Incredible Strength of Fleas

I'm always interesting in personal flight and from the following article, maybe the Incredible Hulk is a mutation of a flea which allows him to jump so far using incredibly strong leg muscles.

The mexican jumping bean is another curiosity and a proof of inertial, unidirectional propulsion.

"In an old book called 'Invisible World' by M. de Fonvielle, he writes that a flea can raise itself from the ground to a height equal to two hundred times its stature.

At this rater, he says, a man would only make a joke of jumping over the towers of Notre-Dame or the heights of Montmartre. A prison yard would be useless unless the walls were more than a quarter of a mile in height."

You might have seen the new pogosticks which use super elastic bands to allow people to jump 6-10 feet.

In the past, people have used gasoline engines to drive pogo sticks as shown in the attached photo.

And I have a contact who claims he built a piezo electrically driven pogo stick that could break your leg if you didn't ride it at the correct rhythm. His design was very interesting.

When you hit a crystal, it produces electricity using the piezoelectric effect. So when you apply a high voltage pulse to a crystal, it produces a very strong mechanical thrust.

This is the principle for ultrasonic cleaning machines and the piezoelectric flat plates that produce most of the beeps and sounds we hear in our portable devices and computer related toys and devices.

My inventor friend wrapped a coil of wire around the base of a pogo stick. Then he connected a crystal and a very strong magnet.

The magnet was on the sliding rod of the pogo stick so when you pushed it down really hard with your weight, the magnet would induce a current in the coil which would be stored.

When the pogo stick pushed back to throw you into the air, the accumulated current would be applied to the piezo crystal to produce a very strong thrust to push you up with great force.