Personally I'm very very grateful to those gentleman but of course Hengist Pod was an very early inventor of something that resembles a bicycle.
Ha! Hengist, the founding king of the Kingdom of Kent, was my ancestor. You hear a lot about Anglo-Saxon Britain, but the Angles and the Saxons were johnny-come-latelies following in the footsteps of the fiercer but few Jutes. The "Anglo-Saxon" British worshipped our (Hengist's and my) common ancestor, Odin the Jute*, until the coming of Christianity. In Hengist's time no one would have made fun of him; indeed, one of his descendants and my ancestor, Erik Bloodsword (in my juvenile siblings' version "Erik the Red, the only Commie in our family") was so irritated by a fat abbot not getting off the road quickly enough when his pack of hunting hounds approached that he chopped up the man and fed him to the hounds. My family, still irate at the insult to Erik's hounds, sacked the abbot's abbey three times between the 9th and 11th centuries. I can ride up the hill on the other side of the river and look down on the ruins of the abbey at the head the bay up which my ancestors sailed to collect tribute from the abbey; for a millennium the clergy would step off the pavement when a member of my family approached lest they suffer the martyred abbot's fate. Horsa, Hengist's brother who died in the pacification of the ingrate Romano-British, is another of whom the descendants of Norman invaders-come-even-later** like to make fun...
*The Danish island of Odense is named for him, as a contraction of Oden's Halle or Odin's Hall, because he lived on it. He was a warrior-poet-singer, basically in his time a philosopher who knew how to defend himself and his people and territory.
**Also relatives: The Normans descended from an earlier wave of "Viking" invaders.
Can't see anybody going to a celebration of GATES who possibly was the inventor of the bicycle belt drive amongst other things ?
Quite. GATES wouldn't qualify under the rules of selection Charles Murray laid down for the construction of his list of 4000+ people who had really important achievements. The Gates Drive belt is only a development of the principle of the bicycle chain, not an earth-shaking novelty. Actually, it's amazing that at least five and possibly six of only 4000-odd people in a narrowly elite list of innovators and geniuses contributed to the development of the bicycle.
These remarks make me wonder if we can truly understand, in these days when a bicycle is a pricey and rather elite indulgence, how important bicycles were in last half of the 19th century when the alternative would be a horse, which would every year in maintenance cost as much as a modern Rolls-Royce -- the car being a one-shot purchase likely to last twenty years with minimal further expenditure, whereas the horse has to be fed and curried and mucked out every day, and then dies, a large, sudden, complete capital depreciation.
