It's All About the Bike (8 page)

After several further attempts – ‘the result as before . . . you don't get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire' — Twain did finally mount the machine:

We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on the instructor's back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that broke the fall, and it was not injured. Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite sound. I attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on something soft. Some recommend a feather bed, but I think an Expert is better.

The Expert returned to the fray with four assistants and Twain eventually learnt to balance and steer:

The bicycle had what is called the ‘wabbles,' and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way . . . For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down. The law required the opposite thing — the big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are falling. It is hard to believe this, when you are told it . . . The intellect
has to come to the front, now. It has to teach the limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.

Twain memorably concludes: ‘Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.'

Many who rode high-wheelers didn't. With the arrival of the safety bicycle in 1885, the world finally had a machine that was both safe (at least compared to the high-wheeler) and easy to steer. Since the pedals were attached via a chain to the rear wheel, the front wheel was free again to undertake its principal responsibility — steering. Only the aged and the overly prudent required ‘experts' now. Leo Tolstoy, aged 67, took instruction in 1895 and Jerome K. Jerome reported how, around the same time in London's parks, ‘elderly countesses [and] perspiring peers, still at the wobbly stage, battled bravely with the laws of equilibrium; occasionally defeated, they would fling their arms round the necks of hefty young hooligans who were reaping a rich harvest as cycling instructors: “Proficiency guaranteed in twelve lessons.”'

For the greater part of humanity, balancing on a safety bicycle was straightforward. In
The Complete Cyclist,
published in 1897, A. C. Pemberton wrote: ‘What each learner must remember is simply to turn the handles in the direction in which he is falling . . . the rest is easy' — a fact that lies at the heart of the universal appeal of the bicycle to this day.

Bicycling Science,
an academic tome on the physics behind the machine, explains balancing a bike as: ‘making the small support motions necessary to counter each fall as soon as it starts, by accelerating the base horizontally in the direction in which it is leaning, enough so that the acceleration reaction (the tendency of the centre of mass to get left behind) overcomes the tipping effect of unbalance'.

Perhaps Twain put it better but the point is that balance is at the heart of the story of the bicycle. Drais understood this, even if he did discover it by accident. And the key to balancing a bicycle is learning to steer the handlebars the way the bicycle is leaning, putting the centre of mass back over its support, and regaining equilibrium. Only temporarily, of course, for a bicycle follows more or less a curving trajectory, continually deviating a little to one side or the other. I've often wondered if it is this — the eternal serpentine course of the bicycle, the ‘dignified curvature of path' as H. G. Wells called it — that lies at the root of my love for the machine.

Initially a child learning to ride a bike will refuse to steer the way the bike is leaning; once this is grasped, the child will over-correct, yanking the handlebars to left and right, veering dramatically from side to side like a sailor on shore leave full of rum. In time, the steering adjustments become more subtle, and second nature.

If you restrain or lock the steering on a bicycle, you cannot ride it. If you've ever got the front wheel of a bike stuck in a tram track, or off-road in a narrow rut, you'll know what I mean. In addition, a bicycle has to be moving forward to balance. Balancing a bicycle at rest — a manoeuvre known as a ‘track stand' — is difficult. The fixed-wheel riders you see at city traffic lights managing to balance their bikes without dabbing a foot down are only nominally at rest. With the front wheel set at an angle, they are minutely rolling the bicycle backwards and forwards. They are also showing off. I know. I used to do it.

For a year I became obsessed with not putting a foot down whenever I cycled in London. Being able to do a track stand at traffic lights was one of the skills required: anticipating lights and braking early, knowing when to run them on amber and intuiting the manoeuvres of motorists were also critical. I regularly used
to get from my flat in Paddington, north of Hyde Park, to the college in the City where I studied photo-journalism, without ever dabbing a foot down. That was easy: 4 miles — I knew the sequence of the lights at the major intersections and my route avoided main roads. More difficult was riding from Paddington to Camberwell, south of the River Thames, where my girlfriend lived. If I arrived and rode up the garden path, grinning like a fool, she knew I'd done it. ‘You make people who won't walk on the cracks in the pavement look normal. You should seek help,' she'd say. The relationship didn't last.

Even today, there is a small minority of adults who can't ride a bicycle, let alone pull a track stand: roughly 8 per cent of women and 1 per cent of men in Britain, according to a recent Transport for London survey. Apparently, most able-bodied adults can grasp the rudiments in one three-hour session. The best thing about learning to ride a bicycle, though, is that you will only have to do it once.

There is a neuroscientific explanation for why we never forget how to ride a bicycle. We have a type of nerve cell in our brain that controls the formation of memories for motor skills. They're called ‘molecular layer interneurons'. These nerve cells encode electrical signals leaving the cerebellum — the part of the brain that controls co-ordinated movement — into a language that can be stored as memory in other parts of the brain. Of course, our molecular layer interneurons don't only encode the skills required to ride a bicycle; they encode all motor skills, from crawling to skiing and from knitting to dancing the tango.

What this doesn't explain is why riding a bicycle has been singled out as the one shared experience that we reference to illustrate how something once learnt can be etched in the memory so distinctly that we take it to the grave. ‘It's like riding a bike' — we say this about something we never forget how to do. Why
not the expression ‘like rowing a boat', ‘like using chopsticks' or ‘like doing breast stroke' instead? For some reason, we've chosen riding a bike as the benchmark motor skill by which our molecular layer interneurons may be judged. I don't know why. I'm not sure if anyone does.

It may be to do with the relationship between the bicycle and childhood. As I've said, most of us now learn to ride a bike early in life, ‘before the dark hour of reason grows', as John Betjeman put it. Perhaps, in youth, the cerebellum sends out stronger electrical signals, which are in turn encoded very carefully and stored in a secure place — the cerebral equivalent of a safe-deposit box in a steel vault beneath a bank in Zurich. Or perhaps it's to do with the fact that riding a bicycle fits so perfectly with the human software that our molecular layer interneurons can encode the motor skills and guarantee that the files won't be corrupted for the life of the user.

It may also be to do with how incredibly well balanced the safety bicycle is. It's so well balanced, it doesn't need a rider at all. If you let a well-aligned, riderless bicycle, with freely turning steering, roll down an incline, it will remain straight and upright, up to a speed which depends on its design. A riderless bicycle can even automatically make the small steering motions necessary to right itself after a bump or disturbance of some kind. Physicists call this ‘intrinsic stability'. It is often written that the gyroscopic momentum of a bicycle's spinning wheels alone support a riderless bike, like a spinning top. This is not true. The gyroscopic effect is one of several subtle concepts, including geometry and the distribution of mass, behind a self-balancing vehicle.

With or without a rider, a bicycle does need a well-balanced and maintained steering system to remain upright. This comprises the handlebars, the handlebar stem, the front forks and the headset. The forks have a steering tube, which passes through the head
tube of the frame; the stem and handlebars are clamped to the steering tube. The headset is principally made up of two bearing assemblies or cups that are pressed into the top and the bottom of the head tube of the frame. The headset permits the forks to rotate independently of the frame, for steering and balance.

*

‘We think of it as an initiative test,' Chris DiStefano said, greeting me with a big handclap at the door of an unmarked, unassuming factory down the end of Nela Street, a dead-end road that had neither a sign nor any road markings, at the arse-end of a large industrial estate in north-west Portland, Oregon. Finding Chris King Precision Components had taken half a morning. I'd asked directions two dozen times: ‘Nope. 'Fraid I ain't never heard of that place,' came the reply every time. It seemed strange. The company has a reputation for making superbly engineered bicycle components — hubs, bottom brackets and, most notably, headsets. That reputation has reached around the planet and yet people who worked a block away had never heard of Chris King. Hell, they'd never even heard of Nela Street. It was confirmation of something I learnt a long time ago travelling on a bicycle: if you want local knowledge, don't, for
God's sake, ask a local. In the end, I'd found it, as one first finds equilibrium on a bicycle, by trial and error.

Chris DiStefano is the marketing director at Chris King. When I'd first emailed him with an outline of my project, and the idea that I might visit the factory to see the headset for my dream bike being made, the shutters were snapped shut: no comprehensive tours, no photography of the facility allowed, no ‘walk-up orders' for components. An interview with Chris King himself was, Chris DiStefano wrote, ‘not an option. Bummer, I know, I'm nothing but bad news.' Thankfully, by my arrival, Chris had warmed up, though meeting Chris King was definitely not going to happen: he was ‘on holiday'.

‘Everybody else's tour ends here,' Chris said, standing in the door between the reception and the factory. He was lithe, like a committed amateur cyclist, with the long arms of a boxer and the unpredictable gesticulations of a stand-up comedian. ‘But because it's your
dream
bicycle,
and
you've come all the way from Wales, we've decided to invite you beyond the red door.'

We walked through the finishing and component assembly area: headsets were being stacked and packaged — ‘every one destined for somebody's dream bike,' Chris said — and in one corner, a laser machine was engraving hubs with the company logo. Chris explained how the people who work in each area design the workspace. There are fewer than 100 employees, but it helps them claim a sense of ownership of the company.

‘Chris King got into this business in 1976. He was a keen touring cyclist and he'd heard too many complaints about faulty headsets from his cycling friends,' Chris said. ‘With his engineering experience making medical equipment, he thought he could do better, and he designed the first
sealed
bearing headset.'

We'd reached a metal balcony overlooking the ‘prototype and development' area of the machine shop. Only one machine was
working and I wondered if work on prototypes had been shut down for my visit. If you were involved in headset espionage, and in the trade of bicycle engineering secrets generally, writing a book about assembling your dream bicycle would be a good cover.

The headset is an unglamorous but fundamental component of the bicycle. It's also a part that takes a terrific beating from the road. The ball bearings contained within the lower cup of a headset are loaded differently from those in all other rotating parts of the bicycle. They are loaded axially, and they hardly rotate — an undesirable situation as impacts from the road are transferred to stationary ball bearings. This is called ‘thrust stress' and it can cause pitting or brinelling of the bearings. The problem is exacerbated riding off-road, or on a loaded touring bicycle.