design cars.”
Instead, he returned, after the war and without very great enthusiasm, to the family firm. “In a way, it wouldn’t have mattered who was running the company as long as it was somebody with a family connection,” he says. There was a deep connection between the factory, the family and the town of Bradford-on-Avon. The company sponsored the town’s flower shows, its band, its branch of the Territorial Army and the playing fields. “There was a profound sense of continuity in that relationship,” says Moulton. “I utterly condemn the present trend for companies to be acquired by people who have no interest in running them, no interest in them at all except to strip them of their assets and to inflate their value for sale.”
Even so, he soon sensed that the company was unsound and suggested to the board a merger with Avon. Instead of full-scale industrial production, he instigated the creation of an independent research department, developing rubber as a spring material not just for the railways but also for cars. This was the endeavour that would lead him, through mutual friends, to Alec Issigonis and to engineering immortality.
Issigonis, chief designer of BMC, was under instructions from the hard-driving, foul-mouthed chairman, Sir Leonard Lord, to “get those *melonsing* bubble cars off the road”. The Suez crisis and the ensuing petrol shortages had created a ravenous demand for small, fuel-economic cars. Lord wanted to supply that demand with a car that cost little more than a year’s average income (about £500-£600 at the time). In 1959, Issigonis delivered the goods with a creation that many experts regard as the car of the century.
The most revolutionary aspect of the Mini was, of course, its transverse engine, but Moulton’s suspension system of rubber cones (rather than steel springs) was unprecedented in a mass-produced car, and it gave the Mini extraordinary grip and road-holding.
But the Alec/Alex partnership was uneasy from the start. Issigonis was, says Moulton, “extremely scathing about rubber suspension at first”, partly because some of his own experiments with the material had failed and partly because “he hadn’t thought of my approach himself”. The Mini’s suspension was a crude compromise – which Lord demanded for reasons of economy and speed of production – compared with the advanced hydroelastic system that Moulton devised for Issigonis’s 1962 1100. That four-wheel independent system used fluid under pressure to connect the front suspension with the rear, providing a smoothness of ride which had never been known in a family car. The 1100 and its successor, the 1300, were Britain’s best-selling family cars throughout the 1960s, consistently beating their leading rival, the Ford Cortina.
. . .
After Issigonis was, in Moulton’s words, “written out of the picture” by British Leyland and cut off all connection with his former partner, Moulton went on to develop suspension systems for the Austin Allegro, the Princess, the Metro and the MGF sports car. Some of these cars, it should be said, were infamous (the Allegro was recently voted the worst British car ever made), and their suspension systems were not exempt from the unreliability and disgraceful build quality that beset British cars in the final quarter of the 20th century.
Moulton acknowledges the criticism. He adds: “Of course, all cars were badly made 50 years ago. The difference was that Britain was making cars badly long after other countries had learnt to make them well.”
When I asked him who he blamed for the ruin of the British car industry, there was a long silence. “I would say that...”, he began – and then broke off for another protracted silence. He began again: “One mustn’t be too offensive...” and there was another huge silence that went on for perhaps 15 seconds, broken only by the ticking of a clock and by footfalls in another room.
Finally, he said: “I blame it on this new culture of seeing personal gain, of maximising personal gain, as the primary objective rather than concentrating on the continuity of the industry. I think part of the problem is that too many senior executives these days come from an accountancy rather than from an engineering background and they assess value solely in book-keeping terms.”
“So it’s a matter of personal greed?”
“Answer: yes.”
The returns he has seen from his revolutionary inventions are, evidently, a sore point – though one expressed with characteristic elegance. “The weakness of my career,” he says, “has really been from a commercial point of view. I have not made very large sums of money and I am not proud of that deficiency. The spur of profit was simply incidental to much of my work, with the result that I didn’t earn as much from it as perhaps I should have done. The expenses which BMC contributed towards our research work were chickenfeed, so the profit lay simply in the royalties they paid – and those were tiny.”
Even the bicycles Moulton began to produce in 1959, from a new factory based in the grounds of his house and employing several hundred people, have not provided him with a great fortune. More than 150,000 of those bikes were built, but in the mid-1960s Raleigh went to war with Moulton when it started producing its own small-wheel bicycle, putting pressure on suppliers and retailers and driving up Moulton’s costs. In the late 1960s, the company was forced into what Moulton calls “a distress sale” to its larger rival.
Thereafter, Moulton has continued to turn out handmade bicycles in numbers that can be calculated on fingers and toes. They have provided him and his few loyal employees with a living, but haven’t brought him riches. “Such surpluses as I have accumulated have been spent on this house and I do rejoice to think that I shall leave it in good condition to the charitable foundation I have established to provide educational courses in engineering here,” he says. He is especially proud of the carbon-neutral Swiss boiler he installed for the central heating which runs on off-cuts from a nearby furniture factory.
Even as he approaches 90, Moulton remains inquisitive about engineering developments and, as a committed enthusiast for James Lovelock’s Gaia theories, is a passionate advocate of Toyota’s Prius hybrid petrol-electric car. Yet it typifies his ceaseless intellectual openness that, when I mentioned to him the existence of a number of writers who depart from the consensus on global warming, he immediately asked me to send him a reading list.
Only one question seemed to unsettle him. When I asked if he had ever had a family of his own, he turned away from me and muttered a sentence under his breath in which the only audible word was “embarrassing”.
It would have been possible, of course, to pursue this line of inquiry with one of his friends or with his great-nephew. But the noble Alex Moulton so obviously did not want to discuss this issue that it would have felt like lèse majesté to ask.
................................................................................
..........
Why small is beautiful when it comes to bicycle wheels
1. Rotating mass. During acceleration, wheel mass is far more important than frame mass. About twice as much force is required to accelerate a unit of mass on the wheel than on the frame.
2. Rolling resistance is lower for small wheels, due partly to their having a smaller contact-point with the road. The deformation of the tyre or the road surface also has an effect.
3. Aerodynamic drag is reduced because the bicycle has a smaller frontage and a far smaller spoke area (spokes are a major cause of the turbulence that slows you down).
Edited by mab01uk, 22 December 2008 - 12:11 AM.
