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You and Yours - Transcript 大象传媒 Radio 4 |
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TX: 10.05.07 - Wheelchair Design PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON |
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THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 大象传媒 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. ROBINSON Seventy years ago, in 1937, the patent was issued for a folding wheelchair, designed by Herbert Everest and Harry Jennings. Their design revolutionised not only how wheelchairs looked but what they could do and also the lives of the people who use them. We sent our reporter Simon Parkes to discover the history of the wheelchair, what existed before the Everest and Jennings breakthrough and what developments there have been since. And he began by talking to the Paralympic athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson about how important her wheelchair is to her. THOMPSON My wheelchair's kind of been part of everything I do in the sporting sense and that's important to me but also for me like day-to-day my wheelchair is just one of the most important things I'd choose and for most disabled people it's probably one of the biggest expenses you have, apart from your house and a car. And for me it's about how I sit, how I want the frame to look, how it folds, what colour wheels, what colour tyres, the way I have it sprayed, you know whether I have purple or chrome or ... and it is a huge, huge decision. And I think a lot of non-disabled people don't understand just how important that decision is in someone's life, about how they feel and how they want to look. PARKES In effect the wheelchair as fashion statement. But that's all very new fangled. To find out more about the origins of the wheelchair before it started to vary from season to season I turned to Dr Brian Woods, research fellow at the University of York. WOODS Probably the first recording of a wheelchair would be in three and a half thousand BC China. However, wheelchairs, as vehicles to be used by disabled people, really didn't emerge in Europe until about the 16th or 17th Century. Then they were specially designed, one off chairs. But by the 18th Century we see the emergence of big wooden ornate chairs, they were large, they were heavy - probably around about a 100-120 pounds each - and they were designed mainly for indoor use. PARKES Just that sort of thing is one of the few that are on display at the Science Museum in London, where I was given a tour by Stuart Emmons, the curator of Community Health. EMMONS The chair that we're in front of here is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, in the collection. It dates from the 1700s and it's pretty much a standard upholstered dining chair really. PARKES It's like a carver isn't it, it's got arms, it's got silk damask upholstery, I mean it is a dining chair except for the fact that it .... EMMONS It has wheels. PARKES It has wheels. What do we know about this chair Stuart? EMMONS It probably would have been used by quite a wealthy person, I mean it's a very good quality chair. There's no self propulsion, so the user would have to be pushed. The big wheels are pretty much mini cart wheels with an iron edge, so there's no pneumatic tyres at this time, there's no suspension system here, so it's not very comfortable. PARKES And perish the thought that anything like this could be folded up in any shape or form. So when did that particular aspect get incorporated into the design? Dr Brian Woods. WOODS Well the earliest examples of folding wheelchairs that I have found certainly date back to the beginning of the 20th Century. J.A. Carters was a British company that developed a wooden folding wheelchair in 1902 which it claimed would - and I quote: "Meet long felt want of travelling invalids by avoiding the inconvenience and annoyance of being carelessly moved about by railway porters". So I suppose we can take from that that there was an idea that disabled people or people who maybe couldn't walk for too great a distance would use wheelchairs for travelling, certainly on the railways. PARKES But the breakthrough came in 1933 when Everest and Jennings started manufacturing their very up-to-date invalid carriage that had a brand new feature called an X-frame, allowing the chair to be folded for transport yet remain rigid when in use. But this evolution was not an instant success. WOODS Although Everest and Jennings patented their folding wheelchair in 1937 folding wheelchairs came about because of the interaction between them and the mass produced motorcar, which came into its own during the 1950s. It allowed wheelchair users, probably for the first time, to get out and about and have a means by which they could combine both long range and short range mobility. PARKES What made it so important - this patented model of 1937? WOODS Well the clear differences between the Everest and Jennings chair at that time and other chairs was first of all the weight, a hundred pounds for previous chairs, 50 pounds for the Everest and Jennings wheelchairs, which is a massive reduction. One of the key design changes was to place the propelling wheels at the rear and this allowed the occupant to now negotiate steps and curves which they really couldn't do with the propelling wheels on the front, which was predominantly the case for wheelchair designs during the first half of the 20th Century. So the chair didn't really come into its own until after the Second World War and certainly by the 1950s had become almost emblematic of what a wheelchair was. PARKES And through much of the post-war era little about that iconic design altered. But that's not to say that everyone after the Second World War had a fold up chair. Tanni Grey-Thompson again. THOMPSON I've actually got a very good friend called Rick, he started using a wheelchair when he was very young through polio and it was actually kind of a basket chair where the big wheels were at the front and he had wooden push rims, which sounds kind of quite sweet and romantic really but when he used to go downhill very fast and he'd try and break you used to get splinters in your hands. And you just think that was probably must have been like hundreds of years ago but actually that was only quite recently. PARKES Back at the Science Museum Stuart Emmons and I had moved on to the Making of the Modern World Gallery, full of immediately recognisable products and we focused on a far more up-to-date wheelchair in the collection. EMMONS We're standing in front of a large group of objects, really a whole range of things from microwaves to synthesisers to flymo mowers and at the back of the case here is a shadow mono ski which is one of the first commercially available devices for disabled skiers. And what you've got is a light but very protective bucket seat into which the skier is strapped and they sit directly above a single ski but they also have two handheld mini skis to sort of help balance and direct, in the same way that an able-bodied skier would use two sticks. PARKES How emblematic is this model? EMMONS This is a chair that's built for speed and unlike the earlier chairs that we've seen it's a chair that the user is very much in control. It's at the other end of the spectrum really from passive reliance to a sort of active independence. PARKES And that notion of the wheelchair as a liberating force, a point established by the first fold up chair, is now the norm. For those that can afford them they're now bespoke, made to order, incorporating all the latest ergonomic features. I went to visit the firm of RGK in Staffordshire, a company partly started by Russel Simms, who became a paraplegic after an accident in the early 1980s but then took up playing basketball. Dissatisfied with the sorts of wheelchairs he had to use he decided to start his own company where today the average wheelchair takes eight weeks to deliver and costs around two and a half thousand pounds. I met him in the quality control department. SIMMS That's our Interceptor basketball wheelchair, which is very much the flagship of our sports range, it's the top of the tree, it's for elite athletes, typically playing at national team, international competition level. What makes it so special - it's one of the few chairs which are completely constructed in one piece, so we eliminate with the exception of the wheels all of the moving parts, so you end up with a far, far lighter stronger and more rigid chair, it's all about performance. PARKES What is it that gives it the edge? SIMMS As far as manoeuvrability goes the biggest invention ever on a wheelchair was the camber on the wheels. So when we're talking about a cambered wheel, we're talking about wheels that rather than being vertical they're angled out, so the wider the wheel base at the bottom and narrower the wheel base at the top, that's what makes the chair spin and turn very quickly. PARKES And that's what these are, I mean they're very splayed aren't they. SIMMS Absolutely, you know you're looking at angles in excess of 20 degrees on each wheel which gives it a fantastic handling characteristic. PARKES What are the elements now that make up the cutting edge wheelchair of the 21st Century? SIMMS A combination of things but the key things that most people are looking for now is they want a very, very lightweight product. So that immediately drives you from a materials point of view into tubular products in the realms of titanium, carbon fibre. PARKES And what is it at the moment that is driving the market? SIMMS A big leader is still wheelchair sport. PARKES So what are the aspects that sports people have demanded that everybody else is demanding now? SIMMS They want their chair basically to go faster with less effort. They want more performance from their chair with minimal effort. PARKES Russel Mills [sic] of the wheelchair manufacturers RGK ending that report by Simon Parkes. Back to the You and Yours homepage The 大象传媒 is not responsible for external websites |
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