How did it all begin?

The wheel and axle has been dated back approximately 7 000 years ago, and it is interesting that ‘modern humans ‘have been roaming Earth for more or less 150 000 years, of which more than 140 000 have been lacking the wheel.

The spoked wheel’s origins have been traced back to the Bronze age’s Andronovo culture in Siberia / Central Asia - almost 4500 years ago - where it was used in horse drawn war chariots, eventually spilling over to Greek mainland to have an iron rim added by the Celts, and it’s use pretty much continued until 1890’s which saw the addition of the pneumatic tyre to wired wheels.

Several inventors and innovators have contributed to the development of the bicycle, but it remains relatively vague. In 1974 there was a claim made by a member of the team involved with the restoration of the recently discovered text of Leonardo da Vinci's "Codex Atlanticus" (circa 1490), that revealed a sketch of a bicycle. The claim was taken seriously for some years, but turned out to be a hoax. The drawing was - in fact - added some time later  (around the turn of the 19th century), but it is unknown by whom.  The hoax continues (as recently as 2005 a Canadian exhibit told its visitors that “the wooden bicycle displayed within the 'Travelling with Leonardo da Vinci' exhibition was constructed to a design sketched by the Renaissance master.” (http://www.bikebiz.com/news/19934/Canadians-get-chance-to-touch-da-Vincis-bicycle).

Another ancient reference to a bicycle is found in a 1580's stained glass window in England (Stokes-on-Poges) which appear to depict a toy two-wheeler of sorts.

The Celerifere - The first claimed real two-wheeler was the Celerifere hobbyhorse, supposedly a toy of the French nobility in the 1790s. France's Comte de Sivrac is said to have invented the Celerifere with a frame in the form of an animal (horse / bird). Having no pedals, riders propelled this pushbike by pushing it along with their feet, steering it by leaning towards a desired direction, but it is possible that Louis Baudry de Saunier, a 19th-century French bicycle historian, could have imagined the Celerifere.

The Draisienne - Despite the dubious Celerifere we know the Draisienne (still without pedals) was created by German baron Karl Drais de Sauerbrunn having patented this wooden pushbicycle in 1817. The Draisienne was a ‘walking machine’ that would help the baron get around the royal gardens, sporting two same-size in-line wheels mounted in a frame which one would straddle, propelled by pushing your feet against the ground rolling yourself forward in a ‘gliding walk’, and could steer its front wheel with a handlebar. The Draisienne was successfully copied in England as a "hobby horse” (requiring neither stable nor feed). They were often used for downhill racing, but only men rode these bicycles (as women’s dresscode made it hard for them to ‘run’ along). Over time a female inspired 3-wheeled model was also developed, and it probably constitutes the original ‘tricycle’.

Cranks - Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick MacMillan added a mechanical crank-drive to the bicycle’s rear wheel in 1839, creating the first true "bicycle" in the modern sense. His system employed a pair of treadle drives connected by rods to a rear wheel crank, rather like a steam locomotive's driveshaft.

The Velocipede - In the 1850s Ernest Michaux - a Parisian manufacturer of baby - and horse carriages - unleashed  the Velocipede. It was the world's first mass-produced riding machine. An interesting application of the Velocipede had 3 flanged wheels which made it rideable on train tracks. Being a light and manoeuvrable bike - basically made from wood - it became an important track inspector's vehicle. Pierre Lallement took this bicycle’s design in a new direction by placing the pedals on an enlarged front wheel during the 1860s.

The ordinary / penny-farthing - In order to increase speed in the absence of any practical method of gearing, larger and larger wheels were used in the Velocipede.  British cyclists likened the disparity in size of the two wheels to their coinage, nicknaming it the ‘penny-farthing’. Other popular names included  the 'ordinary', 'high-wheeler' and 'boneshaker, (although the latter generally referred to any bicycle before the invention of the pneumatic tyre).

The penny-farthing had a relatively brief vogue which coincided with the birth and heyday of bicycling. It was speedy and capable of long trips on poor roads, and its use spread fast and far. In a day when a skilled person might earn 25 cents per hour in wages, a good Ordinary sold for $75 to $125, yet selling at a furious pace.

Mounting an ordinary is a process requiring some skill, and although stable at speed (because of the pendulum effect) it was notoriously prone to accidents. To slow and stop a highwheeller the rider applies a backwards pedalling motion, augmented by (a notoriously useless) use of a spoon-shaped brake ‘pressing’ on the tyre. Any attempt to stop suddenly / collision with a large pothole or other obstruction could send a rider flying over the handle bars (known as "taking-a-header" or "coming-a-cropper"). On long downhill stretches it was recommended that riders take their feet off the pedals and hook them over the handlebars, so that in case of a crash they would land (hopefully) on their feet. Scott Sorensen is known to have been the first person photographed falling off a bicycle.

The appearance of the bicycle with the one wheel dominating, led to their riders being referred to - in especially America - as "wheelmen", a name that lived on for nearly a century in the League of American Wheelmen.  Interestingly, ‘penny-farthing’  - today - also refers to the traditional rotor arrangement found on most helicopters (a large horizontal rotor for lift and a smaller vertical tail rotor to counteract the effects of torque).

The Rover Safety Bicycle - In 1885 John Kemp Starley launched the Rover Safety Bicycle (so-called because the rider was seated much lower down and much further behind the front wheel) and over the next fifteen years or so,  the penny-farthing vanished. The safety bicycle  sported  the modern placing of the crank axle and featured a cross-frame tension structure. With two wheels of equal size and a roller chain geared transmission, the safety bicycle is the grandfather of today's machines. The high-wheeler lives on in spirit in ‘gear inch units’ used to describe gear ratios, but the shape of the Rover Safety and its use of the triangle based diamond-framed bicycle has come to dominate the perception of what constitutes a bicycle.

The 1890's Golden Age of Bicycles - In 1888, Scotsman John B. Dunlop introduced the pneumatic tyre to the spoked wheel, which evolved in massive universal application. Soon the rear ‘freewheel’ was developed - enabling the rider to coast without the pedals spinning out of control - in turn leading to coaster brakes in 1898. Derailleur and cable-pull brakes were also developed during these years, but were relatively slowly adopted by casual riders. By the turn of the century, however,  bicycling clubs flourished and touring / racing were extremely popular.

Englishman Frank Bowden started the Raleigh company in Nottingham in the 1890s, and was soon producing some 30,000 bicycles a year. German builder Ignaz Schwinn emigrated to the United States where he founded his similarly successful company in Chicago in 1895. By the mid-20th century, bicycles had become the primary means of transportation for millions of people.

The derailleur  - One of the greatest developers and proponents of the derailleur was the Frenchman Paul de Vivie (1853-1930). A passionate advocate of cycling, he rode his first high-wheeler at the age of 28, and soon sold his silk business to start a bicycle shop. He also founded the magazine Le Cycliste in 1887 where he wrote under the nom de plume "Velocio," touting the joys and benefits of cycling. As a tireless inventor he was convinced that geared bikes, then an oddity, were the future of cycling. Though existing gear-changers were awkward and unreliable, Velocio developed a two-speed derailleur that he used on extensive forays into the Alps by 1905. Derailleurs did not become common road racing equipment until 1938 when Simplex introduced their cable shifted derailleur.

During the early 1950’s a cable-operated parallelogram variety derailleur was introduced by Tullio Campagnolo - who also invented the quick release skewer (circa 1932) for attaching wheels – and Campagnolo became the standard for high quality derailleurs for several decades (with its Gran Sport, Record, and Super Record products). In 1964, Suntour invented the slant-parallelogram rear derailleur which alloweded the jockey wheels to maintain a more constant distance from the different sized sprockets - resulting in easier shifting - and once their patent expired other manufacturers adopted the design.

Shimano – In 1921 Shozaburo Shimano established ‘Shimano Iron Works’ and began production of bicycle freewheels. From these humble beginnings, Shimano has become a goliath in the bicycling industry “providing products with a focus on cycling and fishing, the most popular of outdoor sports”. As the leading manufacturer Shimano has come to dominate the industry, owning a near monopoly having pioneered commercial success with many key technologies such as Indexed shifting, Cassette freehubs, Hyperglide and Interactive Glide clusters, Superglide & Biopace chainwheels, SLR brakes, SPD pedals, and STI shifting.

The bicycle’s influence - Bicycle manufacturing centered around advanced metalworking techniques that proved to be a training ground for many other industries, enabling the development of components used in early automobiles and aircraft. Rover, Morris, Škoda, Henry Ford and the Wright brothers all started in the bicycle business.

Bicycle clubs and national associations became prominent advocates for improvements to roads and highways, founding and leading such institutions as the Good Roads Movement in the USA. Both their model for political organization and the paved roads for which they argued facilitated the growth of the bicycle's only rival, the automobile.

The bicycle even came to symbolise the New Woman of the late nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States - the 1890s bicycle craze having led to a movement for ‘rational dress’ helping to liberate women from their corsets and ankle-length skirts. In 1895 Frances Willard - the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union - wrote a book called “How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle”, in which she praised ‘Gladys’ – her bicycle - for its "gladdening effect" on her health and political optimism, urging women to action, proclaiming, "I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum."

Sociologists suggest that bicycles enlarged the gene pool for rural workers by enabling them to reach the next town and to increase their ‘courting radius’. In cities, bicycles helped reduce crowding in inner-city tenements by allowing workers to commute from the suburbs.  Bicycles also reduced society’s dependence on horses with all the knock-on effects this brought to society.

In North America the use of bicycles levelled off or declined as motorized transportation became affordable (the bicycle having been relegated to the role of a child’s toy). In other parts of the world - China, India, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands - the traditional utility bicycle remained a mainstay of transportation as the automobile could not be affordably produced (it had to be imported). Europe’s bicycle manufacturers kept on developing and refining the bicycle tackling its weight, gearing and braking systems, with spectacular events such as the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France ingrained in the local culture and national pride.

In North America consciousness of physical fitness, the high cost of fuel and environmental consciousness spawned a renaissance of bicycling in the late 1960s, and bicycle sales - racers - boomed. Sales were helped by higher performance steel alloys and gearsets. While 10-speeds were very popular in the 1970s (which had remained largely unchanged since the turn of the century), 12-speed designs were introduced in the 1980s, and today most bicycles feature 18 or more speeds. By the 1980s newer designs had driven the English three-speed totally from the roads, and the ‘mountain bike’ had taken to the stage. The hybrid bicycle surfaced in the early 1990’s, and during  the late 1990’s the combination of TV coverage and Lance Armstrong’s unrivalled conquest of Tour de France threw bicycling right back into the mainstream of popular sports.

Today - The diamond frame bicycle is made in a staggering number of configurations, with massive support for bicycling as both a sport and means of primary transportation in the known universe. Approximately one and a half billion bicycles are in everyday use, and more than a hundred million bicycles are manufactured every year to meet the demand for wheeled transport.

Despite its variations and guises, the humble chain-driven diamond frame bicycle is one of the most efficient machines ever created and remains celebrated throughout the world. It was a commercial success before the automobile, and - in all likelihood - will outlast it as well.

Mountain bikes - Riding bicycles off-road goes back to the beginning of cycling itself. Road racing cyclists had long used cyclo-cross as a means of keeping fit during the winter, eventually becoming a sport in its own right with the first world championship in 1950. The French Velo Cross Club Parisien (VCCP) comprised about twenty-one young bicyclists from the outskirts of Paris, who - between 1951 and 1956 - developed a sport that was remarkably akin to present-day mountain biking. The Roughstuff Fellowship was established in 1955 by off-road cyclists in the UK .

However the mountain bike has its origins in the modified heavy cruiser bicycles used for freewheeling down mountain trials in California, U.S.A. in the mid-late 1970s. At the time, there was no such thing as a mountain bike. The earliest ancestors of modern mountain bikes were based around frames from cruiser bicycles such as those made by Schwinn.

The Schwinn Excelsior was the frame of choice due to its geometry. Riders used balloon tyred cruisers and later modified them with gears and motocross style handlebars, referring to these bikes as “Klunkers”. The term would also be used as a verb since mountain biking was not yet in use.

They would race down mountain fireroads causing the hub brake to burn the grease inside, requiring the riders to repack the bearings. These were called "Repack Races" and triggered the first innovations in mountain bike technology, as well as the initial interest of the public. The sport originated in California, on Marin county's Mount Tamalpais.

It was not until the late 1970s / early 1980s that road bicycle companies started to manufacture mountain bicycles married with high-tech lightweight materials. Joe Breeze is normally credited with introducing the first purpose-built mountain bike in 1978. Tom Ritchey then went on to make frames for a company called MountainBikes that was a partnership between Gary Fisher, Charlie Kelley and Tom Ritchey. Tom Ritchey with his skills in frame building also built the original bikes. The company's 3 partners ran into rough times and finally fell apart in 1983. The designs were basically road bicycle frames (with heavier tubing and different geometry) with a wider frame and fork to allow for a wider tyre. The handlebars were also different in that they were a straight, transverse-mounted handlebar, rather than the dropped, curved handlebars that are typically installed on road racing bicycles. Some of the parts on early production mountain bicycles were taken from the BMX. The first mass-produced mountain bikes - made in Japan - were produced by Specialized in 1983. ( being copies of Tom Ritchey's frames).  These bikes were not yet fillet-brazed, and configured with 15 gears.

The first Downhill time-trial race took place in Fairfax, California on October 21, 1976, and 12 riders descended 1300 feet in under 6 minutes. Alan Bonds won, being  the only one who hadn’t crashed. At that time riders rode "clunkers" and immediately after the race riders had to disassemble and repack all the bearings with grease or risk the hub to seize up. With the modification of "clunkers" the modern mountain bike and fat-tyre revolution began. Many participants in the original Repack Downhill Racing Series of the 1970's went on to become mountain bike innovators and industry leaders.

Most riders who ride exclusively downhill do so in competitions or ride almost exclusively on lift accessed terrain, but tramming up to the top of runs is still by far the most popular as most trails do not have lift access. Pushing the bike to the top is also a commonly used method.

North Shore mountain biking originated in the hilly, slick, rocky terrain of Vancouver on Canada's north shore, hence coined "North Shore" riding. Because of the almost - if not completely - impassable terrain, riders began building bridges over swampy or muddy areas. These bridges evolved into complex, often extremely challenging, man-made 'stunts'. These stunts are often narrow and require the rider to move very slowly regardless of width, and North Shore riding requires immense balance and bike handling skills. North Shore bikes are much like freeride bikes in their geometry on the one hand, and downhill bikes in their component makeup. However, because stunts have evolved to include large drops and high speed descents (through a series of stunts), they commonly have as much travel as downhill and freeride bikes, however feauture more nimble and manoeuvrable frame designs, and are often lighter-weight.

Interesting bicycling speed records

UCI’s ("new rules" ) hour unpaced, men:

In 1876,  F. L. Dodds rode 26.508 km (16.471 mi) in an hour, on a penny-farthing.

On September 9th, 2000, Cycling’s Hour Record was established as the most prestigious record for the longest distance cycled in one hour on a bicycle . Time trial helmets, disc or tri-spoke wheels, time trial aero bars, and/or aerodynamic monocoque frames are not allowed under these rules, and cyclists have to ride an ‘Eddy Merckx’ type standard diamond frame bike (without aero wheels) – and the achievements in this category are: 

• At Mexico City, on 25 October 1972 (in a velodrome, at altitude) Eddy Merckx set a record of 49.431 km (30.715 mi). This record not only stood for twelve years, but established the benchmark for equipment to be used.
• At Manchester, on 27 October 2000, Chris Boardman posted a distance of 49.441 km (30.721 mi), topping Merckx's hour record by the tiny margin of 10 m (32.8 ft).
• In Moscow, on 19 July 2005, Ondřej Sosenka improved Boardman's record to 49.700 km (30.882 mi) using a bike with 54 x 13 gearing, radical positioning of the seat and a relatively small vertical frame height (yet remaining within the UCI’s regulations).

UCI’s  "best human effort" and other records:

• The best human effort – the hour record for an ‘upright bicycle’ remains with Chris Boardman,  @ 56.375 km, obtained with a ‘time trial bike’ (not allowed under the UCI’s "new rules") in 1996.
• The hour record for the International Human Powered Vehicle Association is the record for the longest distance cycled in one hour in a ‘speedbike’ recumbent, and “Fast” Freddy Markham, on July 2nd, 2006 set his 20th world record in covering a distance of 85.991km (53.43 miles) in one hour.
• Land's End to John o' Groats  is a traversal of the whole of Great Britain (southwest to northeast). Land's End is the extreme westward point of the mainland, and John o' Groats is the traditionally acknowledged extreme northern point of Great Britain. The record for cycling from Land's End to John o' Groats (875mi / 1400km)  is held by Andy Wilkinson, who completed the journey in 41 hours 4 min 22 sec on a Windcheetah recumbent tricycle, and on an upright by Gethin Butler, at 44h 4m 20s. during 2001.
• Motor paced – the Absolute Speed World Record in Cycling : On 3 October 1995 Fred Rompelberg (from Maastricht, the Netherlands) became the holder of above record with a recorded speed of 268,831 km/h  on his special bicycle, drafting behind a dragster of the Strasburg Drag Racing Team on the Salt Flats at Bonneville near Salt Lake City , Utah, USA.
• Flying start, unpaced.  Sam Whittingham - a Canadian - holds the following records under the sanction of the International Human Powered Vehicle Association:
  o The 200 m flying start (single rider) : 130.36 km/h (81.00 mph) on 2002-10-05.
  o The 500 m flying start (single rider) : 100.32 km/h (62.34 mph) on 1999-07-30.
  o The 1000 m flying start (single rider) : 128.40 km/h (79.79 mph) on 2001-10-06.
  o The 1 mile flying start (single rider) : 126.55 km/h (78.64 mph) on 2001-10-06.
• RAAM – In the race across America the gun fires somewhere on the West Coast (Oceanside, CA in 2006) and the finishing line is over 3000 miles away, on the other side of the continent. The race claims to be the longest running ultra-distance bicycle endurance competition in the world, and is not a stage race like the Tour de France. In the race’s history (since 1982) nobody has equalled Pete Penseyres 1986 record of crossing the USA – solo - in 8 days, 9hours and 47 minutes, at an average of 15.4 miles per hour.
• Tour De France – The highest TTT average speed to date has been obtained by team Discovery during 2005, averaging just over 57km p/hour over a 50km course!