Think of all the things you could power using internal combustion. Bicycles? Absolutely. Scooters? Yep. Skateboards? Sure, why not. Pogo sticks? Believe it or not, yes. Say hello to the Hop Rod, arguably the most insane form of combustion-powered personal transportation.
Yesterday, I mentioned the Hop Rod while writing about Mitsubishi beer and immediately realized that I needed to write an actual article on this bizarre toy. After all, a pogo stick augmented by tiny explosions sounds like a phenomenally fun way to break ankles and spawn lawsuits.
The motorized pogo stick was invented by Gordon Spitzmesser of Elwood, Ind. around the turn of the 1960s. Hey, it was a time of great optimism, if cars could have fins that an explosion-aided pogo stick could totally be a viable product. While Spitzmesser tried out various fuel mixtures including a reportedly thrilling combination of oxygen and acetylene, butane was eventually settled on as the safest solution. IndyStar reports that Spitzmesser was granted a patent on March 22, 1960, which must be one of the coolest thing of all time that could be hung on a refrigerator. Crazier still, IndyStar reports that Spitzmesser’s son Edwin was the Hop Rod’s guinea pig.
The inventor’s test pilot was his adolescent son Edwin. “Even on butane, if you came down not quite straight you could shoot out to the side and injure yourself,” said Edwin, now 66 and a retired school teacher living in LaPorte. But if you knew what you were doing, as Edwin did, it was fun. “I could do about anything with it,” Edwin said the other day in a phone interview. “I could do it with one hand and one foot.”
Those are some properly impressive skills, Edwin. Despite the non-zero risk of serious injury, Spitzmesser’s combustion-powered pogo stick sounds like an absolute gas. Someone deliver one to Johnny Knoxville and Co. stat. Anyway, while the combustion-powered pogo stick likely provided Edwin with hours of entertainment, Gordon Spitzmesser never got into the business of mass production. Instead, Spitzmesser sold the patent to Chance Manufacturing of Wichita, Kan., an ironic name given the chance you might get seriously injured if you hop on one of these bad boys. Chance Manufacturing marketed the device as the Hop Rod for a very brief while, before everyone realized what an insanely sketchy idea it was.
Back up for a second, how does a gas-powered pogo stick works. Let me tell you, it’s beautifully simple. Since a pogo stick is really just two concentric cylinders with a spring for resistance, it was fairly easy to turn one into a crude engine of sorts. This was essentially done by splitting the lower cylinder into two chambers. A piston atop the inner cylinder was fitted with a poppet valve to allow flow from the primary chamber into the secondary chamber and maintain vacuum under compression. When a rider hopped on the pogo stick, the lower cylinder would compress into the upper cylinder, sending the primary chamber past the carburetor and drawing in fuel-air mixture.
Pop up on the pogo stick, and the cylinder would extend, forcing the fuel-air mixture in the primary chamber up through the poppet valve and into the secondary chamber to be compressed once the pogo stick touched terra firma again, then ignited by a spark plug powered by a stack of batteries in the handle. The resulting explosion would launch the rider into the air and the cycle would complete all over again.
So what’s riding a Hop Rod like? Well, check out this quick one-minute YouTube video of the thing in action. Either this kid has some serious skills or the Hop Rod actually seems pretty safe. The height isn’t crazy, the hops are well-controlled, and the whole thing almost looks sensible.
Nowadays, Hop Rod units come up for sale online every so often, although you’ll have to pay a pretty penny to get one. There’s one up for grabs on eBay right now for $999, expensive for a pogo stick but reasonable for personal combustion-powered transportation. Plus, imagine the rush of being on a combustion-powered pogo stick. If electric scooters are a bit too quick and too mainstream for you, why not grab a Hop Rod? It seems like good, old-fashioned sketchy fun.
Go for the trifecta, ride a Hop Rod, play Jarts and Clackers at the same time
The April 1973 Road&Track has a road test of the Hop Rod.
Also:
“ reportedly thrilling combination of oxygen and acetylene”
I can imagine! After occasionally inadvertently setting of an oxy acetylene bang welding I would not ever think of trying that but would watch from a suitable distance.
Thanks for getting the date, I clearly remember reading the article but not the year. Back in the day R&T always had something weird in the April issue like a locomotive or a blimp and once did an entire parody called Rod & Truck.
Interestingly the Hop Rod is basically a miniature pile driver.
I’m surprised Mainway Inc. never picked it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veMiNQifZcM
I can’t believe nobody else has posted this:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3Dr62PMFiS5LA&ved=2ahUKEwj8qoyklaf6AhXek4kEHXIqA1wQwqsBegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw3cz-DGkPkz-pP_kGGxHlTH
TH I S is what I was expecting from a powered Pogo stick
I like the idea that everyone in the ’60s were just sitting around waiting for this to come along.
“Gee whiz Gertrude, I’d sure like to go hoppin’, but it’ll just tucker me out. Why can’t someone think of a way for me to hop with the help of explosions? What? The Hop Rod! Well Hop Damn!”
And here I thought cap guns were a cool use of mild explosives in children’s toys…
As a kid, we’d bring back fireworks from France, and use them to launch Lego vehicles up the road
Diesel powered pile drivers operate similarly, they are basically two-stroke engines.
The article was great. I was ready to see some serious vertical lift. That was maybe three inches? It’s about as exciting as the X-Ray specs.
What an interesting idea.
Kind of pointless given pogo sticks dont use much of your energy but still neat
I think they make pogo sticks with a much longer throw nowadays. I expected to see at least double the pushback that shown. Doesn’t seem like any advantage at all.
It’s so perfect that it was made by a company called “Chance.” I love that it exists, but I wouldn’t ride one on a bet.
So could you make an electric one were you charged up a capacitor by jumping on it until the capacitor was full, then it discharged the power to the moving shaft? The capacitor (or batteries) would live in the cylinder.
Using a large solenoid to convert the electricity into motion? Sounds sketchy, I’m in!
I love how the commercial shows people using the Hop Rod right next to flights of stairs and low railings. As if to say – if I’m going to fall off this gas-powered jumping machine, I should at least be thrown down from a significant height.
Ok, it doesn’t propel you nearly as violently as I had assumed. Still cool, though.
But I gotta admit I was hoping to read mdharrell’s write up of this. (Nothing against Thomas at all: I just like the idea of readers becoming contributors)
In my admittedly limited experience the Hop Rod wasn’t “violent” in the sense of throwing the rider several feet in the air but instead “violent” in the sense of providing a sharp jolt at what occasionally seemed to be the wrong point in the hop cycle. In its defense maybe mine wasn’t running properly and/or I was simply incompetent. I mean, I’m definitely incompetent, but perhaps in this context even more so.
I don’t think it’s you. Backyard Scientist on Youtube got ahold of one and had exactly the same response even after fiddling with it. All the power gets delivered in a single short impulse, so you get a brief but ankle-straining jolt that only gives you a little actual height.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyM0rkoO-XI
Maybe my Hop Rod has mechanical issues or, more likely, I didn’t stick with it (so to speak) long enough to achieve even minimal mastery, but I summarized my own less than productive experience in a comment to yesterday’s article:
https://www.theautopian.com/mitsubishi-once-had-their-own-beer-with-a-can-that-predicted-the-future/comment-page-1/#comment-50592
By the way, here’s mine leaning against my International:
https://live.staticflickr.com/7730/29263572542_efbb7640f4_b.jpg
I’ll be right over…to see the International. I love those things although only recently saw one out in the wild. I love them more now that I see they are not overweight like the Blazer.
You may be disappointed by its weight, then, as mine’s a 3/4-ton pickup, not a Scout:
https://www.theautopian.com/users/mdharrell/
Scout not overweight??? Scout IIs are heavy little vehicles. I think the scale weight shown on the title/registration of my Cab top which was originally a 2wd, 6cyl, 3sp, in other words the lightest version, shows 36xxlbs. The typically Scout II is over 4000lbs. The early Scout is a little lighter but not much.