On certain three speed bicycles, the shifter is made by a company called Sturmey Archer. On a particularly long ride one time, my mother told me that Sturmey Archer was the name of the little man who lived inside the hub and changed the gears. He had very large ears, which made the clicking noise as you rode, and changed the gears by sticking his nose in and out of the hub. This last bit isn't too far off from how a three speed hub works (sans extremely small man), so she might have been actually trying to teach me something useful...
A childhood belief about technology
others believed things like this
- For a very long time I believed that there were little men underground that changed the traffic lights!— Melissa
- My older brother told me that speed bumps were really dead people covered in cement.— Trina
- I thought that if you were speeding and hit a speed bump, it would cause your car to fly into the air.— SeñorChaCha
- When my wife was a kid, she used to think that highway speed bumps were for the blind.Anon
- I used to believe that speed bumps were dead bodies that had been paved over.— Natalie
- I always had to sleep with my feet under the covers or else speed racer would drive over them.Anon