What are Rolligon tires?

Published Aug 25, 2015, 2:29 PM

They've been described as gigantic watermelons attached to otherwise unremarkable vehicles, and you can even watch these tires roll over a person without harming them. But what exactly are Rolligons? Whatever happened to them?

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Go behind the Wheel, under the Hood and beyond with car stuff from house Stuff Works dot Com. I welcome to the podcast. I'm Scott, I'm Ben, and today we have Matt the Madman Frederick here with us as our super producer, the Madman we should call him the Bagman. The bag Man. Oh that's cool, that's cool. It makes it sound like kind of a heist crew. Yeah that okay. So just quick backstory here. Our super producer Noel is on the road today as we speak, because he is playing a couple of shows at Nashville. Ok. Yeah, good for him. You know, he's a multi instrumentalist when he's not recording with us. Big City, Yeah, Big City. I was born there, right, so I left ones eight. So my experiences are the things that we're cool for eight year old. But uh, well, okay, so I have to ask what was cool for an eight year old in Nashville old uh you know, twenty years ago? Uh grand old Opry for sure, right, it was close amusement park. I remember being very into the creek behind our yard and uh and I always was trying to get into a big rigs because I had this idea that I could you know, own a semi and just living it and drive around at eight at eight at eight years old at a couldn't even reach the pedals. Very cool. Okay, well it makes sense. That makes sense for an eight year old to be interested in exactly what you laid out there the creek behind the house. I can completely relate to that. Yeah, And that was always a lot of fun. Any place I ever visited that head of creek, I was always in up to my knees in it, you know, within an hour, Yeah, chasing tadpoles and stuff. You know, it's weird because I guess it's a mark of when you start to get older, when you're able to say things like or when you're able to have the realization rather that life for you was as a child was very different than to life for kids now, Like a lot of kids that I see around don't spend near as much time outside through and uh, to me to mean, that's a weird thing because I want one thing that I never really prized as a kid that I really appreciate now is that when I was growing up as a kid, if you were if you were not really up to trouble, you were just wandering around, then you could go pretty much anywhere and do whatever, and people wouldn't. People would just tell you to leave in the middle of the day, your miles from your home, right, Yeah, I had the same experience. And let me ask you a couple of quick questions, okay, and then we'll move on. Yeah, because this has nothing to do with the show. It really doesn't want in a roundabout way, but um so, Tennessee, Yeah, we talked about a creek. Did you call it creek or did you call it creek? And also when you were catching animals in there? Were you catching crayfish? Are you catching craw dads? Where you catching? You know what do you call them? Yeah? Well, primarily in that creek, if I remember, there were tadpoles and frogs. And here's where here's where you see how memory paints things, Scott, because in my head it was always a creek. My mom called it that ditch. She wasn't so it wasn't It wasn't quite you know, a rolling Mississippi River or anything the pristine creek that we're thinking about, right, But there were turtles in there, and you know there would be birds, but I didn't know. I didn't catch me any crowdads. No crowdads no, no crayfish or craw daddy, no, no, no one one fearsome ancient snapping turtle because it must have been about, you know, more than a foot big as which I guess means it had been alive for some time. And that was that was a monstrous thing. You know, we were living the same eight year old life, hundreds of miles apart, and maybe probably a decade apart. It sounds like fun. Okay, so good memories. Anyways, let's take this another direction here, let's go towards our topic. How about that? Oh yeah, let's maybe do our show. Yeah, maybe listeners would appreciate that. I think. So all right, here's something we have to get out of the way first. And this is this isn't really related today's topic in anyway, but um, it's something that I feel we need to talk about right away, right because recently we had had some great listener mail over on Facebook from someone who checked out how one of our one of our more recent episodes. Surprising person contacted us on Facebook. I was I was shocked by this, Ben, And um, here's what happened. We recently aired our episode on Smokey Unich and hopefully everybody's already listening to that one. But the very next day after that was published, I got a Facebook message from Trish Unich, who is Smokey Unich's daughter, and she contacted car Stuff and said, Um, during the podcast about Smokey Unich, you mentioned wanting wanting a copy of the book. I'd be happy to make that happen if you gave me the mailing address. And so that's really really nice. Yeah, here's Trish Unich. And I look up who she was and you know where she lived and everything, and it was all legit, and um I contacted her and said, how that be fantastic. You know, here's my mailing address, and I said, I concluded this note, I'm gonna read through our corresponse a little bit because there's some some answers here, some some further clarification on some things we talked about during that podcast that I think is important to get out there. So I wrote back to her and I said that I really hope you enjoyed the podcast, and I sure wish we had the opportunity to meet your father because everything that we've read about him so far only deepens our interest. You know, it's uh something that uh we found really really exciting to to research and kind of dig into as a topic. And I said, I'm really looking forward to reading this book, and you know, thanks again, Tish. And she wrote back and said, well, thank you. I really did enjoy the podcast. It was nice. That's too kind, thank you. And she said, here are a few answers that I posted on the Facebook page. Now answers she means clarification. And right away when I read that, I thought, oh no, we made a bunt. Well, well there are five points here. And the five points again aren't aren't corrections really, they're they're more um clarifications on points that we had brought up, and a couple of slight things here. All right. So the first one is about that horse that we talked about that was always giving Smokey trouble on the farm. Yeah, given him so much. Yeah, that's right. She said. The horse's name was Bill. Bill. He said ironic that Bill was the horse. The horse's name because um, considering his his future tangles with Bill France and Nascar, you know, the Bill, the two Bills gave him a lot of trouble in his early life. Um. The second thing is that when we said that the truck shop portion of the best damn Gradge in town closed, we neglected to say that Smokey continued to work in his private portion of that shop, which was really the race shop, you know, the race portion of that shop. Um, all the way up until the day he went to the hospital. Um, you know, and he was there you know, for that. That was the last time he was there in April of two thousand one. So he continued to work in that shop right up into the day he was admitted into the hospital. So just then the public retail kind of end of it was closed, but he was still where can assiduously in the racing portion. He's still they're doing this thing, building race engines and and consulting and doing all that good thing too. Yeah, very good things. So so a longng time. So that was the additional fourteen years after the the public portion shutdown. Now the third point she brings up here. We had a question about the Fiarro where the hot vapor fierro went. And this is interesting. We'll talk about this in a moment two of it. She said the hot vapor fierro was donated by Tony and Diane ours to the Don Garlos Museum of Drag Racing, where it's currently on display now. Been that's exciting for you and I because that's only a few hours from where we are right now. And how many times on this show and of course outside of the show have you and I talked about making a day trip down there to see that place, because we've passed it probably thirty times each shore, maybe more because it's just it's on the way with the trip. That's one great thing about any road trip. You know, you you passed by all these places and you file them away as you know things to go too soon, But how often do you ever actually get to them. I'd like to break the cycle man. We should absolutely take field trip out there. I'm in complete agreement with this this plan because every time we drive down to Florida there's a uh, you know, a museum, well museum building or a big signed for the museum. It's just it's really literally a stone's throw off of five. You can see it from you can see you can see it right there, so um, there's no excuse for us not to go Number four here. Smokey never lost a driver and was very concerned about safety. He wanted to use an aviation fuel cell, but was refused by NASCAR. It was the final straw for him and leaving NASCAR. Um. Remember, Fireball Roberts was injured, um in a race, and we thought that that was under Smokey's direction or Smokey's as as a crew chief. It turns out that Fireball was injured in a crash right after Smokey hit. So again, Smokey never lost a driver. Well, he was a crew chief, team owner there. Um all right. And last point is that Smokey's autobiography was not edited in any way, because I think we mentioned that he had handed over the materials to an editor but said, don't change a lot, just just make this work together. But she's saying that Smokey's autobiography was not edited in any way. He Um, he formed a company called Carbon Press. Um, exactly because he had been edited at Popular Science and Circle Track Hens. Yeah, exactly. So he says that he knew what he wanted to say might be controversial and didn't want to be edited at all. And she also points out that the pocket edition is not abridged in any way. It's not a shorter version of the story. It just simply occupies less space. It's it has all the stories that's in the bigger volumes, but it's on a much smaller page and print size. So interesting to know you can get you can get the full story even in the abridged version. So that's basically about it. But I mean, there's a few more things here that I'll mention. But but that was the main point that she wanted to clarify. And hopefully everybody, um can pick that up from you know, reading or listening to the podcast, the previous podcast. UM. I said, you know, hopefully you don't mind me reading this on air, and she said, of course you can do that. I would have done it without you know her now hearing her, knowing of where they were doing this. Um, but I thought, you know, it would be a good idea for us to kind of set the record straight on all those issues that that she had just pointed out to us. And UM, here's another thing, then, this is this is really important to me. This is this makes a big difference, she said. I said, well, I hope we didn't make too many mistakes after that, you know, after those five points, and I said, I hope you know it was pretty concise, you know, with you know, the message that you wanted to get across about your father. And she said, oh, and here's what she said. You said it was the It was really the cleanest piece I've ever seen or heard. No mistakes, just points I wanted to clarify. Yeah, not bad. Huh, gosh, thank you. That was really nice, she said. And this is also important to this whole thing, said, you see all too often how a falsehood, repeated often enough, becomes fact. It's important to me to do what I can to not allow that to happen to smoke his legacy, especially with regard to cheating. And we talked about that too, how he wasn't really cheating, he was just making new rules. Really, he never that's the thing. He never cheated. He would do things that would inspire the authorities to uh change their their rules, but he never actually broke a rule. Yes, exactly right, and that's uh. She thought that was good that we pointed that out, that we were we were careful about about mentioning that. Um. She says that Don, meaning Don Garlics and Smokey were good friends. Don puts an incredible amount of time and money and energy into the museum that he operates, because he's still there operating that museum. And she says, don Museum is actually why Smokey left us explicit instructions on how to disperse his stuff and told us don't make no damn shrine. Said you know, however, you know Don's place is a really cool place to go to, So you know, he didn't want the time and the upkeep and the effort that was necessary to make a shrine to smoke Unich the way Don Garlos has done with his his drag racing memorabilia. Um, but you know it's still Don's place. I can't wait to go there. It's gonna be so much fun. Yeah. And and you know, well I understand the point of a shrine and why that does sound very much like him. The fact of the matter is that if you're a fan of racing, you're a fan of Smoky Unit. Yeah. And the very last point I'll make about this before we finally get into our topic today, this was this is really an interesting conversation with her. I had a lot of fun, you know, back and forth with her. Um, I said, you know, I hope I hope we get everything straight, you know, and it's all taking care of You said, absolutely, I'd really like it if you do that, And she said, I just wanted people to know that Smokey's work ethic was so strong that it just killed me to think the folks might have thought that he retired after the truck shop closed. Um, you know, because he did put in that additional fourteen years of tuning and working with customers and really putting forth the effort that he had prior to that. It was just the public part of that shop has shut down. He's doing it was doing a lot more consulting to right. Yeah, so I don't know. I thought that was really interesting and I'm really looking forward to reading the copy of the book that hopefully it's gonna be arriving soon. I'm truly excited about this. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, Trish. We really appreciate it. And Ben, finally we can move on to today's topic. Oh, yes, that's right, we are doing a topic today. We've been I guess we've spent a lot of time visiting, but hopefully listeners it was it was worth it for you, and there's some cool stuff. Today's topic will will perhaps be something you haven't heard of. We are talking about tires, but not just any tire, Scott. We're talking about a very specific, for many people, very unusual type of tire. And this comes to us through a listener suggestion. Right, guess Kyle, you you sent a tweet our Way tweeted me and said, hey, Ben, have you seen these crazy tires before? And then showed us a clip that I sent to you, Scott of a vehicle with these cylindrical tires that that are huge rolling over a person and the person is unharmed. Yeah, this is so strange when you watch this video or actually would be a film clip, but it's probably from the nineteen fifties, and uh it really it's gonna be tough to describe this. So so as we say with a lot of our topics, you know, you'll you'll be doing yourself a huge favor if you go out and take a look at what we're talking about. They're called, and this is a weird name, roll agon tires, not rolling on r O L l I g O N rollergon tires, roll agone tires and cylindrical is probably the best way to describe them. I wouldn't even call them, you know, I know they're called tires, but I would call them bags. It's like you're writing on big rubber eyes. Bags. Yeah, that's a that's a good point. So what what we'd like to do as first, as as you point out Scott listeners, please uh take a second and check out some of the clips on YouTube where you can see these things in action. What we'll like what we'd like to do is sort of walk through the history of their invention and then describe a little bit more about what differentiates these from you know, the typical average higher Yeah, what are they good for? What are they good for? What are they good for? Um? Yes, So it goes all the way back to a fellow named William Hamilton's albeit in n William Hamilton's albeit was a teacher, and he was living in a very small Inuit village on near the Bearing Strait, and he saw some of his friends who were villagers there, uh lifting a boat that was loaded with tons of meat, literally tons of meat, like four tons of meat in these boats. And they had they had this ingenious way of moving this. They had several I guess you'd call them bottles or bags of seal skin that were sewn up and swollen under the boat and uh their air tight their air tight, Yes, their air type Scott and they shoot to the top of this slope without any difficulty, even though they're gravel. There's gravel and stone. Yeah, so okay, here's the problem if you get the both out of the water up onto land. But in the way is a is a shoreline that is jagged craggy with and it's a difficult surface to get over. And you hear, you've got four tons of meat. You need to get up onto the smooth you know, the grass or the tundra area. And these these bags would be positioned under the bow of the boat and then um, you know, further back and then it would be kind of rolled across these things with them cushioning the way almost like a like a like an air bag, like a shop absorber. Yeah. And the bags were heavy duty enough, you know, they were they were strong enough that they weren't punctured by the rocks because you know, these are sharp rocks, um craggy surfaces, as we said, you know, probably something that would puncture a normal tire. But because they had relatively low pressure inside them. It wasn't like they were inflated to the point where they were you know, rock hard. They were soft bags. Um. It was able to absorb uh not only the weight but also um the surface that it that it was attempting to cover, so you know, would roll over the rock and no damage at all to the sealskin bag. Right. And this is a practice that has existed in this community for a very very long time, and it stays with William Albi. Yeah. Now we mentioned that this was nineteen thirty five when he saw this, right in the mid nineteen thirties, and I believe that they had been on a honeymoon I think in that area, um, prior to that, and that's how they were attracted to that region, and then they went back to be to become teachers. Um. But the idea stuck with him for sixteen years before he really did anything with it. Yeah, and uh, it wasn't until nineteen fifty one when William he and his family relocated to carol Mala, California, he started trying to think of a modern application or adaptation of these bags. So he started working on a nylon in pregnated rubber bag. So it's super flexible, right, and he starts pitching this idea around. Uh. He ultimately talks to one of the biggest names and tires, good Year. Yeah. Now, this is about two years after he's kind of worked on some prototypes, some ideas, and uh, I think you know he started around nineteen fifty one. About nineteen fifty three, um is when they were finally mentioned in Popular Science magazine. Now, I don't know if Goodyear the Goodyear talks were happening in nineteen fifty one as well, because you know that this idea didn't just completely go out of his head for the sixteen years. No, he was probably he's probably sketching some ideas, working with some different materials, experimenting. Yeah, right, it's all throughout that time. So then you know, in the nineteen fifties when he got to the back to the uh um, the Continental US, the the lower forty eight, he was able to, uh, take this idea and then and shop it around, as you said, and good Year finally been on the idea. Now, um by nineteen fifty three, just two years later, or you know, right around that same time, it was appearing in things like you know, Popular Science magazine just a little you know, a little add on the side, and that's where um a gelopink article that I saw. They had a clipping from that Popular science magazine three and it shows a jeep body vehicle. Of course, it's running over Mr Albie, as as are most of the promotional materials. You know, when you see a film clip of this, you'll see that he's being run over by just about every vehicle out there. And it's funny to see, you know, that that's happening, but it also really really drives home the point that this is a soft material that's not going to damage the surface beneath. Um. It's strange how something that heavy can roll over somebody without, you know, causing any kind of bodily harm. But their tricks to that too. We know you and I know that you know, you can kind of fake that kind of thing, right. Yeah. You can see magicians, for instance, in televised programs having a semi roll over someone. But it's all distribution of weight, because the other side of the semi that you do not see has a bunch of counter balancing weight. Sure, and about the only thing that I can pick a part about what I've seen here, you know, like these uh these these exhibitions where you know, Mr Alby lays down and allows the you know, the five ton vehicle to roll over top of him. There's really not any other trick to it other than that he's on a soft surface. I mean if he's not. He's not laying on gravel. He's not laying on um, you know, a uh an asphalt surface. He's usually laying on sand or on grass something like that, something that's a little more forgiving. That's a little bit of cushion on his on his stomach side as you know, this vehicle rolls over his back. But still the guy's got a smile on his face the whole time. It doesn't look like it hurts. In fact, I think in the article here, the the dwopping carticle, they point out that it looks like it might actually kind of feel kind of good to have this happen to you, like like a back massage, Yeah, like weird back massage. The question that you're probably asking yourself listeners is a very good one, which is whoa whoa whoa whoa? Guys, how can attire actually go over in person without injuring them? Right? It's because these have tremendously low pressure in comparison to other tires. They're they're what's called low ground pressure tires, and they are increasing. What they're doing is they're increasing the surface area to distribute the weight of the vehicle. So the point of contact for a typical tire, right, is just going to be that narrow strip that actually hits the road. But in the case of these rolligons, that that space is increased by the orders of magnitude. Yeah. Sure, so the bag deforms as it rolls over the rough terrain beneath, right, and that makes it even useful that that gets us to the part, well, what is it good for? Right? Yeah, sure, it's a good for and it's good for all kinds of crazy terrain that you wouldn't be able to traverse with a normal tire, a standard vehicle tire. Um And you know, I guess we haven't even talked about the propulsion for this either. Bend. Now, now I know we're getting to the what are they good for? You know, the surface isn't because that's really interesting, but we haven't talked about how you get these things moving. I mean, it's not the axill simply they're to to allow the bag to spin around. And it's a strange design. You'll think like, well, how is that thing moving, how's it spending? How does it connect to the engine? Yeah, where's the drive shaft? Where's that? Where's all that happening. It turns out it's a friction drive system. So the friction rollers are underneath the body of the vehicle and they contact the top of the bag and they through friction, moving in whichever direction you want forward reverse. Yeah, and here's here's one of the things too, Because clearly this has some specialized applications. Clearly there's not a reason for you or I or Matt or anyone really to buy these for their daily driver or somehow try to adapt it. It's just impractical. This is for roadless terrain. This is for the rugged, jagged, remote parts of the world. And we we know that people saw the value nearly immediately because Rolling on its tires. First big customer was Uncle Sam. Yeah. The U. S. Military decided to buy into this idea and they started to equip UH some some Jeep vehicles, Dodge power wagons, and Ario trucks. UH four vehicles that were shipped to Korea during the Korean conflict, and um, I think that it's probably a fantastic application of this, I mean military application. Is is a great first way to kind of break into this whole thing instead of going straight to the civilian market. Because honestly, we said, you know, what are they good for? And you mentioned, you know, the uh, the kind of rocky and difficult rain, but they're also really good for soft materials that we would normally sink into. Sand. Sand is perfect for for this snow. Yeah, mud, So if you're in a marshy area, you can traverse a swamp in these things. And you know, as long as there's enough to grab onto, it's not you know, just water. If it's a marshy uh kind of a mucky muddy, I think they call it boots sucking terrain. You know, like take one step and you lose a boot. Um this thing will float right over top of it. And I know there are other vehicles that that do similar things, but this is one that can kind of bridge the gap between that type of surface and a hard surface as well, because it works equally well on the other The difference is that with such a wide um, a wide contact patch in and a soft contact patch. If that's the way to describe um. You know, the way it deforms, it doesn't damage the surface beneath, It doesn't compact what's what's below it. So even though you're in a five ton vehicle driving over you know, soft sand or snow, you're not leaving deep tire ruts like you would in a standard jeep or a standard power wagon or a standard R E O truck or any of those. So this military application is perfect because they can go anywhere and do anything like the jeep. You know slogan sets right. Yes, Oh and I forgot the stat this. If you're wondering how low the pressure is, it's about point zero seven two point three kilograms per centimeter squared. All right, So this doesn't mean a whole lot to me, but you know what you can You can push on it and prob put your whole hand into it if you wanted to. It's a it's a very soft soft bag. What else should we talk about? You Well, you know, I would like to just mention a couple of things about the sand because I watched I've watched some of these, some of these videos, and again I encourage our listeners to do the same thing. And what it shows is really the military application of this. It shows the military vehicles that are that are so equipped and what they're capable of and what they do. And I think one of the most impressive parts of those of those demonstration films to me was climbing loose sand dunes. Yeah. Have you ever had a chance to climb a sand dune like, I mean a towering sand dune. Yeah, that's as tall as you know, a ten story building or something. Not a ten story building I have, but a long long time ago when as a kid, I mean maybe even higher. I don't know. Um, Silver Lake in Michigan, there's a place called the Sleeping Bear sand Dunes on the western side of the state and it's amazing and we should probably do a show on just that region. And some of the vehicles that people take their the sand buggy type vehicles, the competitions they have, some of the homemade vehicles that that are allowed out there. I don't know how. Um, it's really pretty. Going up a sand dune on foot can be tough. It is unbelievably difficult. I mean you you wouldn't think it, but even you look up a sand dune. That's that's loose. You know, it's not hard packed. It takes you a long long time to get up there because you take it's like you take two steps forward and you go back one and a half steps. At least, it's difficult if you're not in a roll again vehicle. Yes, yes, because it climbs it with ease. And I mean it really does climb with ease. It doesn't. It doesn't uh you know, kick the material up like a sand buggy. Would you know where it's paddling through the material? Um, it's it's not something that requires a huge fast burst of speed in order to get the hill. You can just slowly climb this uh, this loose sand hill. And I think they said a thirty percent grade. Um, so that's very very steep. Uh. Same with with descent. You know, you can also descend the sand dune at the same speed, you know, nice and slow. Uh. No material is dispersed, you're not making deep ruts, You're not, um, you know, working against yourself the whole time. It's it's really remarkable to watch this thing in action. I truly don't know why more sand buggy type vehicles today don't use this type of design, right, we we all SHO should talk about the evolution of the company, because although this is a brilliant design, there are a few difficulties or obstacles the company faces after its formation in ninety one. What they find is that, you know, they're selling a very specialized product and people are not buying them, you know, every year, all the time. So eventually financially it becomes kind of difficult, and the company is purchased in nineteen sixty sold to a guy named John um Hollard and uh Hollard, I guess movie operation to Houston, Texas. Uh, And they had decided that you know, these tires are just too expensive to make. I mean, they're they're very costly to manufacturer, and I'm not not a widely used product. I mean, the consumer market for it is almost none. And the military contracts, you know, that's fine, but there weren't enough of those coming in. There wasn't enough um you know, product being shipped out. You had to rely on more than just that. So um there there's a few other twists and turns in this, right. I think it moves around in Texas a few times, right, But the company has bought and sold a few different times within the nineties, sixties even uh, and let's go up to the seventies here there there's still building stuff and studying the entire time. Right Like in in the sixties, they study how fixing it's higher on the axis, UH can make it can make it become powered. And they adopt an articulated chassis when they create the fifty. So so this is a new suspension system, right, Yeah, lightweight supermobile, amphibious UH. Ground pressure point one five kilograms per centimeter squared UH. And then they eight They continue working on these and they their ranges go up as high as from a six by six to a fourteen by fourteen. So these they're they're starting to build these large specialized vehicles, which spoiler alert, you can still purchase if you have if you have the interests in the overhead. Right. So, anyway, where were we the seventies. In the early seventies, there's a joint venture with the Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco, and so they make twelve by twelve so this would be an eight by eight tractor with a four by four trailer. And they have those slick tires. They're driven by the rollers, right, and these are uh, these were still in use for for a long time afterwards. Interestingly enough, Albe William Hamilton's Alby has a son, William Alby Jr. And he was the driver of the first prototypes of these. Interesting so he's in some of the early photos that have I think is just one big wheel, wasn't It looks almost like a you know, a homemade cart that they made in the garage or something. Yeah, welded together prototype, but it but it clearly got across the point that this is something that's viable, it's something that's possible, and the oil industry, in the oil exploration industry really starts to like these, I bet because they're able to get out into the tundra areas, the marshy areas, the areas that were you know, previously inaccessible, but now they're able to get out there with the the equipment that they need to in order to start the the exploratory process of searching for oil without have without damaging the tunga soil which is pretty sensitive, and without always puncturing something on a rock and getting stuck, because you know, you get out in these remote regions and you need uh two other vehicles to pull you out of that area. And then in the meantime, you know, those two vehicles get stuck and then you have to send for somebody to come from back at camp. You know, it becomes a very difficult thing. UH. That just simply didn't happen with these vehicles. And I can see why the corporation, like somebody who's doing this oil exploration, uh, you know this research of this UH surveying, would have an interest in something like this. And of course the military, I mean that makes perfect sense to me as well. Sure, UM. Some of the other companies that might make sense would be, um, you know, architects and land developers and people that need to get kind of an early view of a region before their roads there really before you know, you can easily get a standard vehicle out into that that part of the world. Right. And so if we continue following this up towards the present day, we see that they do get these big contracts from around the world. China in ninety eight has an order where they want seventy five different models over five years. UH. In nineteen fifty nine, the corporation UH starts to produce and sell equipment exclusively for oil production, things like mixers, uh, the stuff they can haul, the electronics associated with wells, and pumps and pie being and following along this timeline, in nineteen nine, the corporation starts to produce and cell equipment just for oil production, so mixers, pumps, piping, electronics for wells. And it still needs to expand. So in two thousand two, the guy who wants the place at that time a phone in Mike Deering does what what you were alluding to earlier, Scott? He says, let's move from Houston, where the fees are getting kind of expensive, to a place called Anderson, Texas. And then it's clients become places like Halliburton, Schlumburger companies from Russia and South America and the Middle East. Remember when I said earlier that you can buy one of these vehicles, Yes, okay, Well in two thousand two the average price was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Well, okay, you know why it's seven Because it's used on these massive pieces of equipment that are very specialized, right, and so it's not like you can go out and buy a doom buggy that has these on it, you know, you know, be in uh, I guess the the our mortal price range, our mortal price range like that. My question would be like, well, is there a used model or you guys take trade in anything civilian? Please, anything at all? Anything you can do to to my Honda Civic? Can you do anything to that? What about what about this Subaru? Can you make it even even more adept to drive it through the march because I need to drive through the march in my s T I right right, Like you know, I love my Ford one fifty. I would like it more if I didn't need the roads at all. That's something like that. And you know what I would bet, I would bet that there's probably a conversion out there. There's probably a kit somewhere that you could somehow adapt this. But when you look at what it is really, I mean, it's the suspension is nothing more than a thing that holds the bag in place. I mean the axle, I should say the suspension is something different, but um, the axle is really nothing more of the holds that You've got to incorporate all that other stuff, the friction drive. Um, you know that specialty suspension we just mentioned, you know, that goes along with the system. Um, it's not just a matter of you know, replacing your car truck tires with these these these blue tires. It's it's different than that. It's a it's a very different system. We'll say at this point, Uh, William h Alby, William Hamilton's all be senior, the original one. Uh, he passes away from two thousand nine. Yeah, it wasn't he very very old when he was one hundred and two years old. Good for him. That's amazing two years old. Yeah, that too, that was amazing. Yeah, And as far as we could find, he spent the bulk of that time after about the fifties working on constantly refining, Uh, these concepts interesting and so with that our story ends. Uh. You can of course find rolligin vehicles or things like that around the world, and we would love to see some pictures or especially if you have experienced driving one, because I want to know about the handling. You know. I just think that with the reach that we have with our podcast now, I think that there's gotta be somebody out there that either has a a you know, some kind of firsthand knowledge that through the military applications or through um heck, even like an Arctic expedition that used them on you know, ice surfaces or something like that. That would be fascinated to hear how it's like, or hear what it's like to drive one of these, because it's got to be a strange feeling. Yeah, I imagine. So I'm still okay intellectually, Scott. I know it's fine if I lay down and one of those rolls over me, I would like to try it, but just on an emotional level, like instinctively and still not that first time would be a little rough with. Now imagine him, he's I mean, he's putting his life on the line thinking that, you know, this should work, that's really should But maybe you tested out with you know, sac of potatoes first. Yeah, see how the potatoes fair first, and then uh, maybe I'll do it myself. The old sack of potatoes test well. On that note, it is time for us to head out. We're gonna go have some further adventures. We hope you are having adventures as well, and if you are, we'd love to hear about them. You can find us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter. Scott and I are car stuff hs w at both of those. Uh, and we take suggestions for both of those, which is why you know you are. Suggestion for today's episode came from a tweet. Uh special thanks to Trish so much for writing in. Looking forward to reading that book. And if you have something you'd like to send us, or a question, like to ask a topic, Um, a limerick if you want, but you know, keep it kind of clean. You asked for limericks all this time. You know how many limeris we've received. Zero? Count let's acounting the ones we've got last week plus the ones the previous mom man still zero, it's still z okay, all right, yeah, but you know what I'm hoping, I'm hopeful to someday we're gonna get one and it maybe it'll be clean enough that we can read it on air, you know, hope Springs E Turtle, Scott had Lemericks usually don't go with the queen direction, No, not in my experience, but not the good ones. But uh, but if you if you would like to write in and again this listener driven show, all of our best ideas come from you. Go ahead and take a page from Kyle and Tricia's book. You can send us an email directly. We are car stuff at how stuff work dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, there's a how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com

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Did Bonnie and Clyde really write to Henry Ford to thank him for his fast, reliable getaway cars? Do 
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