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 by: Bill Oetinger  2/1/2011

Another Top Ten List

I got bit by the list-making bug last month, with the column about my Top Ten Highlights of 2010. This month, it looks like the bug is not quite out of my system, as I have an irresistible urge to put together yet another Top Ten list. This one has been simmering away on some back burner of my brain for years, waiting for the right moment to come to a boil. I think about it when I’m off on a long bike ride; when, wandering along some quiet back road, my mind wanders off on its own little back road of contemplation and arrives at this particular thought: the wonderful, mechanical invention we call the bicycle, and how it came to be.

At some point in my grade school education, our history books offered us two lists that were simple and iconic and exciting. Both of them employed the magic number seven: The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the Seven Great Inventions of the Ancient World. The former list was a sort of travel guide put together by the Greeks: amazing places to visit around the "known world" (that is, around the rim of the eastern Mediterranean Sea): the great pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, etc.

In attempting to refresh my rusty memory about these school-kid factoids, the Wonders list was easy enough to track down. Google got it in one shot. The list of inventions proved more difficult. As a handy, stand-alone reference item, it seems to have vanished or to have been subsumed into some larger mass of Great Inventions. At any rate, I have been unable to unearth exactly that list of seven basic building blocks of the mechanical world. (I freely admit that the sum total of my scholarship in this matter has amounted to about an hour of internet searching, plus pulling Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man off my bookshelf for a quick browse.)

Perhaps some of you know the answer here. I’ll give you my best guess at what I think the list should be, and you can tell me if I’ve got it right. Some of this I remember from my school book and some of it just seems obvious. And while you may think this is a silly digression from the subject of the invention of the bicycle, it really isn’t: the assorted bits that make up a bike are all on this list of seminal inventions.

Okay then, here’s my guess at that list…

1. The wheel (in particular, the wheel with an axle)

2. The cutting edge (as in knife, ax, spear point, plow…)

3. The lever (and as you can’t have a real wheel without its axle, you can’t have a lever without its fulcrum)

4. The pulley (which is really just a wheel with a rope attached)

5. The rope

6. The screw

7. The stair step or ladder

8. The inclined plane or ramp

Wait…that’s eight, not seven. Some poseur is crashing the party here. Perhaps it’s the pulley--or block-and-tackle--which is just a refined combination of rope and wheel. Or perhaps it’s the screw, which is just a refined combination of wheel and lever. Maybe either the step or ramp is considered too primal to merit the honorific of "invention." And for what it’s worth, I’m not sure that the toothed gear shouldn’t also be included here.

This list also conveniently overlooks several other advances we busy little humans threw together back in the day: the domestication of fire, the birth of agriculture, the matter of clothing, and the development of spoken and written language. I guess none of those technically qualifies as either mechanical or as inventions (as opposed to discoveries).

So what does this Seven Great Inventions list have to do with the invention of the bicycle? Aside from the fact that the bike is a lash-up of many of these basic inventions, this list also reminds us how much fun it is to put lists together; to attempt to reduce the vast, messy, muddy business of life to one, easy-to-understand check list. With that thought and goal in mind, I am going to attempt to concoct a list of the Ten Great Moments in the Development of the Bike. I will say right off the top that my list won’t be so fundamental as to begin with the invention of the wheel. The wheel is obviously essential to a bike, but it isn’t particular to the bike. It existed for millennia before the bike made use of it. Ditto for other more-or-less essential elements in the advance of bikes: the screw, the lever, the pulley, advances in metal working, paving, etc. All of them would have happened anyway. The bike simply adapted them to its own devices.

(As an aside though, it is interesting to note--and is not widely known--that the first major wave of paved roads in this country came about not because of demands from motorists but because of demands from cyclists. Those early "macadam" roads predate the automobile by 15 or 20 years. They came to be there in the 1880’s and ‘90’s in response to social and political pressure from hundreds of thousands of cyclists demanding better roads upon which to ride their bikes. The next time a motorist suggests you get your bike off his road, you might want to remind him that the bikes were there first. I leave it to you to decide how you would like to word that.)

I am also going to ignore any more recent advances in the nuts and bolts of bike building, such as carbon fiber, suspensions, and GPS units. I am in this context only interested in those advances that took the bicycle from its uncertain beginnings and transformed it into the essential shape and functionality that we can recognize today as a true bike. My list will be generally chronological, although other considerations may cause me to deviate from a precise ordering of dates.

One final disclaimer: I am not a professional-grade bike mechanic, nor an engineer, nor an historian. This list is not intended to be authoritative, encyclopedic, or carved in stone. It’s simply a conversational gambit, the same sort of kicking-it-around discussion a group of cyclists might have over a few beers, after a ride. Admittedly, it’s a one-sided conversation at this point, but if some of you are interested enough to write back to me about it, then perhaps it can become a real discussion. If enough of you respond with enough varying points of view, I may be forced to run one of my follow-up columns in some future month.

No single person gets credit for the invention of the bike, as Edison does with the light bulb or Bell with the telephone. The bike as we know it was refined over a period of about a century, beginning with the silly, semi-useless boneshakers and progressing through such evolutionary dead-ends as the high-wheelers. That period of refinement and invention coincides almost exactly with the Industrial Revolution, and there is probably no other object created during that time--the latter half of the 19th century--that is as emblematic of the thriving, striving, can-do attitude of those times. It was, first of all, a great idea: harnessing our modest human energy--our walking motion--to the rotational utility of the wheel. But it was also simple and small and therefor relatively inexpensive, both to own a bike and to tinker with one or devise a newer and better one. Tinkering with bikes didn’t take the financing and organization it did to design and build locomotives or steam ships or steel foundries or bridges. Anyone with a little mechanical aptitude and a shop full of hand tools could do it.

The result was an absolute tsunami of tinkering and inventiveness. In the last years of the 19th century, the US Patent Office was housed in two large buildings in Washington. Of the two, the larger building contained all the patents having to do with bicycles; the smaller building contained everything else. And that’s just the United States, where, I am sorry to say, none of the great bicycle innovations took place. All of the serious breakthroughs came in either France or England. I don’t know how they had their patent offices organized, but for sure, there would have been a blizzard’s worth of paper associated with bicycles.

Alright then…enough with the back stories and disclaimers. Let’s get to the list…

1. The diamond frame

Right away I’m deviating from chronological order, as there are other items on my list that predate the diamond frame. But to my way of thinking, it is the configuration of the frame, with the rider sitting between two, equally-sized wheels, that really marks the birth of the classic bike…the bike we know and ride today. The so-called "diamond" consists of two triangles sharing one, common side. The shared side is the seat tube, so called because the rider sits on a saddle mounted to the top of the tube. The cranks and pedals mount to a bracket affixed to the bottom end of the same tube. The rear triangle also contains the chain stay and seat stay, with the rear wheel mounted at the trailing corner of this triangle. (Okay, there are actually two rear triangles, one on either side of the rear wheel, but it looks like one in any side-view diagram of a bike.) The front triangle, in addition to the seat tube, is made up of the top tube and down tube. Most of the time, it will have its leading corner nipped off with the head tube affixed in that space.

There were many inventive runs at the question of frame geometry before the basic diamond frame came along. It seems so right and so sensible that you wonder what all the other folks were thinking, as they tried out their other bike frame apps. Looking at patent office drawings or photos of some of the other false starts in this department is like watching one of those amusing film compilations of early attempts at flying machines: the ones where some outlandish assemblage of matchsticks and lacquered cotton self-destructs in a comical heap. How could those ernest, suicidally optimistic dweebs have possibly thought this or that contraption would really work? They weren’t trying to make some entertaining piece of performance art for future generations to chuckle over. They really believed in their designs. And yet, after all those failures and false starts, one of them eventually did work: it flew. (Which is a good point to remind folks that before Orville and Wilbur Wright put their flying machine together and took it down to Kitty Hawk, they were…yep, bike mechanics.) The same was true with bikes: lots of false starts and failed dreams, but eventually…success.

The fellow who generally gets credit for the diamond frame is John Kemp Starley, who introduced his Rover "safety" bike in Coventry, England in 1886. The Rover doesn’t really have a frame you could identify as a diamond made up of two triangles. It has swoopy, curving tubes and no seat tube whatsoever. But it contains the essential elements of the two, equally-sizes wheels, with the rider in the middle, with handlebars steering a pivoting front wheel, and, most importantly, with a crank set (two levers) providing indirect motive force to the rear wheel via a chain running around two cogs (a pulley system). After he got the basic premise down, others refined it to the point where the classic diamond frame was widely available just a few years later.

2. Indirect chain drive

Starley’s bike was called a safety in counterpoint to the high-wheeled bikes that were the standard of the day and which were exceedingly dangerous to ride. You may never have asked yourself why those bikes had to have such a big front wheel. It was to multiply the rider’s power output from the pedals by transferring the power to the big circumference of the enormous wheel. The pedals were attached directly to the hub of the front, driving wheel…direct drive, as we see on a children’s tricycle. The bigger the wheel, the faster the bike would go, but it’s obvious, just looking at one, how unsafe they would have been, and it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a better alternative.

The true genius of the diamond frame is its offset drive, which is simply the application of that seminal invention, the pulley. The safety bike’s geometry meant the rider’s feet weren’t anywhere near either axle, so a way had to be devised to transfer the power of the leg-and-foot motion to the driving wheel. Much inventive gray matter was expended on this problem: solid-gear drive, shaft drive, treadle drive, belt drive… But the classic chain drive, running in a continuous loop around two cogs, was the winner. No other drive system combines such light weight, durability, and efficiency.

Sketches of bicycle chain drives around rotary cogs appeared as early as 1866, but cyclists had to wait until someone came up with a decent chain to turn theory into reality. There were attempts at chain drives from the 1860’s on, but the materials, designs, and machining were just not up to the task. That changed around 1880, when good bush-roller chains came along. Since then, the system that we know today has been in place. The chains and cogs have been refined, but the basic platform and premise is the same today as it was in the 1880’s.

The collateral benefit of an indirect drive is that the gears on the two ends of the drive train can be of different sizes, thus offering opportunities for multiplying the rider’s power output by stepping up the gearing. (I have it in mind to write another column at some not-too-far-off date all about gearing and the mysteries of gear inches, so I’m not going to dwell on that topic here, although it is of course central to any discussion of the mechanics of bikes.)

3. The crank set

Using two opposing crank arms--levers--to harness a person’s walking or running energy and transmit it to a wheel dates back to the very first velocipedes of Paris, around the middle of the 19th century. No one knows exactly who should get credit for the first pedal-driven bike, but Pierre Lallement and the Michaux brothers both seem to have gotten in on the ground floor in the mid-1860’s.

(Let’s be clear about these moments of invention: all sorts of bright boys down the years produced sketches and even prototypes to the process of perfecting the bike…hence all those patents filling up the patent office. But what we’re looking at here are substantive developments that came before the public, got some serious traction, and were seen to be tipping points in the evolution of the breed, as opposed to just being a twinkle in some inventor’s eye. Many people believe Leonardo Da Vinci sketched a plausible looking bike in 1492, but that drawing has been proven to be a forgery made in the 1960’s.)

Lallement briefly immigrated to America, and it was while he was resident in Connecticut in 1865 that he registered his pedal-driven bike with the US Patent Office. So I suppose we Yankees can lay some small claim to that famous moment in bike lore. However, he soon returned to France, and nothing much was done with his invention, neither here nor there.

Once the premise of pedal-and-crank-arm drive was established, it pretty much took over the field, with only a few goofball geeks pursuing other, less successful options. So that, shall we say, pivotal element of the bike was in place first, employed on high-wheelers and other whacky contraptions, long before the diamond frame came along.

Actually, to be completely reductionist and to take this all the way back to its proper roots, we should probably tip the old chapeau to those earlier pioneers who dreamed up the idea of a vehicle with two wheels in line, front to back; for the notion of this small machine that would only stay upright when in motion, thanks to the gyroscopic principle embodied in the spinning wheels. For my Top Ten list, I thought this was just a little too primal to be called an invention, but you may not agree.

4. The handlebar-headset-fork assembly

You might quibble my listing of all these assorted parts of a bike frame as individual milestones on the march to the modern bike. After all, chain drive, crank sets, and pivoting front forks were all included in Starley’s "invention" of the diamond-frame safety bike. But I see them as all individual problems to be solved, and that when Starley and his fellow tinkerers were cobbling together the first plausible bikes, they were cherry-picking the best bits from any number of previous iterations of bike design. And that applies to the whole assembly that includes the handlebars, steerer tube, and the forks that house the front wheel.

Pierre and Ernest Michaux’s first bike displays such an assembly, as does Lallement’s wooden velocipede. Even some of the earliest "hobby horse" style bikes from 1820 or so--the ones where you propelled yourself by paddling along the ground with your feet, scooter style--had some rudimentary steering-by-handlebar mechanism. The principle of changing the direction of the bike by turning the front wheel seems so fundamental as to be a no-brainer. But not all early--I mean really, really early--bikes had steering. Someone had to think it up and come up with those early steering tubes and the basic notion of handlebars.

Handlebars are just another form of lever. Levers not only multiply our power by moving the applied force some distance from the fulcrum or pivot point, they also afford us more control. If you ever wonder how much control those long lever-arms called handlebars give you, try steering your bike with one (or both) hands placed on your stem. Things will get seriously twitchy very quickly.

A steerer mechanism is essentially just a rod connecting the handlebars and the forks (and wheel) passing through a pipe or sleeve at the front of the frame. We all know that the headsets contained within our modern head tubes are far more complicated than that. But those are all merely minor refinements on the original notion, a notion which has been in place since early in the 19th century, before diamond frames and even before crank sets.

5. Ball bearings

Speaking of head tubes (and crank sets and wheel hubs), let’s talk about ball bearings. I said previously that I wouldn’t count on this list any "invention," such as the wheel, that predates bikes and has an existence of its own, aside from bikes. That said, you might wonder why I include the humble and yet universally useful ball bearing in this list of inventions specific to bikes. I do so because the first-ever patent for a ball bearing was awarded to Jules Suriray, a Parisian bike mechanic, on August 3, 1869. He fitted the bearings to the winning bicycle in the world’s first bike race, Paris-Rouen, run in November of that same year. My historical researches do not reveal where on the bike Suriray fitted his new-fangled bearings. I’m going to guess in the wheel hubs.

Let’s face it: our power output is puny. We hardly generate enough watts to fire up a large light bulb. So in addition to multiplying our puny output with levers and gears, we need to reduce resistance (sometimes exhibited in the form of friction) at every point where it rears its ugly head in the mechanisms that constitute our bikes. Little balls, rolling around inside their races, offer less friction than two flat surfaces rubbing against each other. Some day, when you have a few minutes to kill and you have your bike up on the rack, give your front wheel a gentle little spin. Then sit there--and sit and sit and sit there--and watch how long and how smoothly and how quietly that wheel will keep spinning. (This is assuming you have a good quality hub.) It’s pleasantly hypnotic to watch how long and easily that wheel will continue to revolve. Those are your humble ball bearings at work. Where would we be without them?

6. Pneumatic tires

The earliest bikes ran on what were essentially wooden wagon wheels with steel rims. You don’t need a lot of imagination to appreciate why they were called "boneshakers," especially on the cobbled or gravel or dirt roads of the day. In 1844, Charles Goodyear developed the process known as vulcanization that allows natural rubber to retain the shape into which it has been molded, regardless of hot or cold temperatures. This didn’t have much of an impact on the progress of bike design, although having even a solid rubber tire was a step up from metal.

The big breakthrough, and one of the really important points in bike development, came in 1888, when John Boyd Dunlap, a Scottish veterinarian living in Belfast, Ireland, introduced the pneumatic bicycle tire. All of a sudden, overnight, cyclists were riding on air, resulting in a huge improvement in ride quality. Within five years, virtually all bikes in the world had pneumatic tires. There has seldom been such a great leap forward in the development of any technology than this one. For the record, there were patents awarded for pneumatic tires before Dunlop’s. But he was the one who made it work in the public marketplace.

Dunlop’s original inner tubes were leather, but soon rubber tubes took over. To finish off this technological break-through, in 1893, August and George Schrader introduced a good, air-tight valve stem…the same "schrader" valves that are still used on most bikes (any bikes that don’t have fancy-pants presta valves).

7. Caliper brakes

Getting a bike going is one thing; getting it to stop is quite another. And the faster you can make it go, the more important it becomes to make it stop, or at least slow down, in a controlled, reliable way. As with all aspects of bike design, there has been no shortage of solutions offered for the problem of slowing down a bike. Back in the bad old days of high-wheelers, riders often just applied their shoe to the tire to slow the bike down. This was ineffective as a brake and dangerous as a maneuver. Spoon brakes were added to some bikes, where a metal or wooden surface was applied directly to the crown of the tire. These didn’t work very well either.

In 1887, just as the safety bike was getting up to speed, a pair of inventors named Browett and Harrison took out a patent on a caliper brake, that is, one that grips the sides of a wheel or tire in a pair of pincers, like a powerful thumb and forefinger. The first ones applied their braking surfaces to the tire itself, but it was soon figured out that braking against a metal wheel rim made better sense, and rims were designed to mate with the brake pads. I think some of the early caliper brakes were controlled by solid rods, and I’m not entirely sure when the first cable-pull calipers came into common usage. But the general idea for caliper brakes--not unlike the ones we use today--was in place at almost the same moment as the diamond frame and the pneumatic tire.

Any kid who grew up with classic Schwinn or Columbia single-speeds in the United States prior to 1970 will be familiar with coaster brakes, where the stopping power is provided by backward pressure on the pedals, locking up the freewheel mechanism in the rear hub. These are still in use on many bikes, but hand-operated, cable-pull, caliper brakes are the default setting for most better road bikes.

8. Tensioned spokes

Think again about those earliest bike wheels: the ones that were essentially wooden wagon wheels. Not only did they offer their passengers that bone-shaking ride, they were also absurdly heavy. (Heavy matters in wheels not only as absolute weight but also as a matter of making the wheel go around…of overcoming rotational inertia.) Clearly, this was an area ripe for inventive improvements, and in 1869, Frenchman Eugene Meyer invented the wire-spoked, tensioned wheel. However, at about the same time, across the channel, James Starley and William Hillman were granted a patent on a high-wheeler called an Ariel that featured essentially the same sort of wheels with tensioned spokes. (James Starley was the uncle of John Starley, he of the Rover "diamond" frame.) Once again, it was a case of the innovation that caught on that ends up getting most of the credit, for although Meyer’s wheels were beautifully made, he fumbled his patent application and didn’t end up being the driving force in moving the technology forward. So, in spite of creating a good design, Meyer has to take a backseat to Starley in the history books.

On the face of it, a wire-spoke wheel seems implausible: the weight of rider and bike held up by a bunch of little wires? It doesn’t seem to compute. But the trick is that the loads the wheel is carrying are turned on their head. Instead of the weight being supported under compression by the spokes between the hub and the ground, the weight is actually suspended from the rim, under tension, in somewhat the same way a suspension bridge works. Look at it this way: if you could get a single spoke to stand straight up, and then you started piling weight on its top end, it would soon bend and crumple. However, if you suspended a single spoke from a fastening at the top and then started hanging weight onto its bottom end, it could hold a great deal of weight before failing. When all of the spokes are tensioned properly and are all pulling the rim equally toward the hub, you end up with a very strong and very light wheel. (While I can write about them and understand them intellectually, there is still a part of my primitive monkey brain that finds the entire premise of tensioned wire-spoke wheels to be counterintuitive and little short of magic or voodoo, and I have the greatest respect for that leap of inventiveness that made such a wizard assembly a practical reality.)

Things were hopping on the inventive front at this point. In 1870, right on the heels of the Ariel, William Grout got a patent on a spoke nipple for easier tensioning of the spokes. Then Starley went back to the drawing board and came up with a design where the spokes came off a flange on the hub at a tangent (as opposed to connecting straight from hub to rim…what we call a radial spoke pattern). Radial lacing provides a very stiff wheel, but tangential lacing makes for a better ride and also does a better job of transmitting torque from the drive train to the ground. At that point, pretty much all the pieces were in place for modern bike wheels…light and resilient and amazingly durable, in spite of how flimsy they look.

9. The freewheel

In the same year that Meyer and Hillman, Starley and Grout were doing such good things with bike spokes, William Van Anden was inventing the freewheel. A freewheel, located inside the driving hub of the rear wheel, works approximately the way a ratcheting socket wrench works: movable teeth or pawls engage when force is applied from one direction, but slip freely when force is applied the opposite way. What this means for a bike is that power can be applied when needed and the teeth will engage to drive the wheel, but when not needed, the teeth will disengage and the freewheel will simply spin, allowing the cyclist to coast.

We’re all familiar with what a fixed-gear bike is: just the one cog and no freewheel, so the rider must always pedal…no coasting, ever. I’m not going to get into a great philosophical debate about the zen purity of the fixie. Yes, there is an essential simplicity to it that has a certain appeal, but most riders are not going to think twice about the advantage of being able to coast on a downhill or when in need of a brief rest from pedaling. With the notable exception of all those happily retrograde fixie fanatics, no serious cyclist would leave home without a freewheel.

10. The derailleur

If we review the list of innovations and inventions preceding this final entry, it can be seen that all were in place by around 1890. Some of the most rudimentary of the elements were in place as much as a century before that, but most came to fruition in that golden age of bike invention, the 20 years between 1870 and 1890. Before the turn of the century, the bike as we know it today was pretty well fully formed. Any cyclist from the present could travel back in time to the Gay ‘90’s and find a bike to ride that would be entirely familiar, practical, and useful…even fun.

This last item on the list lags quite a few years behind in the march of progress, for a variety of reasons. I debated whether I should label this last entry "the derailleur" or "the multi-geared bike." Multiple gears are the real pay-off here, allowing the rider to tailor his power output to the terrain or to other variables, such as headwinds or fast pacelines. But you can’t have and make use of multiple gears on a bike without a mechanism to shift the drive chain between the gears, and that was the crucial piece of the puzzle that stumped the best mechanical minds of the era for quite a few years.

There are derailleurs on most bikes at both ends of the chain loop, where the gears reside. They both work in approximately the same way to address two challenges: lifting the chain off one gear and depositing it on another one, and adjusting the length of chain to account for travel around sprockets of varying sizes. In this little narrative, I’m mainly thinking about the rear derailleur, as that was the bigger challenge, with more gears involved, as well as the chain tensioning device.

It may not be the most important innovation on this list, because, clearly, a bike will function quite well with just one gear, with or without a freewheel. That’s the perspective of the die-hard fixie fan: that extra gears and their consort derailleurs are just an effete and complicated bit of frippery. However, if the bike is going to be a significant player as a vehicle, appealing to a wide range of people, either for utilitarian transport or for sport, then multiple gearing is going to have to be a part of the package.

I’m going to assume we don’t need to go into a detailed explanation of why we would want a stack of gears at the rear hub and two or maybe three more at the cranking end of the loop. With another tip of the hat to the cult of the fixie, I am going to also assume that most of you agree that having multiple gears on a bike makes as much sense as having a transmission full of multiple gears in one’s car. But this wasn’t always the case, back before derailleurs attained some practical level of utility, fixie fanatics ruled the earth, much as dinosaurs did in an earlier epoch.

Experienced cyclists learned very early on about the benefits of having different gearing for going uphill or down. The problem was how to implement those options on a bike. I would guess there was more creative, inventive energy expended on the challenge of multi-geared systems than on all of the other items on this list combined. Look at any rear derailleur today: it is the most complicated mechanism on a bike. More moving parts and more little, fiddly bits than any other component, by far. More things to go wrong. More things to figure out and get right. It’s no wonder it took another half-century to finally hammer this last piece into the puzzle.

There is an old adage in motor sports: racing improves the breed. That has proven true in some cases with cycling as well, but not always, and the development of the derailleur is a classic case where the racing community adopted a very retrograde, luddite approach to new ideas. Most racers and most of the suits who controlled racing and wrote the rules were opposed to the notion of derailleurs.

Henri Desgrange, the creator of the Tour de France and more or less the leading arbiter of all decisions regarding racing, summed it up pretty well. (This was in response to a series of much publicized tests of derailleurs, early in the 20th century.) "I applaud this test, but I still feel that variable gears are only for people over 45. Is it not better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of the derailleur? Come on, fellows. Let’s say that the test was a fine demonstration--for our grandparents! As for me, give me a fixed gear!"

Desgrange banned derailleurs at the Tour de France. Racers could use a wheel with two different cogs, one on each side, and flop the wheel at the bottoms and tops of big climbs. They could even swap bikes with different sprockets here and there, if their team cars could have the bikes there, waiting for them. But derailleurs? Nope! Instead, progress and innovation on derailleurs was left up to cycle-tourists, especially in France. (For reasons too complicated to go into in this short essay, development of multi-geared bikes came to a standstill in almost every other country but France for a great many years. There are some minor and curious exceptions to this, but in general, it was the French, and in particular, the French recreational cycle-tourists who drove the technology forward.)

Cycle-tourists were legion in France at the turn of the century and in the early years of the new century. They didn’t give a rip about Desgrange and his racing rules. They wanted multi-geared bikes with simple, relatively inexpensive and reliable gear shifters. Their voice was expressed through the first real bike periodicals, and those publications sponsored and reported on various road tests of the state-of-the-art derailleurs (the tests to which Desgrange was referring). Literally hundreds of derailleurs were designed between the 1880’s and the 1930’s. Dozens of them were actually built in small batches and tested in the real world, and quite a few eventually went into something resembling mass production. Almost all of them fell well short of what we think of as a useful, reliable derailleur today. But many good minds and skillful craftsmen kept banging away at the problem, and they kept getting closer…

I mark the tipping point as falling around 1939. In 1937, Henri Desgrange finally retired as the eminence gris behind the racing scene, and younger, less conservative folks took control. Almost immediately, they allowed derailleurs in racing. Then, in 1939, French manufacturer Nivex introduced a rear derailleur with the so-called parallelogram configuration that almost all derailleurs retain to this day. The Nivex derailleur cannot really be called an invention, in the sense of producing something entirely new from scratch. It was just the latest in a long line of refinements. But it was the iteration that finally came to resemble the derailleur as we know it today…the point at which the tinkerers finally got it right. At that point, one could really and truly say that the classic bike was complete. All the pieces were in place. Nothing since then has amounted to more than fine-tuning of the classic package.

I wrote another essay some years ago about the birth of the modern bike. I still think it’s a pretty good piece, and if you haven’t read it, I invite you to give it a spin. In that essay, I implied that Tulio Campagnolo invented the derailleur. I implied it because at the time, I thought it was at least approximately true. Since then, I’ve learned a good deal more about the subject. The only invention for which Campagnolo gets credit is the quick-release on a bike’s axle. He came up with that idea while struggling to turn one of those two-sided, two-cogged wheels around during a freezing race. His numb fingers couldn’t manage the wing nuts securing the wheel, and out of that frustration, he came up with the cam-lever quick-release. After being in business for awhile making quick-releases, he branched out into derailleurs and eventually into full gruppos of components. Indeed, he is probably the leader, or at least one of them, in the concept of manufacturing and marketing a full ensemble of matched parts for a bike…a gruppo. Along the way, his exacting attention to detail and quality made Campy gear the gold standard against which all other brands are measured.

So there you go: a long article to itemize a short list. I could have just published the list and let it go at that, but what fun would that be? This way, if you’ve stuck with it to this point, you might have picked up a few interesting tidbits of bike lore. If you are enriched by that, terrific. If, on the other hand, you think I’ve made a hash of history and gotten all sorts of details wrong, please feel free to write: "Oetinger, you fatuous, fat-assed fool…" And so forth. Either way, I hope this historical disquisition has jump-started in my readers some appreciation for the beauty and genius of the humble little tool we know as the bicycle.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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