Will Butler-Adams - The Brompton: Engineering for Change

THE BROMPTON Engineering for change

Will Butler-Adams is a chartered engineer and CEO of Brompton Bicycle Limited. He was appointed OBE in the 2015 New Year Honours, has been featured in multiple publications including the Financial Times, and has given talks for Google and PwC.

Dan Davies is a journalist and economist. He has worked as an analyst for a number of investment banks and has written for the Financial Times and New Yorker.

Engineering for Change

Will Butler-Adams & Dan Davies

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Will Butler-Adams and Dan Davies 2022

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The right of Will Butler-Adams and Dan Davies to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain copyright permissions where required. Any omissions and errors of attribution are unintentional and will, if notified in writing to the publisher, be corrected in future printings.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 830 4

eISBN 978 1 78283 864 7

Text design by Jade Design

www.jadedesign.co.uk

To the B-A team WB-A

To Tess DD

The Brompton bicycle was born out of one mans need. Its inventor, Andrew Ritchie, wanted one for himself, and he also thought that if it solved his own problem it might be useful for others. His resources were scant, but he had time time to optimise, evolve and simplify his design until he reached an elegant solution:

The triangular frame holding the rear wheel releases from the seat slide tube and swings under the chainwheel to fold underneath the main frame. A chain tensioner arm swings with the frame to keep the chain taut as it loops back on itself. The angular hinge towards the front of the main frame is undone and folds in parallel with the rear wheel so that the front wheel can be locked onto the chain stay, while still facing forward. The handlebar support hinge is then released, to drop by gravity, locking the handlebars tight in to the front wheel, and finally the seat post is dropped, which locks the whole folded assembly.

If you have ever folded a Brompton, or seen one being folded, you will probably recognise that this is how it works, summarised in just over a hundred words. Its easier to demonstrate than to try to explain it, but once you understand the principles its like riding a bike! The Brompton just works. But to deliver just works is not a small thing. It sits on an edifice of engineering detail and thought, and well go through the interesting bits in this book.

As well as designing the bicycle, Andrew Ritchie also founded the company, Brompton Bicycle Limited. The company is not necessarily such an elegant or specialised piece of design; it wasnt invented as a unique creation by a design genius. Its a normal business, with human resources, logistics, events, retail and all sorts of other things which dont always lend themselves to engineering solutions. And the company has changed a lot more than the bicycle over time. Since I first joined in 2002, we have grown from 35 staff to 835, and from annual turnover of 2 million to more than 100 million. And we have moved factories twice, to accommodate growth in production from 6,000 Bromptons a year to 95,000.

But the principle that form follows function ripples through all that we do. Everything needs to be lean and to add value. We like clever ideas, we like to do things for ourselves, and we like things that are good value and dont cost too much money. This should be a general principle for any business, whether youre making microchips, food additives or garden furniture. Too often staff in business believe it is their job to do stuff, to be busy, but that is not what we want. In fact our world is full of too much stuff, most of it adding no value at all: it is junk. We want more considered thought, time to optimise, so that in every part of our business we deliver something that is clear and simple and moves us a step further forward.

In this book, we will look at how these principles have shaped Brompton, and how Brompton has shaped the bicycle. Were often going to do this by looking at a component in detail, and asking How did it get to be that way? Why is it exactly like that, rather than any other shape or material? What sorts of things had to happen and had to be brought together in order to get that part of the Brompton bicycle to be how it is today? Some of these parts are really important, like the hinges. Some of them might seem slightly trivial, like the little hexagonal boss that holds the plate that holds the chain pusher. In each case, though, because form follows function, explaining the reason for the form starts to tell a whole story about the functions.

But I hope a message will come through that this doesnt have to be complicated. The right thing to do is usually pretty obvious, but is not always the easy thing to do, and may require courage. Keeping hold of your intellectual property in a world of globalised manufacturing is difficult. Finding a way to seamlessly incorporate a 300 Wh battery into a bike, and make it clip on and off intuitively so that the bike can still be carried, isnt straightforward. And planning management succession from a genius inventor who founded the company yes, thats hard. But none of these things are actually complicated. They require considered thought and honesty, but they dont need endless meetings full of egos, covering whiteboards with vision statements and abstract theories.

We have a vision. Quite simply, we want to change peoples lives. The Brompton is a bicycle that disappears when you dont need it and reappears when you do, something you can carry onto a bus or a train, whizz across town or take to explore. It is hardly mind-blowing. It isnt the only folding bike in the world, and it wasnt the first. But, largely because of that hinge, its a bicycle which people actually do carry onto buses and trains, which people actually do ride across cities and people actually do take on adventures, all over the world.

Even if you only cover four miles a day on a bicycle (two in the morning and two in the evening) rather than sitting on a bus or the Tube or being stuck in a car, thats still 800 miles over the course of a working year. Which works out at about 40,000 calories, which in turn equals about five kilograms of body weight. That wont exactly give you a perfect body, but for anyone past their twenties, the difference between gaining five kilos a year and not is going to add up to something pretty good for your health. On top of which, riding a bike is a blast. It makes you feel good and allows you to declutter your mind, something I for one couldnt live without. All this may sound blindingly obvious, but so often its not. That is the vision. We know were doing something that makes life a little bit better, so the more we do, the happier we are.