Harry Bickerton

Harry Bickerton (1922–1994?) was a British engineer in the fields of aerospace engineering, aircraft engine design, and bicycle construction and design. He became a household name in the UK in the early 1980s after a successful TV campaign advertising the Bickerton (bicycle), a folding bicycle that he originally designed in the 1970s and perfected over time. In the mid-1970s, The British Central Office of Information released a film, presenting the Bickerton Portable as a symbol of the British lifestyle while simultaneously extolling its technological advantages ("The smallest bike in the world"). Harry Bickerton's bicycle design became equally seminal as Alex Moulton's, and eventually inspired Andrew Ritchie to create the Brompton bicycle.
Harry Bickerton's achievements go well beyond the bicycle for which he is best known. In 1938, Bickerton left school to take up an apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce in Derby. After transfers to Glasgow and being seconded to RAE Farnborough to work for Tilly Shilling, where they worked on water methanol injection and exhaust pipe tuning amongst other things for the Rolls Royce 'Merlin' engine of the Spitfire fighter plane. After World War II, Bickerton, now a seasoned aircraft engineer, moved on to de Havilland where he was Chief Engineer and worked primarily on internal combustion engines (Gypsy Major) but also became involved in the investigation of the De Havilland Comet after a series of failures. He later re-designed the Gypsy Major engine for Britain's first helicopter - The Skeeter, and headed the development of extreme cold weather starting for an Antarctic expedition by air. He also filed a patent for a Rotary Engine design whilst at DeHavilland. Bickerton eventually left the industry in the late 1950s to become a free-lance engineer and inventor.
Some of his other projects were a self-adjustable posture bed, which was adopted for use by the National Health Service, and an economical centrifuge (called a Hermatocit) for separating red and white blood cells, designed for use with a car battery in remote locations like Africa. Harry Bickerton's engineering principles, expressed in ten "Performance specification[s] for a new portable human-powered personal transport device" (1971) are still valid today.

External links

• Part 2 of "The Bickerton Story" by David Henshaw.
• Film by British Central Office of Information, ca. 1975