How about pulling a fully loaded tractor trailer all by yourself? No, you don’t need to be the world’s strongest man or a hypnotist, or even a magician to do this. While even a dozen of the World’s strongest men won’t be able to pull a fully loaded tractor trailer, you can do it, with a technology that has been around for quite some time now, Magnetic Levitation.
And this was precisely what a man sitting in a tractor trailer did, in New Jersey on Route130 and was promptly pulled up by some very bewildered cops who finally had to let him go as they just couldn’t find an engine in the human powered tractor trailer. As this tractor trailer was non motorized, the cops couldn’t charge the man when the human powered tractor trailer malfunctioned and went reverse instead of going forward.
For those of you who don’t know, Magnetic Levitation is the technology the Japanese Maglev Trains use. These trains which reach upto 580 kmph, use the magnetic field to levitate above the track while electromagnets on the train keep it at a particular distance from the track to give it the forward thrust. And now, researchers working on this technology for a company called JUSTABIKE have made a human powered tractor trailer, that too using a bicycle to pull the tractor trailer.
This has been done by blending the human powered bicycle with a software that simulates the magnetic levitation technology. For obvious reasons, Justabike didn’t reveal much beyond this. Now that something is happening with human powered machines, the future looks greener and very promising indeed. To hit it off successfully, this concept has to overcome the very powerful oil lobby and also other non conventional sources of energy. Can it manage that? Only time can tell.
Source: AutoBlogGreen
Video Courtesy: MySpace
