It's All About the Bike (19 page)

There are more elaborate spoke patterns, such as crow's feet (radial and crossed spokes combined), Spanish laced, snowflake and offset radial. Some of them do look beautiful, but they have no practical advantage over standard, cross-spoked patterns. It's just somebody pimping their ride.

Gravy wanted to build my wheels tangent-spoked and three-cross. To ensure this was possible, he first had to measure the
internal diameter of the rim, the thickness of the rim at the nipple hole (you'd imagine that these dimensions are standard but Gravy explained they can vary from one ‘extrusion' or batch of rims to another), the width of the hub, the distance from the outside of the flanges to the edge of the hub, and the hub flange diameter (the distance from centre to centre of the spoke holes). He typed the figures into a spoke-length calculator on the Sapim website.

Before computers, Gravy did the calculations using tables. Getting the spoke length exactly right is important because the next step is to cut the spokes to that length and re-thread them — using the trusty old Phil Wood spoke cutter, a dense, grey hunk of manually operated machinery in the corner of the workshop. If the spokes are cut to exactly the right length, you get the maximum amount of thread in the nipple, and they're less prone to breakage. You can't ask a machine that builds wheels to do all this, I thought.

Ting — up came the spoke length on the computer screen. ‘OK. The 'puter, it says we can build both wheels three-cross. Three cheers for your Mr Starley.'

James Starley is the greatest British inventor you've never heard of. He's a colossus of the self-taught entrepreneurial, manufacturing cadre that ensured the industrialization of Britain was a
revolution.
Cycling historian Andrew Ritchie described him as ‘probably the most energetic and inventive genius in the history of bicycle technology'.

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 culminated 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.