It's All About the Bike (7 page)

The seat stays were the last tubes to be welded: they would complete the rear triangle, and the diamond shape. There are
several ways to affix the top of the seat stays to what is called the ‘seat cluster' — the junction of the seat tube and the top tube. As with lugs, the method of attaching seat stays developed among British and Italian frame-builders during the twentieth century, as a way of distinguishing who built the bike — it was like a signature, and a mark of the pride an artisan took in identifying himself with his work. It is the aesthetic flourish underpinned with practical design that typifies the frame-builder's artistry.

The different methods include ‘fastback', ‘semi-fastback', ‘Hellenic' and ‘wishbone'. At Rourke's, they favour what is widely recognized as the strongest way to attach the seat stays, whereby they are mitred to wrap right around the seat cluster and rejoin above it.

‘The “wrapover” seat stay has been something of a Rourke trademark for the last 30 years,' Jason said when he'd finished mitring. ‘I'll be honest: it's a right headache, but it looks great. At least, we think so.'

The torch snapped alight again. We flipped our visors down. Jason picked up a fresh filler rod and the flame roared into action on the seat cluster. He worked methodically round the weld, turning the jig, flicking the cable of the torch from beneath his feet, holding the flame steady at the exact distance from the weld. Ten minutes later, the seat stays were on. The torch went out. Jason pulled off his mask and stepped back, inviting me forward with one arm, like a midwife in a maternity ward introducing an overawed father to his child. The frame of my dream bike — the diamond soul — was finished.

Steering System

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance,
you must keep moving.

(Albert Einstein)

In April 1815 the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora erupted, and continued doing so for three months. An estimated 90,000 people died. It remains the biggest eruption in recorded history. Millions of tons of volcanic ash were blasted into the earth's upper atmosphere, forming an aerosol veil that shut out solar radiation across Europe and North America. The sun disappeared, rainfall increased and average temperatures fell several degrees. It is probably the most dramatic incident of global cooling the world has ever known.

The social ramifications were immense. In New England there were blizzards in July. Many farmers were wiped out, prompting both the rapid settlement of New York and expansion into the mid-west. In Ireland, 65,000 starved to death. In England there were food riots and the dramatic colours of the dust-laden sunsets inspired a young landscape artist, J. M. W. Turner. Byron wrote his poem
Darkness.
In Switzerland, the endless winter moved the 18-year-old Mary Shelley to write
Frankenstein.

In 1816, known as the ‘year without a summer', the harvest
failed across the Western world. The role of the price of oats was then something like the price of oil today. In southern Germany ‘true famine' prevailed, according to the historian Carl von Clausewitz. There, farmers who could no longer afford oats to feed their horses, shot them. An eccentric German aristocrat, Baron Karl von Drais de Sauerbronn, a former student of mathematics at Heidelberg University and inventor, witnessed the slaughter. Without horse power, society faced an even graver crisis. Inspired by necessity, Drais realized a dream as old as mankind: he conceived a mechanical horse with wheels.

The ‘Draisine' was invented in 1817. It was the first prototype bicycle. Also known as a
‘laufmaschine
(‘running-machine'), it comprised two wooden carriage wheels in line, a wooden bench which the rider straddled, and an elementary steering system. You didn't pedal. You propelled it by scooting or paddling your feet along the ground: travelling downhill or at speed, you lifted both feet off the ground.

It was original. No one had previously put a pair of wheels in line, on a frame, and made use of the fundamental precept of the bicycle: balance by steering. It was thought then that without your feet on the ground, you'd fall over. The Draisine taught humanity that you can balance on two wheels in line if, and only if, you can steer.

One of the big, unanswered questions in the history of the bicycle is: why, when technology had made it feasible for at least 3,500 years, did the Draisine take so long to invent? A hypothesis is that no one believed you could actually balance on two in-line
wheels. It is possible that Drais only worked it out himself by chance. He may have anticipated stabilizing the machine by almost constant use of the feet: only when it was built, and he was ripping down a hill did he raise his feet from the ground and realize he could achieve the same with the help of the steering mechanism.

By imparting velocity to a machine, Drais also accelerated the act of walking or running, while simultaneously reducing the energy consumption required. To prove his point, he rode from Mannheim, where he lived, to the Schwetzinger Relaishaus and back in an hour, along Baden's best road. The same journey took three hours on foot.

With hindsight, we know that the Draisine was the earliest ancestor of the bicycle. At the time, it did not make a significant impression. The machine was expensive, cumbersome and weighed some 100 lb. The poet John Keats scornfully called it ‘the nothing of the day'. It was ahead of its time. Roads, especially in winter, were generally too awful to ride on. By 1820 the machines had been banned from pavements in Milan, London, New York, Philadelphia and Calcutta. In Europe, when the harvests recovered, the Draisine fell into obscurity and the dream of a mechanical horse was abandoned for forty years. Ironically, the Draisine is now having a popular renaissance — in the form of a toy bike thought to be
the
ideal way to help children learn balance. It's a fine example of things going full circle.

Today, we take the ability to ride a bicycle for granted. This is partly because we think it's easy — once learnt, never forgotten — and partly because the vast majority of us learn when we are children. It was not always so. Throughout the history of the bicycle, adults attended ‘riding schools' to learn how to maintain the machine in equilibrium, just as we take driving lessons
today. Denis Johnson, an enterprising London coach-maker who custom-made Draisines, opened the first riding school in Soho, in 1819. He charged a shilling a lesson, catering for the upper-class Regency dandies, among whom the machine was fashionable for a summer, hence its nickname, the ‘dandy-horse'.

The next great evolutionary leap for the bicycle happened in Paris during the 1860s: rotary cranks and pedals were attached to the front wheel of the Draisine and the ‘velocipede' was born. In 1868—70 it sparked a fashionable craze — ‘velocipede mania' — on both sides of the Atlantic. The addition of pedals meant the rider's feet were off the ground all the time. Since the pedals were attached to the front wheel, the handlebar had to be braced against the side-to-side effect of pedalling and, when turning, the steering was encumbered by the pressure of pedalling, due to the misalignment between the leg and the plane the pedal rotates in. In consequence, everyone went to ‘school' to learn how to ride. The first Parisian velocipede manufacturer, Michaux et Compagnie, opened an indoor training school in 1868, beside their new factory. Free lessons were given to people who bought velocipedes; the rest hired instructors by the hour. After half a dozen lessons, riders were sent out to brave the streets.

When a velocipede from Paris was demonstrated at a gymnasium in London in 1869, people were amazed. The magazine
Ixion: A Journal of Velocipeding, Athletics, and Aerostatics,
carried a report by John Mayall, later a great advocate for cycling:

I shall never forget our astonishment at the sight of Mr. Turner whirling himself round the room, sitting on a bar above a pair of wheels in a line that ought, as we innocently supposed, to fall down immediately . . . I turned to Mr. Spencer and exclaimed, ‘by Jove, Charley, there's a balance!'

Later the same year, an article in the periodical
Scientific American
breathlessly concluded: ‘That a velocipede should maintain an upright position is one of the most surprising feats of practical mechanics.'

In April 1869, the Pearsall brothers opened their ‘Grand Velocipede Academy or Gymnaclidium' on Broadway, New York. Hundreds of influential citizens attended to try out the new craze. The famous acrobatic brothers, the Hanlons, also opened a school. Some ‘velocinasiums' advertised women-only classes, and hired female instructors. Books of riding instructions were published. Entrepreneurs quickly spread the craze for riding ‘academies' or ‘rinks' across the country: by late spring, Boston had twenty schools, most major cities had at least a dozen and every small town had one.

In 1869 an American journalist summed up the reasons these schools were so popular:

Velocipedes are pretty things to look upon as they whirl along so swiftly and gracefully, operated by some practiced hand. But did you ever try to ride one? It seems an easy thing to sit on the little carpeted seat, put your feet upon the treadles, and astonish everybody by your speed; but
just try it! And don't invite your lady friends to witness that first performance either. You mount the machine with a great deal of dignity and confidence, you see that all is clear, you undertake to place your feet in the proper position, and – the trouble begins. Your first half hour is spent [deciding] which shall be uppermost, yourself or the machine, and the machine exhibits an amount of skill and perseverance that astonishes you.

When the velocipede evolved into the ‘high-wheeler' or ‘ordinary' in 1870 (the nickname ‘penny-farthing' was only used later), having an instructor was highly advisable. The pedals were still attached to the front wheel, inhibiting the steering, the rider was seated high over the front wheel and there was now a long, long way to fall. Again, a plethora of riding schools sprang up, usually associated with a bicycle manufacturer. When Columbia Bicycles relocated its headquarters in Connecticut, the à
la mode
offices featured, on the fifth floor, ‘the most complete riding school in existence'.

In 1884, at the age of 48, Mark Twain said, ‘I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour, I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on.' Twain's essay,
Taming the Bicycle,
on learning to ride a high-wheeler with a hired instructor or ‘Expert', illustrates well the perils of the machine:

He [the Expert] said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself. Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine;
we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.