They’re Trying Unique Ways to Put a Spring in Their Step

PASADENA —  Are your feet killing you? Tired of shin splints and sore muscles from jogging? Trick knees got you down?

Someday you may be able to give up walking nature’s way and start running the SpringWalker way.

The SpringWalker is a framework of steel brackets and mechanical devices--like an Erector-Set suit of armor--that amplifies the gait of the person who climbs into it.

Its designers, physicist John Dick and his psychologist friend Bruce Crapuchettes, believe that with refinements they are still working on, it will allow people to run 25 m.p.h.

They have been working on the contraption, which they term a “bicycle with legs,” for the past six years and are currently enjoying international interest in the device.

“This could do for the legs what the bicycle and motorcycle did 100 years ago,” said Dick, 53, who works at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. For the past six years, he has worked for NASA, specializing in low-temperature physics, cryogenics and superconductivity.

Dick traces his interest in superhuman feats to his childhood on a farm in Montana, when he devoted most of his free time to reading comic books about men who could outrun locomotives and kids who could leap mountains.

“A few years ago, I finally realized that I’d given up hope of these devices being available in my lifetime,” he said.

But rather than forget his boyhood dreams, Dick chose to make one come true.

In his spare time, the Claremont resident began work on the SpringWalker, which in its current format resembles a pair of backward stilts carrying a spring. The ungainly 55-pound combination of pulleys, cables, springs, joints and bungee cords works something like a bicycle’s gearing system, increasing the force with which the user pushes against the ground and propelling him forward.

It takes 10 minutes just to strap Crapuchettes, the team’s 54-year-old test pilot, into the device, which suspends him about 18 inches off the ground. Once Crapuchettes is in the SpringWalker, he has to keep moving or lean against a wall because the invention has no feet. In case of a fall, he wears a helmet and kneepads.

So far, Crapuchettes has been able to run only about 8 m.p.h. through his Pasadena neighborhood.

People who have used it say walking on the SpringWalker is like balancing on your heels on stilts or bouncing from trampoline to trampoline.

At first, Crapuchettes’ Pasadena neighbors came running to their front yards when he clanked by, looking like an outer-space version of a giant ant.

Crapuchettes has a great advantage in testing the SpringWalker, Dick said. “He’s a very secure person who doesn’t mind looking silly. That provides us with very good feedback.”

Once they get all the bugs out and add a small battery-powered motor to the SpringWalker, Dick said, it will allow an average person to run as fast as Olympic gold-medalist Carl Lewis doing the 100-meter dash.

Dick admits there are problems with this prototype, but waves them off as negligible. “We’re scientists, engineers, not designers of things for consumers. It’s like the first, 19th-Century bicycle with one big wheel and one small one. Who knew what the bicycle would eventually look like? This needs some tinkering too.”

Despite the difficulties with this first model, Dick and Crapuchettes, and their design assistant, Eric Edwards, are confident they are on the right track with the concept.

“Instead of being strong enough to jump four feet in the air off of one leg, like we intended, it ends up being so heavy that Bruce’s gait only throws him four inches in the air instead of four feet,” Dick said.

“But within a year I think we’ll be trotting along at 15 m.p.h. That’s like a four-minute mile by an average guy,” Dick said.

Their next version of the SpringWalker will be much lighter--about 20 pounds, Dick said. It will look more like a unicycle--waist-high with relatively straight legs.

Within five years, he hopes to have a motor-powered version that will achieve the highest speeds, be comfortable, reasonably priced and easy to use.

But just who will use the SpringWalker?

Dick is in the process of determining that right now, having participated in a series of meetings, design shows and international interviews this fall.

Some of those meetings have been with military personnel, who envision the SpringWalker as a tool to aid the foot soldier of the 21st Century in carrying heavy electronic equipment and moving over terrain quickly.

British military researchers are interested, as are the U.S. Armed Services and Israel’s military complex, Dick said.

A second consumer might be the serious runner and exerciser whose knees and back tend to give out eventually. The SpringWalker would absorb pavement shock, giving the human body a cushion but still providing a workout.

“I’ve talked to a couple of companies--NordicTrack and Yamaha--and I’m talking with a technology licensing outfit,” Dick said.

He has also done interviews with Discover magazine, Scientific American, New Scientist, British television, CNN, a German talk show and a number of other media outlets.

Dick, a lifelong tinkerer given to understatement, feels a bit lost amid all the publicity. His last five patents have been for devices far more esoteric--ultra-stable cryogenic clocks that do things such as measure gravitational waves in experiments reflecting signals from satellites.

He said that even if the SpringWalker becomes the kind of innovation the bicycle has proved to be, he will not give up his day job entirely.

“I really do like the time and frequency business. I don’t imagine leaving that full time,” Dick said.

His next research project at JPL will be on something he calls an “optical turban.”

“It’s kind of an amazing concept,” he said.