by Robert Penn
Starley was born to agricultural labourers on a farm in Sussex in 1831. At 15, he left a note on the kitchen table — ‘Dear Ma sorry can’t stand it any more going to London will write soon Jim’ — and ran away from home. Clearly, he was in such a hurry, there was no time for punctuation. His head was a hothouse of mechanical ideas from a young age. Working as a gardener in Lewisham, his natural aptitude for mending clocks, sewing machines and other devices, as well as for inventing things, caught the attention of the eminent marine engineer John Penn.
Penn introduced Starley to the businessman Josiah Turner, and in 1857 the pair moved to Coventry, historically the centre of clock-making in Britain. It says much about the times that two entrepreneurs would leave London and move to Coventry to make their fortunes. They established the Coventry Sewing Machine Company and Starley invented and patented many kinds of sewing machines (several innovations remain standard today), before Turner’s nephew returned from Paris in 1868 with a velocipede — the early form of the bicycle then causing a stir in France.
Edward Ward Cooper, a company employee, described in his autobiography the arrival, ‘in the sacred precincts of the office a “thing” from France . . . We all gather round. Mr Turner, our manager, “Ole Starley”, the mechanical genius, myself and a few awestruck officials . . . Yes, there the thing stood; no one ventured to touch it.’ When Starley did first touch it, he lifted it up and complained about the weight.
The velocipede or ‘bicycle’ as the machine began to be known, fell on fertile ground in Britain, a country with a strong metalworking tradition. Even so, it was a bold decision by Starley and Turner to apply their efforts to a nascent industry. In Starley’s hands, improvements to the crude French ‘boneshaker’ followed quickly. In 1870, he patented the all-metal Ariel bicycle (jointly with William Hillman, whose name lived on in the car industry). In the same year, France went to war with Prussia, suspending the manufacture of velocipedes across the Channel. The Ariel marks the true beginning of bicycle manufacturing in Britain. It put the country in the vanguard of bicycle technology for eighty years and earned Starley the moniker ‘Father of the bicycle industry’.
‘To demonstrate to the bicycling fraternity the qualities of the new bicycle,’ a contemporary account noted in 1871, Starley and Hillman rode Ariels from London to Coventry, in a day. They ‘mounted their machines just as the sun was rising’ and, ‘pedalling bravely, they reached Mr Starley’s residence just as the clock of St Michael’s struck the hour [of midnight]’. It was a remarkable feat — 100 miles on primitive roads. Starley was 41 years old and he weighed 196 lb. Both men didn’t get out of bed for three days, but the ride attracted public interest.
The Ariel was advertised as ‘the lightest, strongest, and most elegant of modern velocipedes’. It wasn’t hyperbole. The name itself — perhaps a play on the word ‘aerial’, or borrowed from Shakespeare’s sprite in The Tempest — hints at how lissom the machine was. It went on sale in September 1871, at £8 for the cheapest model. One of the first customers was James Moore, the famous racing cyclist.
The Ariel quickly became the benchmark for the new wave of ‘high-wheeler’ or ‘ordinary’ bicycles. Hollow steel tubular frames, improved bearings, pivot-centre steering, slotted cranks, a brake, solid rubber tyres and a rear-step for mounting all became standard features as the machine developed. Yet one innovation in particular distinguished the Ariel as a landmark in the history of the bicycle: the front wheel.
The wheel is one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Its history is the story of civilization. Though the wheel was probably invented earlier, the first wheeled vehicle we can roughly date — 3,200 BC— was found in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). It was a solid wooden dish with a hole in the middle for an axle to pass through. The next evolutionary step came some 1,500 years later. Skilled Egyptian carpenters learnt how to craft wooden wheels using radial spokes, making their chariots lighter and faster. From then until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the wheel hardly evolved at all. Of course, wheelwrights grew more adept at their craft and the materials developed, but structurally the wheel remained the same. In our age of almost daily technological advances, it seems incredible that something so fundamental could remain effectively unchanged for so long.
The first hint of a development came three millennia later when the tension spoke was patented in 1802. An iron-spoked wheel was patented in 1826 and carriage-makers experimented throughout the nineteenth century with metal spokes, as an alternative to wood, but without success. Eugene Meyer, a Parisian cycle manufacturer and master craftsman, was probably the first to develop a decent suspension or ‘tension-wheel’ for a bicycle in 1869, featuring individually adjustable spokes. But it took a man of ingenuity and vision, James Starley, to see the potential of this type of wheel and put it into production. The ‘lever-tension wheel’ that was standard on the Ariel changed the bicycle for ever.
The wooden wheel with rigid spokes had served humanity well. In the late 1860s, it was constructed in largely the same way as it had been for millennia: rigid spokes were secured to a wooden rim and held firm by an iron hoop which had been heated and allowed to contract as it cooled.
It worked simply — the ground pushes up on the rim, which pushes up into the spoke, which pushes up into the hub. The hub pushes back down on the spoke. The spoke is said to be in compression under load, because both ends of the wooden spoke are being pushed towards each other. If a vehicle was stationary, you could cut away every spoke, except for the one or two at the bottom, and the wheel would not collapse; the thick, heavy wooden spoke is strong enough to support the load.
The tension-wheel works differently: the wire spokes are stretched tight when the wheel is made. Every spoke pulls on the hub simultaneously, but they are in balance, so the hub and rim stay put. Thus, every spoke plays some role in supporting the hub at all times and the hub is effectively ‘hung’ from the top of the rim rather than entirely supported by the bottom spoke. When a load is applied — you sit on a bicycle, for example — the ground pushes up on the rim, which pushes up on the bottom spoke or spokes, but the tension already in those bottom spokes decreases; they become less stretched or looser, while all the other spokes remain unchanged. If a vehicle was stationary, and you cut away every spoke except for the one or two at the bottom, the wheel would collapse: one or two thin, light, wire spokes are not nearly strong enough to support the load.
The first advantage of the tension-wheel was that it was more comfortable: in the pre-stretched wire spokes, there is an element of suspension. Tension spokes absorb road shock much better than rigid spokes. The fundamental advantage, though, was the weight saving — a critical matter in respect of wheels, as we’ve seen. Think of the weight you could hang from a single wire spoke; then think of the wooden spoke you would need beneath that same weight, to support it.
Starley’s and Hillman’s ‘lever tension-wheel’ with radial spokes replaced the wooden wheel with thick, rigid spokes, for good. The Ariel was about a third lighter than the wooden-wheel velocipedes that had gone before. Crucially, this innovative wheel was so strong and light, the diameter could now increase. Strong and reliable wooden wheels simply couldn’t be built with a diameter over 1 m (40 inches), but tension-wheels grew bigger and bigger, ushering in the age of the high-wheeler or ordinary bicycle, which directly preceded the rear-wheel chain-driven safety bicycle.
High-wheelers didn’t have gears: they were direct drive, so, for every turn of the pedals, the wheel went round once. The easiest way to ‘gear up’ a bicycle was to make the drive-wheel larger. Thus, the length of a rider’s inside leg now determined the upper limit; the largest production high-wheeler had a front wheel diameter of 1.5 m (about 60 inches). This was not the limit, though; with new materials tension-wheels have grown and grown. In fact, the recent addition to the London skyline, the London Eye, is a tension-wheel.
Starley continued to experiment with spoke technology. In 1874 his efforts culmina
ted in the ‘tangent-spoked wheel’, the method by which Gravy was going to build my wheels. It was Starley’s greatest achievement. The tangent-spoked wheel followed the same load-bearing principles as the tension-wheel, but with cross-spokes the wheel was braced; and the force driving it was more efficiently transferred from pedal to rim. Spokes were angled; adjacent spokes were angled in almost opposite directions; the tangent on one side balanced the tangent on the other; spokes were laced for strength; each spoke could be individually tensioned, and the wheel could be easily adjusted to stay radially true (the rim is perfectly circular) and laterally true (the walls of the rim are perfectly flat, with no wobbles).
Starley continued to innovate, designing a popular chain-driven tricycle with differential gears, and the masterly Salvo quadricycle, which entranced Queen Victoria. He died in Coventry on 17 June 1881.
Nearly every bicycle wheel made since 1874 has been built using the tangent-spoking method. The innovation would later be borrowed in the motorcycle, automobile and aeroplane industries, among others. It remains the best method for building bicycle wheels to this day.
We now know that the high-wheeler or ordinary (it only became known as the ‘penny farthing’ once its popularity was declining in the late 1880s) was a brief vogue that led the bicycle down a technological cul-de-sac. It had two important consequences for society, however.
The expansion of the railway network across Britain in the 1840s had killed the stagecoach business, leading to the neglect of the once excellent turnpike road system. The pioneering work of Thomas Telford, the civil engineering giant known as ‘the colossus of roads’, and John McAdam, who invented the first road-surfacing process, was long forgotten. In fact, in the 1870s, roads were worse than they had been at the beginning of the century. Great lumps of stone, as well as mud and ruts, were the norm. For cyclists, accidents were common. As the Earl of Albemarle, president of the National Union of Cyclists, wrote: ‘The only obstacle that I know of to the use of cycling becoming universal in this country, is that year by year the roads seem in many parts of England to be getting worse and worse.’
The athletic and adventurous young men who rode high-wheelers formed clubs, with captains, uniforms, badges and buglers, who served to protect their members from the potholes — the bugler rode in front sounding the alarm when he came across a crater. The clubs also campaigned to improve roads. By the mid-1880s, the biggest club, the Cyclists’ Touring Club, had 20,000 members. It was a powerful force. Through it, the bicycle became a major factor in the rebirth of the idea that roads were a national concern.
In America in the 1870s the roads were even worse. Quagmires in spring and dust tracks in summer, they were known as ‘gutshakers’. For Colonel Albert A. Pope, who began manufacturing Columbia high-wheeler bicycles in 1878, improving roads was the key.
Pope involved himself in every aspect of the bicycle. He established an annual trade show, organized races and financed lawsuits against municipal regulations that prejudiced cyclists. He founded The Wheelman magazine and distributed it gratis. He offered prizes to the medical profession for pro-cycling articles.
Most significantly, Pope spearheaded the powerful ‘Good Roads Movement’. He had a section of tarmac laid in downtown Boston, to show how smooth roads could be. He made a donation to establish a course in road-building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he launched the League of American Wheelmen in 1880, which organization immediately took up the demand for better roads.
In the 1880s, the advancing roadworthiness of the high-wheeler seems to have unlocked the minds of young gentlemen to the possibilities of travelling by bike, as the mountain bike would do again, a century later. C. Wheaton, a manufacturer in Covent Garden, London, produced a ‘Map of the British Isles for Bicycle Tourists’ and rented bicycles by the month. Clubs set off to tour France where, from the mid-1870s, the bicycle industry had begun to flourish again. In 1875, Albert Laumaillé rode a 54-inch Coventry Machinist bicycle 1,127 km (700 miles) from Paris to Vienna. In 1882, Ion Keith Falconer, a record-breaking amateur cyclist, Scottish aristocrat and missionary, rode from Land’s End to John o’Groats, completing the 1,600 km (994 miles) in thirteen days.
Thomas Stevens, an American immigrant from England, departed from San Francisco Bay on a black-enamelled Columbia 50-inch ‘Standard’ high-wheeler, on 22 April 1884. He rode around the world. It took him three years. He pedalled through England, Continental Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, where he wintered as a guest of the Shah. Expelled from Afghanistan, he took a ship from Istanbul to Karachi and rode the Grand Trunk Road to Calcutta, through eastern China and across Japan, before catching a steamer home to San Francisco. ‘Distance actually wheeled, about 13,500 miles,’ he recorded.
Crossing the USA in order to, as he said, ‘deliver the message’, Stevens followed wagon-roads, railroad ways, canal towpaths and the few public roads that existed. West of the Mississippi River, there were none. For at least a third of the distance, over mountains and deserts, Stevens dragged, shoved, carried and pushed his 75 lb high-wheeler. He was shot at by cowpokes, chased by coyotes and memorably, to avoid being hit by a train, he hung off a railroad bridge above a ravine by one hand, holding his bicycle in the other.
The drawback of the high-wheeler was the inherent danger of riding one. The saddle was precariously high over the front wheel; the machine pitched forward on encountering the smallest road obstacle, ditching the rider on his head; there were no brakes worth speaking of. Accidents were so common that a new vocabulary was invented to describe them. Riders who went plunging over the front of their bicycles at speed ‘took a header’, received an ‘imperial crowner’ or ‘came a cropper’. The machines were nicknamed ‘widow-makers’. Women didn’t ride high-wheelers; nor did boys, nor older men, nor the shortest, or unathletic young men. The machine was a long way from being ‘a people’s nag’, the form of popular, utilitarian transport that society increasingly craved.
In the end, the safety bicycle rapidly made the high-wheeler obsolete. The enduring reputation of the latter is out of proportion to the part it played in the history of the bicycle. This is partly because it has become a symbol of the Victorian era, and partly because of its intriguing shape. It lives on, though, in the calculation of gear sizes (see Appendix), and most significantly in the spare purity of James Starley’s tangent-spoked wheel.
When every spoke had been cut to length and rethreaded — by hand in the spoke cutter — then washed, degreased and dried, Gravy applied ‘spoke prep’ to the threads. He neatly laid out his tools and the components of the wheel on the workbench and pulled up a stool. He hooked a black ‘Sapim’ apron over his head, sat and checked everything over. He was preparing himself, like a potter sitting down to make a bowl.
‘Building a wheel takes you into the zone. It’s Zen-like . . . and quite meditative,’ Gravy said. ‘A result is a wheel as fine as you can build it. If there are ghosts in there, if you’re trying to get rid of a micron at the end and then messing it up, that’s no good. Like Michelangelo mixing paint, if it’s not mixed right the first time, you start over.’
With that Gravy fell silent. He dropped the spokes one by one through the holes in the flanges of the front hub. Periodically, he gathered all the spokes from one side of the hub together and swept them to the side, like someone tying their hair back. When he’d lined up the label on the hub with the label on the rim — a nice touch — he placed the first spoke through the hole on the rim next to the valve and secured it with a blue nipple. All the other nipples would be silver: the blue one was a visual aid, and Gravy’s signature. Then he went round the rim once, placing a spoke through every third hole. He flipped the wheel over and laced a second set. Within minutes, the pattern of the wheel began to emerge. He wound the last few nipples on with a homemade tool.
The wheel was laced. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it could be done so quickly. Gravy paused to inspect the pattern: ‘When I was wre
nching on the road, mechanics from different pro teams would get together and compete. We called it lacing racing.’
He mounted the wheel in his trueing stand, an essential wheel-builder’s apparatus that checks the lateral truth of the wheel, and its concentricity or roundness. Working with a spoke key, he made an initial ‘pass’, tightening each spoke a couple of turns, working back to where he’d started, slowly bringing the spokes uniformly up to tension.
It was a delightful process to watch. Gravy worked slowly and precisely, yet things happened quickly. The parts sat comfortably in his big hands. There was a harmony in the way the spoke wrench moved. It never clattered into the rim or the hub or any of the still slack spokes. It weaved through the air as if it was an appendage to his hand. I realized I was watching a man do what he was a master at — in itself a privilege.
I’ve seen skilful bike mechanics work their magic and I had anticipated the visual pleasure. I hadn’t expected the wheel-building process to be an aural feast too. The metallic brush of the spokes being gathered in hand, the ting of a spoke as the elbow dropped into the flange, the scuffle of the nipples moving on the workbench, the whirr of the wrench fastening the nipples, the swish of the loosely suspended hub flopping about. Ping, ding, tinkle, chink, clink, jangle — as Gravy worked in silence the room was humming with the century-old melody of a bicycle wheel being made. And this was really the opening allegro of the symphony. As the spokes began to come up to tension, they clanged and chimed, changing tone with every ‘pass’ Gravy made round the wheel.
‘Sometimes I think I could do it with a blindfold on,’ Gravy said, standing for a moment and straightening his back. I could believe this. I’d read about A. G. Duckett & Son, a family run bike shop in East London. It was famous in the 1950s — an era when most bike shops built hoops for their customers — for the quality of its wheels. Despite failing eyesight, damaged during World War II, Albert Duckett used to finish the wheels himself, just by feel and sound.