A nod to military bike history can be found in a new article about the British military called “Charge of the light brigade: Army Parachute Regiment trial electric bikes”

Eighty years ago, wartime necessitated the introduction of the Royal Enfield WD/RE ‘Flying Flea’ and the Welbike, which were parachuted into occupied Europe, providing a means for airborne and assault troops to transmit messages. […] “Motorcycles have been in military use ever since they were invented. So, what we’re doing is nothing new – what’s new is the electrification side of it and the opportunities that presents…they can be used in a way where a petrol engine would just give your position away.”

Electric bikes have many obvious advantages, already getting a lot of attention from special forces in America: given low sound and heat profiles they are much safer, faster, lighter and easier to maneuver than liquid fuel bikes, not to mention an easier and safer supply chain.

What’s not to like about electric bikes?

Even more broadly, the bike in most cases is a far better tool for modern military application than any automobile including trucks. It’s not really any kind of news or secret.

Without a Motorcycle in Kandahar, ‘You Are Like a Prisoner’. A foreshadowing of how the Afghan war would be won and lost by distributed / localization networks, hit & run tactics, and terrain advantages.

See also:

• Bike Sales Climb After Disaster
• Bikes Deemed Best During Pandemic

In terms of the US Army, consider how they rode mountain-bike field tests way back in 1896, as I’ve written here before, so the Ogden Bolton electric bike from 1895 might be a better “nothing new” reference than a smelly, greasy 1939 Royal Enfield.

Speaking of references, in 1991 there was even a book published that detailed a century of bikes used in war. It’s kind of amazing to think how many better references there may be versus that WWII Enfield.

In WWI soldiers allegedly even were pulling heavy gear into battle using bicycles as if some kind of direct replacement for horse power. You’d think electricity would be on their mind.

Journalists in 1914 indeed mention that a bike has a major advantage because it can be dropped flat to the ground and completely hidden from enemy fire, which seems an odd point to make today yet it was an innovation in military thinking at the time.

Being completely hidden, of course, is again why the electric motor signature has been so compelling for 100 years versus oil burners.

And from there, the 1938 McDonald seems even more relevant, especially because by this time Japan was using bicycles in major offensive campaigns (1937 invasion of China).

Given the superiority of electric, it’s a wonder anyone bothered with gasoline bikes at all.

It seems all too easy to find evidence of electric bikes in military projects throughout history that are far more relevant to today’s British paratrooper than an Enfield of WWII. Here’s a good one:

In 1997, [US Government was] seeking a way to move military troops and equipment without the heat or noise signatures of a combustion engine and due to Montague’s experience in the field, they won the grant to develop the Tactical Electric No Signature (TENS) Mountain Bike. Montague worked closely with Currie Technologies on their earliest electric systems to equip these military models with the best electric motor technology of the time. Currie is still making electric drive systems used on many e-bikes today.

Someone in the US military surely thought TENS would be an hilarious acronym for an 18-speed electric bicycle.

So what really is new? The oil industry seems to be losing its death grip. In retrospect, bikes never should have been anything but electric this whole time.

I mean I know it’s fashionable to say electric bikes have short range, have trouble keeping a charge in extreme weather… but let’s be honest about such nonsense.

You can’t pull gasoline out of thin air or water like you can electricity. Even diesel has potential to be created from local sources that gasoline clearly does not. I’ve always found electricity available in even the most remote locations, places oil was nowhere to be found.

In fact, WWII motorcyclists reminisce about their leaky and wasteful fuel cans, which could never serve modern operations.

“We had flimsy cans of petrol, so you cut them in half, pierced it with a lot of holes, three-quarter fill it with earth, pour petrol and put a match on it and it would burn for a long while. That’s how we used to brew up [tea] while we’re on the road!”

With an electric bike he would have just heated water using a simple pad or pole plugged into the battery, having none of the signature/footprint issues of a setting that petrol can on fire.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before the 1947 Nissan Tama.

It has several important historical characteristics that make it look like something very modern even today.

• Designed for the switch to a peacetime economy
• Designed by 200 Tachikawa Aircraft employees
• Extreme shortage of gasoline
• Top speed of 35 km/h (22 mph) and a cruising range of 65 km (40 miles) on a single charge
• Passenger car and truck models
• Battery compartment in the cabin floor, with two “bomb bay” doors on either side
• Battery cases on rollers so used batteries could be quickly exchanged with fresh ones

I bring it up again as people lately have been saying they wish they had a quick way to replace their electric car batteries instead of using a gasoline-pump like attachment for slow (complicated and dangerous) charging.

That is what Tama offered in its “bomb bay” like doors and energy swap cases:

Well I guess that means look at 1947 for the answers from war-time aircraft engineers who understood the significance of rapid replacement, refuel turnaround and similar efficiencies.

Of course it wouldn’t happen today for cars without someone over-hyping automation. The Japanese in fact tried outsourcing battery swap to a 2009 Silicon Valley startup, but it arguably died due to massive fraud (*cough* Tesla *cough*) polluting the market.

The Japanese Ministry of Environment has invited Better Place to build a battery exchange station in Japan and engage with the country’s carmakers.

The Chinese notably refer to the brilliant 1940s Japanese model of drive-through EV battery-swapping as being “killed by Tesla years ago”.

That makes it even more tempting to get excited by a Taiwanese company GoGoro as they have slick marketing calling their products “reimagined”.

It’s basically the most distributed and modern take yet on what came so long before the ill-conceived centralized (and often fraudulent — Tesla chargers were dirty diesel engines) “plug-in” market that’s slow, dangerous and bad for batteries.

We’re essentially going back to the beginning, which is good for modern electric vehicles. What would a Tama look like today? Here’s the latest Nissan concept.

The most exciting thing about Japanese innovation in stop-and-swap transit models is that any home anywhere could be a supplier. It’s much more attractive and sensible to have someone grab a power pack to go than to hook up to any charger.

If I really think outside the box, literally, then the Nissan car full of batteries can be the swappable battery for a house (like Russian nesting doll batteries). Roll your battery tray into the car and power your car off plugin. Then roll the battery car into the garage and power your house off grid.

Fun fact, since 2013 the Nissan LEAF was engineered to send power (Bidirectional EV as specified in UL 9741), like a giant house battery on wheels.

And even that model goes back centuries.

Imagine hanging a small sign outside your home that says “power cell available”, like the hanging red lamp of the Japanese Izakaya.

…many opted to simply make rice at home and purchase side dishes from outside vendors called niuriya (“simmered foods shops.”).  Around the year 1750, “seated sake shops” and “simmered foods shops” combined into a new business model, the “simmered foods seated sake shop” (niuri izakaya). The cumbersome term would soon be shortened to “izakaya.”

That’s a hint at the universal services and interoperability/pluggable sharing markets that have led everyone for centuries towards putting trust in any modern transport (car), storage (hotel), or processing (restaurant).

Interesting to historians may be how battery replacement goes back even further to an ancient system of caravanserais spaced 20 miles apart on Persian highways, where a tired horse or camel could be quickly refueled or exchanged with a fresh one.

…Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa would have been much more difficult if not for the caravanserais… centers for the exchange of goods and culture…

Thinking of transit engineering problems as new just because some minor aspect of it is new, prevents us from seeing the millennia of knowledge right in front of our eyes. And on that note, information security concepts all are basically derived from transit technology safety practices (transport, store, process).