It's All About the Bike

by Robert Penn

  It’s All About the Bike

  The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

  ROBERT PENN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  La Petite Reine

  1 Diamond Soul: The Frame

  2 Drop Bars, Not Bombs: Steering System

  3 All Geared Up: Drivetrain

  4 The Lateral Truth, So Help Me God: Wheels

  5 On the Rivet: The Saddle

  Not in Vain the Distance Beckons

  Selected Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix: Useful Information

  Picture Credits

  Imprint

  La Petite Reine

  Who climbs with toil, wheresoe’er,

  Shall find wings waiting there.

  (Henry Charles Beeching, ‘Going Down Hill on a Bicycle: A Boy’s Song’)

  ‘Meet the future,’ Butch Cassidy says, showing Etta Place where to sit on the handlebars of his bicycle. By the time B. J. Thomas is singing ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ to Burt Bacharach’s melancholy tune, Butch and Etta are off, pedalling out of the farmyard down a dusty track.

  It’s one of the best-known musical interludes in cinema. The song won an Academy Award. When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was released in 1969, the poster featured the pair on the bicycle. For the record, Paul Newman performed the bike tricks himself. The interlude is a pivotal moment in the film: it’s not just the law hunting down the ageing gunslingers; the future – symbolized by the bicycle – is chasing them too. As the scene at their farm-hideaway ends, Butch sends the newfangled machine downhill, riderless, into a ditch: ‘The future’s all yours, you lousy bicycle,’ he shouts. Prostrate in the stream, the wheels ‘tick, tick, tick’ to a halt. Butch and Sundance’s time in the West is up. They’re off to Bolivia, to try and re-make the past.

  William Goldman based his original screenplay – which also won an Academy Award – on the lives of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, a notorious pair of train robbers and members of the Wild Bunch. They fled Wyoming for Argentina in 1901. A period of extraordinary change was over, not only in the Wild West but across the entire Western World.

  For many in the 1890s the future came too fast. The decade saw the first international telephone links, the ‘scramble for Africa’, the foundation of Britain’s Labour Party, the rationalization and codification of global sports and the first modern Olympiad. Heroin, radium and radioactivity in uranium were discovered. The Waldorf-Astoria in New York and the Paris Ritz opened. Durkheim invented sociology. Landmarks of social thought included rights for workers and old-age pensions. The Rockefellers and Vanderbilts amassed unprecedented amounts of private wealth. X-rays and cinematography were born. Verdi, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, William Morris, Munch, Rodin, Chekhov, Ibsen, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy were at the height of their creative powers. It was a remarkable decade – the capstone of the Victorian era.

  At the heart of it all was the bicycle. In 1890, there were an estimated 150,000 cyclists in the USA: a bicycle cost roughly half the annual salary of a factory worker. By 1895, the cost was a few weeks’ wages and there were a million new cyclists each year.

  The style of bicycle that Butch and Etta rode was called the ‘safety’. It was the first modern bicycle, and the culmination of a long and elusive quest for a human-powered vehicle. It was ‘invented’ in England in 1885. When the pneumatic tyre was added three years later, making the machine comfortable, the first golden age of the bicycle began. As Victor Hugo wrote: ‘An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.’ The ‘gospel of the wheel’ spread so quickly that the masses wondered how something so simple could have remained unknown for so long.

  Bicycle manufacturing emerged from its roots as a cottage industry to become big, big business. Bicycles were mass-produced on assembly lines for the first time; the design process was separated from production; specialized factories supplied standardized components. One-third of all patents registered at the US Patent Office in the 1890s were bicycle-related. In fact, the bicycle had its own dedicated patent building in Washington, DC.

  At the 1895 Stanley bicycle show in London, the annual industry event, 200 firms displayed 3,000 models. The Cycle magazine reported 800,000 bicycles manufactured in Britain that year. Many locksmiths, gunsmiths and anyone with metallurgy skills abandoned their trades and went to work in bicycle factories. In 1896, the peak year for production, 300 firms in the USA made 1.2 million bicycles, making it one of the largest industries in the country. The biggest firm, Columbia, with 2,000 employees at the Hartford works in Connecticut, boasted of making a bicycle a minute.

  By the end of the decade, the bicycle had become a utilitarian form of personal transport for millions – the people’s nag. For the first time in history, the working class became mobile. As they could now commute, crowded tenements emptied, suburbs expanded and the geography of cities changed. In the countryside, the bicycle helped to widen the gene pool: birth records in Britain from the 1890s show how surnames began to appear far away from the rural locality with which they had been strongly associated for centuries. Everywhere, the bicycle was a catalyst for campaigns to improve roads, literally paving the way for the motor car.

  The health benefits of the bicycle met with an appetite for self-improvement that characterized the age: the same workers who pedalled to the factories and the pits founded gymnastic clubs and choirs, libraries and literary societies. At the weekends, they cycled together in clubs. Amateur and professional racing exploded. Cycle racing at tracks or velodromes became the number one American spectator sport. Arthur A. Zimmerman, one of the world’s first international sports stars, won over 1,000 races on three continents as an amateur, and then as a pro, including gold medals at the first world cycling championships in Chicago in 1893. In Europe, road racing became hugely popular. Long-lived ‘Classic’ races such as Liège—Bastogne—Liège and Paris-Roubaix were staged for the first time, in 1892 and 1896 respectively. The Tour de France was inaugurated in 1903.

  Americans in particular became captivated by the idea of speed during the Gay ’90s: speed was thought to be a mark of civilization. Through transportation and communication, Americans came to associate speed with the unification of their vast country. On a bicycle, they could actualize it. By the end of 1893, track racers surpassed 35 mph. The bicycle eclipsed the trotting horse to become the fastest thing on the road. Technological innovation made the bicycle ever lighter and faster as the decade progressed. In 1891, Monty Holbein set the world 24-hour track record of 577 km (361 miles) at London’s Herne Hill velodrome: six years later, the cigar-smoking Dutchman, Mathieu Cordang, rode 400 km (250 miles) further.

  A typical bicycle was fixed-wheel (no gears or freewheel), with a steel frame, slightly dropped bars, a leather saddle and usually no brakes (you braked by back-pedalling). Roadsters commonly weighed around 33 lb; racers were under 22 lb – pretty much the weight of the finest road-racing bicycles today. On 30 June 1899, Charles Murphy became the most famous cyclist in America when he rode a mile in 57.45 seconds, paced by a locomotive on the Long Island railroad, on planks laid between the rails.

  The bicycle met with the demand of fin de siècle society for independence and mobility. The safety introduced whole new groups to two wheels: the old and young (juvenile models were marketed from the early 1890s), the short and the unfit, men and women. For the first time, anyone could ride a bike. Mass production and the burgeoning second-hand market meant that the majority of people could afford one. As the contemporary American author Stephen Crane wrote: ‘Everything is bicycle.’<
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  Perhaps the greatest impact of the bicycle was in breaking down hitherto rigid class and gender barriers. There was a democracy to the bicycle that society was powerless to resist. H. G. Wells, described by one biographer as the ‘writer laureate of cyclists’, used the bicycle in several novels to illustrate the dramatic social changes taking place in Britain. In The Wheels of Chance, published at the height of the boom in 1896, the protagonist, Hoopdriver, a lower-middle-class draper’s assistant, goes on a cycling holiday and meets a young, upper-middle-class woman who has left home to flaunt ‘her freedom — on a bicycle, in country places’. Wells satirizes the British class structure and shows how the bicycle was eroding it. On the road, Hoopdriver and the lady are equals. The dress, clubs, codes, manners and morals that society had put in place to reinforce the existing hierarchy simply didn’t exist when one was cycling down a country lane in Sussex.

  The novelist John Galsworthy wrote:

  The bicycle . . . has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles the Second . . . Under its influence, wholly or in part, have blossomed weekends, strong nerves, strong legs, strong language . . . equality of sex, good digestion and professional occupation — in four words, the emancipation of women.

  The bicycle coincided with, rather than instigated, the feminist movement. It was, nonetheless, a turning point in the long war for women’s suffrage. Bicycle manufacturers, of course, wanted women to ride. They had been making ladies’ models since the earliest prototype bicycle in 1819. The safety bicycle changed everything, though. Cycling became the first popular athletic pursuit for women. By 1893, nearly every manufacturer was producing a ladies’ model.

  In September 1893 Tessie Reynolds caused a national sensation when she rode from Brighton to London and back on a man’s bicycle, wearing ‘rational dress’ — a long jacket over a pair of baggy pantaloons cropped and cinched below the knee. It was a turning point in the acceptance of practical clothes for women, most of whom still cycled in voluminous skirts, corsets, petticoats, long-sleeved shirts and jackets with tight neckbands. Later, when the suffragettes’ campaign of civil disobedience reached its height in 1912, the incident was seen as a milestone.

  In June 1894 Annie Londonderry set off from Boston with some spare clothes and a pearl-handled revolver, to cycle round the world. Witty, clever, charismatic — the Becky Sharp of her age — she deliberately took up the mantle of women’s equality. She was a paragon of ‘New Woman’, an American term for the modern woman who behaved as an equal to men. The bicycle, dubbed the ‘freedom machine’ by historian Robert A. Smith, empowered ‘New Woman’.

  ‘The stand she is taking in the matters of dress is no small indication that she has realized that she has an equal right with a man to control her own movements,’ Susan B. Anthony said. As the leading suffragette of her day, and the woman who gained fame when she was arrested for voting in the 1872 presidential election, she knew. In an interview in the New York Sunday World in 1896, she said:

  Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world . . . It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance . . . the moment she takes her seat, she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.

  By the time Butch and Sundance were bound for South America, the bicycle had won broad social acceptance and struck deep into the nexus of society. In a decade, cycling had evolved from a faddish leisure pursuit, exclusive to a tiny minority of wealthy athletic males, to become the most popular form of transport on the planet. It still is today.

  The bicycle is one of mankind’s greatest inventions — it’s up there with the printing press, the electric motor, the telephone, penicillin and the World Wide Web. Our ancestors thought it one of their greatest achievements. This idea is now coming back into fashion. The cultural status of the bicycle is rising again. The machine is becoming more embedded in Western society, through urban infrastructure design, transport policy, environmental concerns, the profile of cycle sport and leisure practices. In fact, there is a whisper that we might today be at the dawn of a new golden age of the bicycle.

  *

  The bicycle can be described in under fifty words: a steerable machine comprising two wheels with pneumatic tyres, mounted in-line on a frame with rotating front forks, propelled by the rider’s feet turning pedals attached by cranks to a chainwheel, and by a loop of chain to sprockets on the rear wheel. It’s very simple. The bicycle can be ridden, on a reasonable surface, at four or five times the pace of walking, with the same amount of effort — making it the most efficient, self-powered means of transportation ever invented. Fortunately learning to ride a bicycle is easy (so easy, in fact, that many of our primate cousins have got the hang of it too). And, once learnt, riding a bicycle is something we never forget.

  I’ve ridden a bike most days of my adult life. I can’t, though, remember the first time I rode a bike as a child. I know I’m supposed to. I’m supposed to recall perfectly that moment of epiphany we’ve all shared, when the stabilizers were removed on an incline in the local park; when the hand of my father pulled back and I wobbled forward into the great equilibrium that I will never leave; the moment when I unconsciously steered, albeit unsteadily, the support points of the bicycle under the centre of mass, and first grasped the esoteric principle — balance. But no, I’m afraid I can’t remember it. In fact, I can’t even remember my first bike.

  The first bike I can remember was a purple Raleigh Tomahawk, the diminutive version of the Chopper. I progressed to a Raleigh Hustler: purple again, and pimped up with white handlebar tape, a white saddle, a white water bottle, white cable guides and white tyres — it was the ’70s. When I outgrew this, Grandma stepped in with a fifth-hand, Dawes three-speed, kids’ roadster. Compared to the Hustler, it had the panache of coveralls, but it flew. During the summer of 1978 I rode loops of my neighbourhood from dawn to dusk. My parents saw I’d got the bike-bug. The following spring, I was given a ten-speed Viking racer—a black thoroughbred. It was in the window of the local bike shop when I went to collect it. ‘Ever bike?’ Jack London wrote. ‘Now that’s something that makes life worth living! . . . Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds . . . and wondering all the time when you’re going to smash up. Well, now, that’s something!’ That’s how I felt on my Viking racer. I was born restless. Aged 12, I finally had wings.

  When I landed, I was a teenager. The bug — to ride and ride, for the sheer love of it — had gone. I abandoned the rhythmic cadence of two wheels for the rhythmic sounds of ‘Two Tone’. Of course, I still used a bike to get around: three unloved, beat-up racers followed. At the beginning of my final year at university, my flatmate arrived on a red tandem. We did moonlit time trials round the Georgian squares. The bike was so honest and so red; we named it — Otis.

  In 1990, I bought my first mountain bike — a no-nonsense, British-built, rigid Saracen Sahara. I rode it from Kashgar in China to Peshawar in Pakistan, over the Karakoram mountains and the Hindu Kush. When I was back in London, working as a lawyer, the Saracen more than carried me around: it represented life beyond the pinstripe suits. Then it got stolen. A succession of mountain bikes, customized for commuting, followed: a Kona Lava Dome, two Specialized Stumpjumpers, a Kona Explosif and others. They all got stolen. I once had two stolen in a weekend. There were excursions along the Ridgeway, and to Dartmoor and the Lake District, but most of the time these bikes merely conveyed me across the city’s backside.

  On a wintry Saturday afternoon in 1995, I walked into Roberts Cycles, a venerated frame builder in South London, and ordered a bespoke touring frame. It was called ‘Mannanan’, after the mythical Celtic figure Mannanan mac Lir, who protects the Isle of Man, where I grew up. I cycled across the USA, Australia, South-East As
ia, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe — effectively around the world. The American bike mechanic, Lennard Zinn wrote: ‘Be at one with the universe. If you can’t do that, at least be at one with your bike.’ After three years and 25,000 miles, I was.

  Today, Mannanan is on the wall in my shed. I own five other bikes: a ten-year-old, steel Specialized Rockhopper, which I am continually rebuilding to keep it in serviceable, commuting order. My old road bike, for winter riding, is a hotchpotch of componentry on a Nervex aluminium frame with Ambrosio carbon forks. The new road bike is a Wilier, with a sleek, Italian-designed carbon frame, manufactured in Taiwan. My old mountain bike is a Schwinn. My new mountain bike is the most recent purchase: a super-light Felt aluminium, cross-country hard tail, perfect for the trails in the Brecon Beacons, where I now live and ride.

  With this small troop of hard-working bicycles, my bases are covered. Yet something fundamental is missing. Like tens of thousands of everyday cyclists with utilitarian machines, I recognize there is a glaring hole in my bike shed, a cavernous space for something else, something special. I’m in the middle of a lifelong affair with the bicycle: none of my bikes even hints at this.

  I’ve been riding bicycles for thirty-six years. Today, I ride to get to work, sometimes for work, to keep fit, to bathe in air and sunshine, to go shopping, to escape when the world is breaking my balls, to savour the physical and emotional fellowship of riding with friends, to travel, to stay sane, to skip bathtime with my kids, for fun, for a moment of grace, occasionally to impress someone, to scare myself and to hear my boy laugh. Sometimes I ride my bicycle just to ride my bicycle. It’s a broad church of practical, physical and emotional reasons with one unifying thing — the bicycle.

  I need a new bike. I could go on-line right now with a credit card and spend $5,000 on a mass-produced carbon or titanium racing bike. I could be tanking through the hills on a superb new machine at sunset tomorrow. It’s tempting, very tempting. But it’s not right. Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly. I want to break the loop with this bike. I’m going to ride it for thirty years or more and I want to savour the process of acquiring it. I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it. Besides, I’m only going to spend this kind of money once. I require more than a good bike. In fact, I require a bike you can’t buy on the Internet; a bike you can’t buy anywhere. Anyone who rides a bike regularly and has even the faintest feeling of respect or affection for their own steed will know this hankering — I want my bike.