The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  Clément sized up that the Dunlop pneumatic tires were dismissed by traditionalists content with solid rubber. The man had a habit of rebelling against traditions. Christened Gustave-Adolphe Clément in the village of Pierrefonds, he had dropped use of Gustave at a young age,11 rejecting it due to its frequent designation among paternal ancestors and his disdain for the extravagant French penchant for compound first names, like his father’s name, Léopold-Adolphe. At a time when the overwhelming majority of men wore a beard, Clément, completely at ease with hand tools, shaved daily with a straight razor, taking care to maintain a neat mustache. After the arrival of the safety razor at the turn of the century, beards became passé, but then he stopped shaving and let his beard grow full and bushy for the rest of his life.

  Some of Clément’s defiant leanings developed while growing up in Pierrefonds, home to a fifteenth-century castle; the castle’s walls and corner towers had languished in ruins until his childhood, when an aristocrat restored it to resemble a palace with rounded turrets fit for a fairy tale.12 Clément and his older brother had apprenticed to their father, who eked out a living as the village locksmith and blacksmith. Adolphe Clément was seven when his mother, Julie Alexandrina Roussette Clément, died.13 Two years later, his father remarried and added to his trade a grocery shop that sold seasonal novelties.14 The youth yearned to leave the complacent petit bourgeois provincial life for opportunities in Paris, a universe unto itself—the national capital, center of France’s arts and letters, source of international fashion and cuisine, and the absolute essence of style.

  His generation grew up learning about France’s legendary Pierre Bayard, renowned in folklore as le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, the knight without fear and without reproach.15 Bayard was also remembered as generous and kindly. In one famous account, Bayard was a lieutenant general under King Francis I in 1521 and commanded a thousand soldiers in the ancient town of Mézièrs against German King Charles V’s invading army of thirty-five thousand troops.16 Mézièrs, a farming community on the Meuse River, where it meanders alongside the Belgian border, served as a critical defense between Germany and Paris. Bayard’s men withstood heavy cannon fire in a six-week siege, giving King Francis enough time to collect an army that drove out the Germans. Such gallantry aroused Clément’s imagination.

  One frigid winter morning in early 1872, sixteen-year-old Clément had pulled on his backpack and walked away from his home on rue du Bourg to embark on the traditional compagnon du tour de France, a journeymanship to become a master locksmith.17 The francs in his pocket were sufficient to buy bread and essentials for no longer than a couple weeks. He trekked clockwise around the country in the custom of compagnons—among them tinsmiths, cabinetmakers, stonemasons, and plumbers. They stayed in hostels or residences of “mothers” doing their part in a guild network by arranging accommodations and local work stints.18 Compagnons put in long hours for low pay as they acquired regional techniques and used area materials over stretches of weeks or months. Clément studied under several masters. Now and then when it was time to leave for his next destination, a rowdy procession of drummers and fiddlers accompanied him out of town—an informal graduation rite.19 Provincials like him thought nothing about walking fifty miles in a day.20 He concluded his tour de France with a year in the Loire Valley region, south of Paris, among its fertile vineyards and a thousand old chateaux, enough to keep a battalion of locksmiths busy.21

  He had Sundays to make daytrips to Paris by train. Paris had recovered from the Franco-Prussian War and had resumed its usual bustle. Clément found monuments galore, trendy boutiques with ingénues waiting on customers, and cafés that served lattés and cappuccinos sipped by men and women alike, all of them dressed to the nines.22 At sunset, an army of lamplighters spread out to the city’s almost one thousand streets.23 Glowing whale-oil street lamps distinguished Paris as La Ville Lumière, the City Of Light.24 Streetlights created a robust nightlife, which Parisians exploited by going about their lives after the sun went down—visiting friends and relatives, attending theaters, shopping, and exploring restaurants.

  Compagnons, as a rule, went back home when they finished their tour, but Clément, a rebel to his core, chose to stay in Paris. He put down roots in Montmartre,25 charmed by its vista over the city, low rents, and the chance to catch glimpses of artists coming and going, like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Marius Utrillo, Utrillo’s mother Suzanne Valadon, and Raoul Dufy. Pierre-August Renoir painted The Garden of the Rue Cortot in Montmartre. Erik Satie played his soft piano compositions at Montmartre’s hip cabaret Le Chat Noir. By 1878, Clément had secured a shop at 20 rue Brunel, in the tall, imposing Saint Ferdinand Building.26 His choice was strategic. As a tradesman, he could starve without attracting enough customers. Instead, he gained some notice by moving next door to the atelier and print shop of acclaimed poster artist Jules Chéret, at 18 rue Brunel, commanding the Saint Ferdinand Building’s other half.27 Clément required a shop sign to hang over his front door to inform even illiterates of his locksmith services, but he could not afford the artist’s rates. He befriended one of Chéret’s understudies to paint a sign depicting an open padlock.

  Around the time Clément settled in, he noticed upper-class sportsmen perched on high-wheeled bicycles cruising Paris’s boulevards. The machines were imported from Coventry, England. Their oversized front wheel and rear wheel like a dinner plate led to the English nickname Penny-Farthings, after the big penny and the smaller, less valuable farthing. The sight of the English two-wheelers had a profound effect on the master locksmith of twenty-three. They had swept into Paris one spring like schoolchildren running to the playground. He learned that front-wheel sizes depended on the owner’s leg inseam. Most front wheels and their long, spidery steel spokes had a diameter of about fifty inches, which fit the average man, about five feet seven. It was fashionable for cyclists to pose standing next to their machine for photos, the top of the big wheel even with the owner’s shoulder.

  The steel frame curved up over the front wheel and accommodated the handlebars and leather saddle. The high center of gravity made the front wheels susceptible to snagging on ruts, sticks, and stones. They became notorious for pitching riders headfirst over the handlebars. Nevertheless, these newfangled machines caused people seeing them rolling along the street to watch and point.

  Small wonder. Unlike horses, these novel contraptions did not deposit tons of manure every day on Paris thoroughfares. Clément later told associates that he was awestruck at how even a portly cyclist could overtake a fast runner in one hundred meters and catch almost anyone on a horse in two kilometers.28 That meant something special to Clément. He was aware that for generations dreamers and tinkerers had fashioned various hobbyhorses with wheels, but they had been crude. Until now. Clément recognized that the high-wheelers whipping around Paris boulevards were what the dreamers had in mind for a self-propelled way to get around.

  Clément had learned a lot about metals and had paid attention to advances in steel from Sheffield, England. He studied the high-wheelers that droves of young men were pedaling in the Bois de Boulogne, the park spread out in western Paris with paths, avenues, and waterfalls. He bought some of the new lighter, hollow English steel tubing and built his own two-wheeler, which the French called un grand-bi.29 He took it out for a spin in the Bois de Boulogne. With the wind rushing across his face and the sense of balance and fluid movement, he felt exhilarated. Always a businessman, he sold his machine to buy parts to make two more.30 He bought a drill press, a lathe, and tools for gas welding to braze tubes together. He sold the next two he made, then four more, another eight, and orders kept coming.

  He joined Sunday summer races in the Bois de Boulogne around the Hippodrome de Longchamp, a dirt horse track rolled smooth. His lack of speed mattered less than the reputation he garnered for making quality high-wheelers. In 1880 at a trade show in Le Mans, southwest of Paris, a jury of business executives awarded Clément a silver medal.31 That stoked his en
trepreneurial spirit. His demand as a locksmith remained even while orders for his bicycles were taking off. He had chucked his day job for a new career. Clément later told associates that he realized his trade—and its tools—were obsolete.32 To inform street traffic that he made bicycles, he prevailed on a Chéret protégé to make a new sign to hang over his shop door. The sign depicted France’s iconic rooster, head aloft, tail feathers spread, balanced atop a wheel.

  Soon Clément employed a man and a shop boy.33 He applied lessons from his hero Bayard, who had prepared for battles on behalf of French kings by conducting reconnaissance and espionage to learn as much as possible about the positions and plans of his enemies. Clément attended trade shows proliferating around France—in Nice, Tours, Epernay, and Alençon. His bicycles and tricycles won enough medals to fill a pirate’s chest.34 Then came a big order from France’s Ministry of War for troops. He purchased additional lathes, drill presses, benches, and other machinery, and hired laborers and shop boys by the dozens.

  In the mid-1880s, modern chain-drive bicycles burst on the scene, with both wheels the same size and a unique diamond frame.35 These vehicles, again from artisans in Coventry, featured wheels about twenty-seven inches in diameter, comparable to today’s adult bikes. Cyclists could set their feet conveniently on the ground and prevent falls, which led to the bicycles being referred to as safety bicycles. Clément realized their appeal was unlimited—especially to women. Safety bicycles made high-wheelers old-fashioned, similar to the 1980s when personal computers got the better of mainframe computers.

  When the Exposition Universelle opened in May 1889 for the six-month-long world’s fair, Clément served on the jury for the Palais des Arts Libéraux, a neoclassic stone building constructed to celebrate the liberal arts, including transportation. The Palais—near the Eiffel Tower on the Champs-de-Mars, an open greensward where Napoléon’s army had marched and drilled—was among sixty thousand exhibits, from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show to a pavilion dedicated to France’s champagne makers.36 Clément and fellow jurors selected creations showcasing French merchandise that transported people and goods. Thirty million people from around the world entered the Exposition Universelle through the arch at the base of the Eiffel Tower. Clément could hold court in the Palais with distributors from cities around Europe to establish a network and pump up his company’s sales.

  More than anyone in France, Clément took a feverish interest in modern bicycles.37 He saw that they would transform how everyone went places on public roads. Men and women were at liberty to hop on a bicycle and off they went—whenever or wherever they chose. For long distances, travelers could take their bicycles on the train as luggage; when they reached their station, they could pedal the rest of the way to where they were going. So when Clément came upon the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company and the du Cros men at their table in the Stanley Show, he recognized that pneumatics were just what bicycles needed to appeal to the masses.

  Clément and du Cros, father and son, hit it off, especially when Harvey du Cros said his family had descended from a French infantry captain—a Huguenot who had fled France in 1704 to escape religious prosecution.38 Important to Clément, du Cros was an avid sportsman. He enjoyed recreation cycling, had won Irish boxing and fencing championships,39 and had fathered six sons.40 Clément and the du Cross men exclaimed that in the near future bicycles would become as great a necessity for getting around as a pair of boots.41

  After the Stanley Show closed, Clément accompanied the du Cros men on a train rumbling across southern England to the west coast. They boarded a commuter ship crossing the Irish Sea to Dublin, home to an uncontested monopoly on pneumatic tires.

  The elder du Cros informed Clément that the company founder was John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinarian who cared for farm animals near Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Dunlop neither owned a bicycle nor cared to learn how to ride one.42 While the tires named for him were first used for cycling, he shrank from travel and avoided any kind of physical exertion,43 a holdover from a childhood fear about his health. Dunlop, shambling around stoop-shouldered,44 like he had recently recovered from an illness, moved slowly and in a deliberate manner,45 and he spoke in a low-toned voice, as though he were an invalid. His ragged beard extended halfway down his chest, and his hair had gone completely white by the time he filed his patent at age forty-eight. He created the pneumatic tire in response to ten-year-old son Johnny complaining of the rough ride on his new bicycle’s hard-rubber tires over Belfast’s cobblestone streets.46

  Dunlop devised pneumatic tires as a cushion, protected by a rubber tread. On October 31, 1888, John Boyd Dunlop submitted papers for his invention to the English Patent Office in London; he received a patent guaranteeing fifteen years of exclusive commercial rights.47 The veterinarian turned over the operation to a group of executives. They incorporated the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company and appointed William Harvey du Cros Sr., as chairman and executive director, based on his professional reputation.

  Harvey du Cros gave Clément a tour of the facility. The only factory on the globe that made pneumatic tires occupied the floors above the Booth Brothers bike shop in a standard-issue four-story brick building.48 The tiny company in the country best known for its potatoes and fiddle players could not have been more underwhelming. The company consisted of a half dozen sewing machines in the attic,49 a few wooden racks, some scissors, and odds and ends.

  Dunlop pneumatics, with the tube sewn inside the tire,50 an inch and a half wide, with the Indian-rubber tread and a linen casing, were called “Mummy” tires (still popular worldwide as tubular tires). They fitted tightly over the steel rim and glued on. In case of puncture, the flat tire was pulled off and replaced by a fresh one, which could be neatly folded for convenient storage and inflated for the ride to continue. The factory may have been rudimentary, but Clément understood the power of an idea to motivate management and workers to make a business prosper.

  Clément grew up with a peasant’s frugality and spent only when unquestionably necessary. Investing in the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company was risky. The product was untried—more of a prototype. It had no demand. The tires were wider than solid-rubber versions and required fashioning new steel rims, building different wheels, and modifying the diamond frame to fit the new wheels. Laborers had to learn new techniques. All the changes required time and capital, a dicey proposition for manufacturers that had recently converted from making high-wheelers to producing modern bicycles. Yet John Boyd Dunlop had exclusive patent protection—essential for spectacular potential. Clément personally liked the du Cros team of father and son. They had his confidence. The former locksmith wrote a check for 500 francs to buy one hundred shares in the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company, divided evenly between preference, ordinary, and deferred shares.51 He became the first stockholder outside the British Isles.

  Always seeking to leverage every deal for maximum possible payback, Clément secured a license for exclusive manufacture of Dunlop tires in France.52 If the tires did as well as he thought, his investment would turn into gold. Clément kept his regular product line to retain faithful customers. The Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company would take a while to produce the tires and ship an order to Clément in Paris. He planned how best to introduce the pneumatic tires on Clément Cycles.

  Dunlop pneumatics faced a tough sell with a public forever wary about buying a new product—only persuasive evidence would sway the public to accept change. Clément could count on the rabid racing crowd, even back then, to try anything racers thought could give a competitive edge. When his first order of Dunlops came in time for the spring of 1891, Clément supplied special new bicycles to the stable of racers he kept on retainer, among them Fernand Charron, a professional he treated as a son—and would become his son-in-law.

  Charron was short and wiry, with taut muscles—an ideal combination for speed and stamina. His hairless face, trim mustache, and clothes like a fashion plate signified him as one of the Moderns. In a coun
try steeped in social rankings, he was noted for being courteous to men and women of all classes. The French press dubbed winners of five events with the honorific l’as, the ace. Charron was an ace many times over. In Sunday races around the Longchamp track in the Bois de Boulogne, his Dunlops rolled lightly over the dirt surface while rivals on the thinner solid-rubber tires that bit into the sand had to fight increased resistance. He could pull away from the competition at will, but, mindful of keeping the race exciting for the paying audience, he avoided making it look easy. Clément hawked Charron’s triumphs by purchasing ads in journals, touting his deeds on Clément Cycles, and promoting success on Dunlops.

  Coinciding with the arrival of pneumatics, the arts and the march of capitalism came together to create an unparalleled mass-marketing medium—pictorial posters.53 Clément’s neighbor, Jules Chéret, had perfected an innovative printing method, which used chemicals for the first time.54 From four basic color stones of red, yellow, blue, and black, his lithographic printing process made a nearly unlimited rainbow. Chéret’s posters, typically four feet tall and three feet wide, advertised wine, perfume, soap, chocolates, paper for hand-rolling cigarettes, even chanteuses and dancing femme fatales frolicking in front of the stage footlights. The artist featured a smiling coquette using the array of products—his instantly recognizable Chérette. Jules Chéret, at fifty-four, was a rumpled little old gent in a smock mottled with paint smears, but his posters sold joie de vivre.