Daniel Valdez of Smeeon modded this motorized wheelchair to look like a steampunk version of X-Men's Professor Xavier's wheelchair. Fantastic!

Check out the video clip over at Roger Ebert's Journal and the photo gallery over at Flickr.

Jesef, in a motorized wheelchair, is chased by a desert tortoise named Cruiser. As exciting as this is, I can’t help but think it needs more Yakety Sax. -via Buzzfeed

It costs less than $60 to have each chair made, shipped and delivered to “some of the most remote corners of the globe,” according to Schoendorfer’s website, freewheelchairmission.org.

Better yet, the recipients don’t have to pay a dime for their new mobility.

Schoendorfer says he hopes to distribute 20-million wheelchairs in total.

Link -via Breakfast Links

(Image credit: KTLA-TV)

FDR spent his entire presidency hiding the fact that he needed a wheelchair, and he wanted a memorial that would do the same. Future generations disagreed.

Four years before his death, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that if he had to have a memorial, he wanted it to be about the size of his desk and placed on a patch of grass in front of the National Archives -anything more would be too showy and too costly a remembrance (a granite table fitting the description was placed there in his honor in 1965). Frankfurter may have heard what FDR wanted, but Congress didn’t seem to have been listening. One year after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Congress felt the need to commemorate him on a larger scale and passed a resolution authorizing the creation of a grander memorial, one comparable to the other presidential memorials located around the Tidal Basin. There was just one problem: FDR’s wheelchair.

POWERFUL MAN, INVISIBLE CHAIR

Despite being completely unable to walk, President Roosevelt led the country out of the Great Depression and through World War II during his unprecedented four terms in office. He was the first disabled leader to be elected in American history, but most Americans of the 1930s and 1940s didn’t even know their president required a wheelchair. They were aware that Roosevelt had contracted polio in 1921 and were under the impression that he wore braces or used a wheelchair occasionally for convenience. And that’s just what FDR wanted them to believe because he was afraid that otherwise the world would perceive him as weak.

(Image source: The U.S. National Archives)

Roosevelt went to great lengths to deceive the public regarding his paralysis -he even created a method to make it appear he was walking. With his legs in locked braces, he would lean heavily on a cane with one hand and on someone else’s hand with the other. Then he’d swing each leg forward while leaning on the opposite hand, throwing his upper body forward. When he sat down the braces had to be unlocked. The braces caused Roosevelt to fall in public three different times, but the cooperative press never reported these incidents. In fact they never photographed him in his wheelchair at all. Of the 125,000 photos housed in the FDR library in Hyde Park, New York, only two private photos show the president seated in a wheelchair.

(Image source: Library of Congress)

The Secret Service built permanent ramps at all the places he visited often. They’d get him into cars by putting his back to the door and helping him vault himself with the strength of his arms; so it would appear he was getting in on his own steam. The act even included events at the White House. Dinner guests were first escorted upstairs and greeted by FDR seated in front of drinks. Then Mrs. Roosevelt would lead them downstairs for a tour of the house. By the time they arrived in the dining room for dinner, FDR would already be seated in his chair, ready to eat.  At outdoor receptions, gardeners would set up a tall seat, like a bicycle seat, for FDR to lean against and appear to be standing. Then they’d hide it with ferns. With all this help, Roosevelt managed to maintain his active image -both politically and in bearing, with a constant broad smile and a strong voice.

A WHEELCHAIR FOR EVERYONE TO SEE

(Image credit: Flickr user Paul Seegers)

More than fifty years after FDR’s death, President Bill Clinton finally dedicated the FDR Memorial in 1997. Located between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials along the famous Cherry Tree Walk surrounding the Tidal Basin, the memorial consists of a red South Dakota granite plaza with a series of outdoor galleries that each depict the chronological events of one of Roosevelt’s four terms. Alcoves, shady trees, plants, and soft water cascades give the statues and educational engravings the feel of an expansive, reflective garden. The memorial includes a larger-than-life statue of Roosevelt covered with his characteristic cloak as he sits in a chair with an oversize sculpture of his beloved Scottie dog, Fala, beside him. If you look closely, you can see two tiny wheels in the back of the chair, just visible beneath the cloak’s edge.

(Image credit: Flickr user Wally Gobetz)

Even though the monument had officially opened, the controversy over FDR’s wheelchair continued. By depicting the wheelchair subtly, rendering it almost invisible in the memorial, the FDR Memorial Commission decided to underplay the president’s infirmity. They did this despite angry complaints that doing so was a denial of the achievements of people with disabilities and a harmful continuation of the fiction President Roosevelt felt forced to maintain because of the prevailing attitudes of his time. The commission and its supporters argued it would be wrong to revise history and portray what FDR went to such great lengths to actively hide from the world. Activists for the disabled argued that his tremendous achievements in spite of his condition couldn’t be properly celebrated or understood without accurately portraying it. Many observers pointed out the fight was largely symbolic: FDR was one of the greatest American presidents and potentially the greatest hero disabled Americans ever had. A memorial recognizing FDR’s own private struggle with his paralysis could never undermine the greatness of his personal and public achievements.

(Image credit: Flickr user Charles Pence)

After six years of protests and debate, groups championing those with disabilities finally won approval from the National Park Service to add a new statue, and they raised $1.65 million to do it. Placed near the entrance of the memorial in in July 1998, the life-size, bronze statue features FDR sitting in a wheelchair he himself designed and lived in for more than twenty years. In this statue the president wears his customary fedora and gazes upward. Positioned low enough so that those in wheelchairs can touch it, the statue is the first ever to depict a world leader seated in a wheelchair.

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The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Presidency.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Aaron “Wheelz” Fotheringham {wiki} has spina bifida and began using a wheelchair when he was three yers old. He has been confined to a wheelchair since the age of eight. Fotheringham achieved the double backflip last weekend. -via the Daily What

Photo: Erin Papacki

Creating a robot capable of grasping a variety of door nobs but is light enough to fit onto a wheelchair is quite an engineering challenge. But Erin Rapacki of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell was up to the task, and built one from only $2,000:

A door-opening robot must be able to grasp a variety of designs of door knobs and handles. It also needs to calculate “how much force is needed to open the door, the twisting angles to unlatch the door, and how much force is needed to unlatch it”, says Erin Rapacki, now at Anybots in Mountain View, California [...]

To keep her device simple, Rapacki used a single motor and avoided the expense of cameras and elaborate sensors. Instead, a motor-driven set of gears extends the gripper towards the handle with its three fingers spread apart (see diagram).

Rapacki first tried flexible neoprene fingers, thinking that they could bend to grasp the knob, but these proved too thick and soft. Stiff plastic fingers with plates to constrain their sideways motion proved much more effective.

She also added a slip clutch to the drive system, to allow the device to hold and turn the knob at the same time as pushing or pulling.

Link via Popular Science

The affidavit says one witness, Chris Bevin, saw the suspect, 34-year-old Kevin Salyers, run from the toy department. Bevin told investigating officers that he began to run after Salyers, and shouted “stop that man!” But no one was able to stop him.

That’s when a man working at the Comcast table at the front of the store went into action. Even more amazing, the Comcast employee, 22-year-old Cameron Aulner was in a wheel chair. Aulner pulled in front of the suspect, and grabbed his t-shirt. Aulner says he wound up out of his wheel chair, and on top of the suspect who was on the ground.

Link via Say Uncle | Image: Fox News

The Galileo Robot has retractable wheels within its rear wheels that extend on command, expanding the hub of the wheel into a tank track. This allows the vehicle to have the advantages of a tracked vehicle when off-road, but the advantages of a wheeled vehicle when on a smooth surface. One application that the developer, Galileo Mobility Instruments, has already developed is a wheelchair that allows users to climb and descend stairs.

Company Website via Make Magazine

The device scans brain waves through sensors in a cap. In 125 thousandths of a second, the brain-controlled wheelchair can turn a thought into a command to turn the chair left or right or to move it forward. To stop, however, the user must puff out his or her cheek, activating a sensor placed there. [...]

To best pilot the wheelchair, don’t try too hard, suggested RIKEN scientist Andrzej Cichocki, leader of the project.

"It works best if you imagine playing the piano with either hand while turning the wheelchair or, for instance, jogging, to [make the chair] move forward," Cichocki said. "After two to four weeks of training, the accuracy is nearly perfect and it becomes effortless."

Link

Dick and Rick Hoyt are a father-son team who have run 60 marathons (25 of them the Boston Marathon), 6 Ironman Triathlons (composed of 2.4 mile swim, followed by a 116 mile bike ride and then a 26 mile maraton), and other races for a total of nearly 1000 events.

Rick has cerebral palsy, so his dad pushes him in a wheelchair and pulls him in a raft through the water … Watch this clip for a fascinating look at Team Hoyt.

– via jaredstanley

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by j_red.