Young Entrepreneur – Ben Gulak
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Young Entrepreneur, Ben Gulak, with the Uno.
After a family holiday to China, where he saw first-hand the horrible pollution caused by traditional motorised transport, 17-year-old Ben Gulak decided that he could design something better.
Many students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology look forward to the day they’ll make headlines with an extraordinary invention. But Ben Gulak, now a 19-year-old freshman, looks back. He’s the inventor of the Uno, an electric motorcycle that has its two wheels side by side instead of fore and aft, balances using a computer and gyroscope, and maneuvers with a shift of the rider’s body forward, back or sideways.
Mr. Gulak, from a suburb of Toronto, began pursuing the concept two years ago after returning from a family trip to smog-choked China and seeing streets clogged with sputtering motorbikes. Battery power would avoid pollution, and the small size would allow the cycle to negotiate crowded streets — and even to be carted up to an apartment.
He retreated to the machine shop in his house assembled with gear he inherited from his grandfather and, initially for a science fair, began assembling a prototype from conventional motorcycle parts. The project, he says, allowed him to “mesh two passions” — engineering and motorcycles. As he describes it, the early effort — replete with burning motors — resembled the scenes in the movie “Iron Man” when a rocket-propelled suit goes out of control. Mr. Gulak got help from a robotics engineer, Trevor Blackwell, and added systems that stabilize the vehicle.
Since then, he has won a heap of accolades — Popular Science chose the bike as one of the top 10 inventions of the year and featured it on the cover; Mr. Gulak made an appearance on “The Tonight Show” — as well as the interest of investors.
But for now he’s seeking international patents, and dealing with exams.
Source: The New York Times
May 13th, 2009 at 12:34 am
Hello Ben
I met you a couple years ago at the Toronto bike show in the C.N.E. grounds and have my picture on your Uno.You have been missed at the show.How are your plans for the Uno coming along?Will we be able to purchase one any time soon,and do you have a price in mind yet? I would like to be apart of your team in getting this project on the road.Hope every thing is going well for you.Get in touch if you can.Thanks.
Bill Zimmerman (Scarborough, Ont)
June 15th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
[...] Ben Gulak, 19, Uno When Ben visited China he couldn’t help but notice that they had a serious air pollution problem exacerbated by the fact that a great number of the population rode around on motorcycles. After pondering the issue for a while, he came up with a solution – emission-free bikes. The design earned Ben a spot at the International Science and Engineering Fair, it got him the cover of Popular Science magazine, which put Uno at the number one spot on its list of the year’s top inventions, and a slot on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The huge publicity attracted a number of investors to fund a second prototype, for which Ben has hired a full team of engineers. They are aiming to get the first models out in November. “Everything that is happening right now is so exciting”, Ben enthused, “but I still have to focus on my education and getting my degree.” [...]
July 28th, 2009 at 4:57 am
[...] http://raisingentrepreneurs.org/blog/2009/03/04/young-entrepreneur-ben-gulak/ [...]
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