Good call Firko - Horst Leitner will be remembered as one of the few great innovators of the late 20th century.
Fans of Douglas Adams (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently) will probably remember his cat door allegory. The simple version is that we can all look at a cat door and say "Yep, that's really simple and really obvious" - but its only obvious after someone else has invented it. That 'someone' must actually possess an exceptional brain, even if its easy for Joe Average to dismiss their inventions as obvious.
Virtually every step foward in the world of dirt bikes is the same.
I mean, how easy is it to sit back and look at our pre-75 bikes and wonder why the hell it took so many years for someone to 'invent' long travel suspensions?
Or wonder why we finally adopted disc brakes, decades after cars had proven that they were a zillion times better?
Etc.
Stuff like the old Suzuki Full Floater were obviously big steps foward, but - like the Tilkeins monoshock - weren't completely new, and used existing ideas adapted from elsewhere and modified/added to them.
