David M. Patrick has accidentally re-invented the wheel. The California-based inventor was toying around with six short, curved lengths of cable that he had connected into a sort of helical loop--and then he accidentally dropped it. What he observed next was surprising: The loop began to roll... and roll... and roll. It was a self-balancing wheel.
Even stranger was that no one expected it to roll; Patrick's loop actually looks square when it is rolling. A lifelong skater, Patrick then prototyped a skateboard wheel based on his design, this one comprised of side-by-side helical coils. He call it the Shark Wheel:
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