IN A NARROW ALLEY between the twelve-lane roar of Beijing’s second ring road and the touristy mayhem of the Drum and Bell towers is a whitewashed shoebox of a space that is more an extension of the little concrete stoop out front than an actual room. There, on a late-summer Saturday this year, four early risers stand peering at a matter-of-fact list of instructions jotted on a white board. Sweet odors of epoxy and sawdust mask the gritty, metallic smell of the smog blanketing the city.

Knobby sticks of bamboo are lined up on four workbenches. A diagram of a bicycle frame is posted on the wall above each bench. In a day’s time these sticks will be frames and, in a few days more, they will be rolling off down the street with their builders on board.

At the moment, though, the diagrams look like a dare.

Here at Bamboo Bicycles Beijing’s ninth and last bicycle-building workshop of the year, David Chin-Fei Wang ’09, compact and boyish at 28, moves calmly among the participants, taking up a saw and guiding its teeth into a bamboo tube, adjusting a vise or murmuring encouragement to someone who has improvised a solution to a tricky cut. The industrious humility of the scene belies the seriousness of the issue Wang hopes to address: the smog-belching, land-devouring, atomizing urban gridlock that besets cities across Asia as newly wealthy societies embrace the private automobile.

In Beijing, a city once famous for its bicycles, car worship is powerful. Tree-lined bike paths have been leveled to accommodate the city’s six million vehicles. An ever-expanding network of ring roads radiates deeper and deeper into the countryside, and car exhaust accounts for a quarter of the city’s infamous smog. All of this brings little joy to drivers. Though China has become the number one consumer of some of the world’s fastest cars—Lamborghinis, Porsches and Ferraris abound—traffic creeps along at an average speed of under 10 miles per hour.

Wang hopes that, by helping people make fine bikes by hand he can get them to think differently about the way they move around the city.

“It’s not about getting rid of cars,” says Wang. “It’s about starting a conversation about a more diverse mobility culture.”

AFTER GRADUATING FROM Pomona with a degree in Asian Studies, Wang won a Fulbright to study physical fitness programs and nationalism in China, where Mao Zedong once prescribed a regimen of exercises, saying, “The body is the capital of the revolution.” After spending time at Xi’an Jiatong University, though, he found what the students did in their free time more interesting than the program of study.

Moving to Beijing, he took a job with China Youthology, a market research company set up to help brands like Mercedes, Pepsi Co. and Nokia understand how Chinese kids in their teens and twenties make decisions.

As Wang settled in Beijing, he started noticing the old bicycles abandoned around the city, sometimes in heaps and sometimes tethered alone to a fence or tree. It seemed like a waste. Scouring the sidewalks for something he could refurbish, he decided on a Yongjiu brand cruiser from the 1980s.

In his living room he cleaned and stripped the old frame, tinkering with components until everything was back in working order. He painted the bike Fanta orange, added some tiger stripes and set it atop white tires.

Wherever the tiger bike went, it drew curious onlookers. Though China produces more goods than any other country, making stuff by hand is not a pastime for the urban elite. A new middle class has so thoroughly rejected handicraft that even the building of IKEA furniture is mostly outsourced. So Beijingers were uncertain what to make of something so humble made with such obvious care.

Wang, however, wasn’t satisfied. In a country where mining and refinement of metals has tainted rivers, soil and air, he wanted to work with something friendlier to the environment. So naturally, he thought of a resource that China has in great abundance—something beautiful and rapidly renewable, a species of grass that can grow as much as 35 inches in a day, producing a material pliant enough to act as a natural shock absorber, yet durable and stiff enough to handle well.

He thought of bamboo.

The idea of building bicycle frames out of bamboo isn’t new. The first bamboo bicycles were a sensation at the London Stanley Show of 1894, and there are several companies manufacturing and selling them today. In China, a small start-up called Shanghai Bamboo Bicycles has been marketing bamboo bikes and trikes since 2009. But Wang wasn’t interested in selling bamboo bikes—he just wanted to build one.

So he ordered a few lengths of bamboo on Taobao, China’s vaster version of eBay, and set to work figuring out how to make them into a frame. Cobbling together information from the web, Wang worked in the living room of the apartment he shared with friends until he had his first completed bamboo bike.

If his tiger bike attracted attention, the bamboo bike was a showstopper. “People were always stopping me to ask about the bike,” he says. Wang enjoyed the resulting conversations with people from all walks of life, from stolid middle-class citizens to fashion-conscious kids, and in their curiosity, he sensed an opportunity to make a difference.

During his research on the web, he had stumbled onto a number of bike-building workshops in places ranging from Africa to Australia. Maybe, he thought, a workshop to teach people in Beijing to build their own bamboo bikes would deepen the impromptu conversations he was having in the street and create a cascade of conversations about the sustainability of China’s growing car culture.

But first, he had to scale up.

He streamlined his building process and equipment so that four participants could be fairly certain to produce a bamboo frame in just two days. Then, to get a better understanding of his new medium, he traveled to Taiwan, where some of the best bamboo craftsmen taught him which bamboo was best suited for bicycles and how to work with it. Through a Kickstarter campaign, he raised $17,869. A campaign on China’s Dreamore crowdsourcing platform brought in another $3,000, and Bamboo Bicycles Beijing was born.

“I AM YOUR TYPICAL victim of a Chinese education,” laughs Danna Zhu as she works on her bicycle frame. “There are so many of us. They don’t let us make anything in school.” Posing with a bandsaw poised above a tube of bamboo, she asks the gangly bespectacled college dropout at the next station to take her picture. She’s never used a saw before.

At 23, Danna is part of a post-1990 generation of Chinese women widely chastised for their materialism. Back in 2010, when a contestant on a reality TV show told a young bachelor she would “rather cry in the back of a BMW” than take a ride on the back of his bicycle, government regulators ordered reality shows to rein in the broadcast of “incorrect social and love values such as money worship.”

But a car, like a house, remains a prerequisite for many brides and their families.

“They’ll still want cars,” Zhu says of her friends.

Ragtag kids from the hutong—the narrow lane outside—skitter about her as she works, steadying a bamboo tube while she saws or pilfering bamboo scraps to paint on the steps, where an old woman driving a tricycle cart loaded with soda stops to banter. Another grandma pauses on her way from the wet market to give a thumbs up.

The kids seem to appreciate the workshop more than anyone. Against one wall is propped a small bike. The kids built it themselves. For days before the September workshop, they have been coming by, clamoring to know whether Wang has finished adding components like wheels and a seat. On the first day of the workshop, Fei Fei, 9, finds the bike ready at last. Quietly he lifts it out onto the street, pedaling a tentative few yards before disappearing around the corner.

Twice in the course of a few hours, people stop to compliment the bikes and ask how much they cost. When a grizzled man towing recycling on his tricycle cart repeats the query a third time, Wang, visibly piqued, says again that the bicycles are not for sale.

“They think it’s just about selling a bike and it’s not.” What it is about, as he often repeats, is starting a conversation.

IT’S FALL 2014, and Wang is planning an October trip to Massachusetts, with several frames for supporters of his Kickstarter campaign stashed in his luggage. The project is at a turning point—the goal he had set for himself and online funders had been to build 25 bikes. He has doubled that and is on target to make 75 by the end of the year. All of this is good but he wonders how he might further the conversation, perhaps tapping into the kind of enthusiasm he’d seen in the kids on the lane.

He’s looking into partnering with local schools. At the same time, he’s searching for ways to make more and better bikes in as sustainable a way as possible, tracking down villages with abundant bamboo, looking for alternatives to epoxy, and working on kits for people to make bikes at home.

The frames themselves are slowly morphing—he made his first women’s and kid’s prototypes in late summer. Participants have egged him on with requests for things like cup-holders, children’s seats and multi-gear models.

“Right now I’m just concentrating on making the next bike,” Wang says. “I’ll follow my curiosity and hope it just grows.”

Recently, Mercedes, an old client of his, got in touch.

“Benz is doing a lot to create more efficient and sustainable urban mobility,” he says. “It’s to their credit. They see the way things are isn’t sustainable.”

Back on the lane, an old, flat-faced Liberation truck filled with sand for construction has blocked the T-junction. While a bleating line of cars and jerry-rigged motorized tricycle trucks forms along the cross road, an antlike stream of pedestrians and scooters improvise a path through a pile of sand. It’s along this path that two bamboo bicycles slip quietly northward, leaving a Lexus SUV in the dust.

REMEMBER THE U.S. ARMY commercials from the 1980s? A voice intones: “We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.” If Mad Men’s Don Draper were to coin a catchphrase for Dick Post, it would read: “He’s made more discoveries after age 90 than most scientists do in their careers.”

For more than six decades, Richard F. Post ’40 has dedicated his life to solving energy challenges. “My whole career has been shaped by energy,” he says. An applied physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Post has 34 patents to his name—nine issued since he turned 90—in nuclear fusion, magnetics and flywheel energy storage.

Post, who turned 96 in November, maintains a work schedule that would exhaust a man a quarter of his age. Retired since 1994 and officially known as a “rehired retired scientist,” Post clocks 30 hours at the lab each week. Until a fall last year injured his shoulder, he was driving himself the 60-mile round trip from his home four days each week to LLNL. “You know why he takes the fifth day off?” asks Steve Wampler, a public information officer at LLNL. “Because he’s retired.”

Post may take a day off at the lab, but that doesn’t mean he stops working. “Friday through Sunday are not always days off for Dick,” says Post’s colleague Robert Yamamoto, principal Investigator for LLNL’s electromechanical battery program. “When Dick comes to work at LLNL on Monday morning, I can generally expect to get a call from him. Dick will want to chat about his latest ideas and thoughts he has developed over the past 72 hours,” adds Yamamoto. The two often meet for lunch on Mondays in Dick’s office. “Dick wants to know if his ideas are practical and have some ‘real meat on the bones.’”

“I learn so much, and am equally amazed at the quality of the new ideas Dick has and his extreme enthusiasm for his ideas—as if he was a person just starting off in his science career,” he says.

POMONA ROOTS

Post’s family connections with Pomona College go back more than 100 years. His grandfather, Daniel H. Colcord, was professor of classics, and his mother, Miriam Colcord, graduated in 1910. Post credits Pomona College with helping him discover both his life’s work and the love of his life.

In Professor of Physics Roland R. Tileston he found both an academic mentor and a life mentor. “He not only looked after my academic side; he looked after my social side,” Post says. “He would call me in on Monday morning and say, ‘There was a dance on Saturday. Did you go to it? Did you take a different girl?’”

Tileston took special care to ensure that promising students had the financial means to undertake graduate studies. “In my case, for financial reasons, he kept me on for a year as a graduate assistant—700 bucks, saved half of it. And then, in 1941, he started me as an instructor in physics because he had arranged for a fellowship for me at MIT.”

Then came Pearl Harbor. Tileston immediately recommended Post for a position at the Naval Research Laboratory near Washington, D.C., where a former student of Tileston’s, Dr. John Ide, was director of the sonar program. “When I left, I flew from Los Angeles airport and he brought the whole physics class to see me off,” recalls Post. “He was a marvelous professor, and I owe him a tremendous debt.”

It was while he was living in Virginia that a friend and fellow alumnus, Vince Peterson ’43, heard that some Pomona College girls were in town and decided to throw a party. “Marylee [Marylee Armstrong ’47] and her friends came,” Post recalls, “and it was 15 minutes before I knew that this is the one I wanted to spend my life with.”

FROM FUSION TO FLYWHEELS

It was nuclear fusion that brought Dick Post to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1952. Following his completion of a doctorate in physics at Stanford and a brief stint at nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Post had heard Herb York, the first director of LLNL, deliver some lectures on the topic. Post later followed York to LLNL, interviewing for the job with the lab’s co-founder and future director, Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Magnetic nuclear fusion would be the focus of Post’s research until the mid-1980s.

Convinced of the promise of the technology, Post regards the premature termination of his line of fusion research, in an act of Cold War politics, a regrettable mistake. “The fuel reserve for fusion is infinite. There’s no long-term radioactive problems, no carbon. That’s why I devoted most of my career to fusion research—until the budget was cut in a deal between Reagan and Gorbachev,” he says. LLNL was forced to phase out its magnetic fusion program, and Post had to shift his attention to other fields. But, in what would become a hallmark of his career, Post was able to apply lessons learned from his research in nuclear fusion to a seemingly unrelated area: magnetically levitated trains.

With seed money dispensed under a competitive grant program run by the LLNL director, Post was awarded a couple of million dollars to develop a concept for maglev train technology. The concept, Inductrack, was later licensed by the San Diego-based defense contractor General Atomics and, in 2004, a 120-meter test track was built.

“It involves a special array of permanent magnets mounted underneath the train and a track, which consists of shorted parallel conductors. The levitation only requires motion. The test model levitates at walking speeds. The Japanese superconducting train has to be over 100 miles per hour before it levitates,” says Post.

“Why is this important?” he asks. “Because if all power fails, this train doesn’t give a darn. It slows down to walking speeds and settles down onto its wheels. It’s a totally fail-safe system. That’s going to be a very important characteristic of future maglevs—they’d better be fail-safe.”

Plans to build a 4.6-mile, full-scale demonstration system on the campus of California University of Pennsylvania were put on hold when the Great Recession hit in 2008. Post says Inductrack technology has been licensed to two other companies—he couldn’t give their names.

In another case of iterative innovation, Post is leveraging knowledge gained from the development of Inductrack to his latest—and likely last—research focus: flywheel energy storage. Post’s thinking on the topic has had a long gestation. In December 1973, Post and his son Stephen published an article in Scientific American making the case that advances in materials and mechanical design made it possible to use flywheels to store energy in the power sector and in the propulsion systems of vehicles.

Forty years later, Post believes he might actually see his concept hit the market within a few years.

The principle of the flywheel is quite simple. A spinning wheel stores mechanical energy; energy can be either put in or taken out of the device. Post’s flywheel research builds upon work done in the 1950s by MIT researcher John G. Trump on electrostatic generators. “He didn’t appreciate the importance of the charging circuit that charges this thing and puts the voltage on it. He used a resistor,” Post says. When Post started work on electrostatic generators for flywheels, he asked himself a question: “’Why the heck did Trump use a resistor? Why didn’t he use an inductor, to reduce losses?’” Post experimented on his computer, inserting an inductor value for the resistor. “All of a sudden, the power took off by almost a factor of 100,” he says.

Many flywheel manufacturers use what are called active magnetic bearings to suspend and stabilize the flywheel—not Post. “What we have developed over many years now,” he says, “is what is called passive magnetic bearings, which are self-stabilizing and don’t require any feedback circuits. They are extremely simple compared to the active bearings, much less expensive, and don’t require any maintenance.”

“If we design it right,” he adds, “it has an almost indefinite lifetime because there are no wearing parts.” This is in contrast to, say, the lithium-ion batteries used in smart phones, laptops, and electric vehicles, which have a limited life cycle of charges and discharges before they must be replaced. Because Post’s flywheel operates essentially friction free, energy dissipation is very low. The flywheel operates at 95% to 98% efficiency—that is, up to 98% of the energy stored in the flywheel can be extracted and put to use.

Post envisions the technology used in large- and small-scale applications. Grid-scale units would be deployed by utilities or grid operators to help balance the variable output from large solar and wind power plants. A 5-kilowatt residential unit would be about the size of a suitcase, says Post, with the flywheel sealed in a vacuum chamber, perhaps under the floor of the garage.

Post says a company is interested in adapting his flywheel technology for use in cars. The idea is not new. Flywheels are already used by Formula 1 racing cars to supply quick bursts of power. For the consumer market, manufacturers would install a series of small flywheels that would, in all-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf or Tesla Model S, replace a battery pack entirely; for hybrids like the Toyota Prius, flywheels would replace the small battery pack that boosts efficiency.

“We could substantially extend the range and eliminate the fire hazard posed by lithium-ion battery technology, and avoid the battery life cycle problem,” says Post.

MAKING IT HAPPEN

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Sir Isaac Newton. If so, the spry Dick Post must be a contortionist, because one set of shoulders he is standing on is his own.

He says one reason he has been so productive for so long, especially after age 90, is that his recent patents build upon earlier discoveries. He is using magnetic bearings work from Inductrack, for instance, in his current flywheel research. “Even though it’s a totally different field, it’s the same concept,” he says. “One of the reasons that I can still file patents is I can draw on past experience and convert it to a present problem.” He has filed 28 of his 85 records of invention, a precursor to a patent, since he turned 90.

Asked where his ideas come from, Post mentions that he recently read a book about the inventor Nikola Tesla. “He was able to visualize, without hardware, his inventions. That’s part of the process for me. When I go to sleep, I think: The magnets could go this way.” Post also credits software invented decades after his career began. “The tremendous help to me in this whole process is I learned how to use Mathematica, which is a very sophisticated computer mathematics program. I couldn’t live without it.”

For Post, the labors of his theorizing mean nothing if the result cannot be used to solve a problem in the real world. “Dick certainly is an ‘idea’ man,” says colleague Robert Yamamoto, “but he truly understands the need to do the real engineering to make an idea come to fruition. He knows that theory alone can only take you so far, and that an idea, unless demonstrated completely, is not worth much. He sincerely understands the real-world, make-it-happen aspect that engineering brings to the table. This is not a common trait of many of the scientists I have worked with.”

Asked what drives him to come to the office four days a week, Post answers without hesitation: “The flywheel. I want to see this happen! I’ve devoted my career to energy. For Pete’s sake, we were torpedoed on fusion, which I think was a terrible mistake.

“My real hope is that this thing becomes commercial before I kick the bucket. I would like to see it happen.”