New light for bikes

It was a dark and stormy night early in 1998 when Chris Stimpson drove to the Wych Elm pub in Kingston-upon-Thames to meet with 3 friends as usual on a Wednesday evening.

Rounding a corner he was dimly aware of a figure on a bicycle emerging from the gloom and crossing his path with inches to spare.

As a result of this experience Chris gave a challenge to one of his friends, Richard Hicks, an engineer and already an inventor with a number of patents to his name.

The challenge was to find a way of providing cyclists with a lighting system that was automatic, integrated within the bicycle and preferably battery-free for today's environmentally-conscious world. In other words, if you got on your bike, you had lights, they were on all the time and you couldn't turn them off.

The result of their deliberations was the Pedalite KPL100, the world's first kinetic pedal light.for bicycles.