Rewriting Mountain Bike History?

[PurpleFrog]

If anyone wants to read a book on real technical innovation and the problems involved then this very short one is outstanding:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Good-Turn-N ... 0684867303

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Good_Turn_%28book%29

..The mass production of interchangeable screws sounds boring, but it was actually the key step in the creation of modern technology: it was when the very difficult problem of how to make things to extremely small tolerances using just seconds per it of (relatively) unskilled labour was solved. This required new ways of measuring things and of controlling machinery; the intellectual effort was immense and the result changed industry and society. That - creation of something new and unobvious - is invention. Making an adult-sized BMX using the most obvious components possible in the middle of a BMX boom, and then getting your marketing department to keep other people's names out as much as possible, not so much.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Re:

It has been pointed out before that there is a point where an interest, hobby or whatever crystallises into a sport.

If you want to pick out arbitrary movements in the history of cycling that demonstrate bikes were being used in off road terrain, there are too many to choose from really. Why not look at the Buffalo soldiers or the Swiss army?

Fact is, logic dictates that from the moment bikes were invented they were being used on all terrain.

What is without dispute is that the modern sport of mountain biking was excited by the goings on in and around the hills of California.

 

[GrahamJohnWallace]

Re: Re:

Firstly, a new aesthetic in bicycle design was created when Tom Ritchey combined his expertise in building quality road bikes with the componentry of the klunker mountain bikes.
It was this iconic road style frame with 26" fat tyres and straight handlebars look that was imitated worldwide. For the first time ever, utility bikes were cool.

That's marketing, not technical innovation. And while aesthetics are highly subjective, I think any reasonable person would agree that the classic 50s English "roadsters" were good looking - more so than most mountain bikes - and they were definitely utility bikes. So for that matter were French randoneurs - they're great everyday riders and excellent load carriers.

The look of bicycles like other product is the responsibility of product designers though the marketing men/women may have a input when it comes to colour schemes and graphics. And there can be innovation in aesthetic design as well as technical matters.

As for improved handling and safety. Mountain bikes represented a major leap forward in this area, which is why they became so popular with cycle couriers. They were even better if the bars were shortened or, as I did on my first MTB in 1984, replace them with drop handlebars.

For the record, I have never stated in this thread that mountain bikes were invented, and at on point I did in fact say they "...the mountain bike...was not invented but evolved." So on this point we actually agree. Charlie Kelly, has also stated in various other forums that he does not believe that the mountain bike was invented.

The evolution of mountain bike design has a history, a story of the sequential set of steps, innovative or not, taking us from its beginnings in other areas of bicycle design to the present day. This thread is about a piece of the puzzle that the evidence fits into 1982, not 1977. However despite any evidence, 1977 is currently being reported worldwide as fact, due to the efforts of the Ritchey' marketing men. Geoff Apps has a phrase "Repetition makes truth". i.e. if you repeat an untruth enough times then people will start to believe it. Next thing you know it's being included in the history books. (Not so easy if Googling the topic brings up well informed debates like this).

I don't know if they had a "Registered Design" system in the States? But if they did it is doubtful as to whether the mountain bike design could have been registered to any one individual, as so many had a hand in the design. In contrast Geoff Apps' Cleland bike was designed by an individual and was probably original enough to qualify as a "Registered Design"

There are of course many patented technological developments that are associated with the mountain bike. Even some that were patented by early mountain bike pioneers. But as you point out, the mountain bike itself was neither 'non-obvious' or 'novel' enough.

 

[GrahamJohnWallace]

Re:

I don't know what the truth is, just that the story so far does not fit the evidence.
However the story appears to be evolving:
http://www.switchbackmagazine-digital.c ... pg=91#pg91

 

[Repack Rider]

The most interesting question here is, did the existence of 'Roughstuff' bikes in California have any influence on the development of the mountain bike?

Post hoc, propter hoc? Zero influence. I only found out about the UK scene after our own experimentation had led to the first generation of modern mountain bikes.

Whilst the mountain bike's fat tyres and sturdy frames have definite American roots from the Schwinn Excelsior and similar bikes, the lightweight frames, Alpine gear systems and cantilever brakes all have European origins. How did the US pioneers learn about these components etc? And how influential was the existence of US Roughstuff bikes?

Never heard of US "Roughstuff" bikes, although I was a member of the Roughstuff Fellowship based in the UK.

How did I learn about the mature technology of derailleurs, frame construction, gearing, etc?

I OWNED A COLNAGO AND I WAS THE PRESIDENT OF MY BIKE CLUB. My roommate was a bike mechanic and worked in a bike shop. This stuff was all my friends and I talked about for four or five years before we got around to building our own bikes.

I had two bikes, one a fine Italian race bike, and the other cobbled together from several different directions. How long would that situation have had to exist before someone asked the obvious question, "What if you built THIS bike as nicely as THAT bike?"

How many of the multitude of other "inventors" of the mountain bike also owned the latest in bike racing technology? How many of them actually raced regularly against their similarly equipped friends on their versions of off-road bikes? Our influences were obvious. competition on our funky bikes and Italian bikes to compare them to.

These English 'Woodsie' bikes were definitely important to the first of the US pioneers, John Finley Scott.

John is deceased now, but I knew him well. While this may be true, I never heard any such thing from him. John's "Woodsie" bike was built on a Schwinn World diamond frame that was modified to take a 26 x 2.125 tire. Your source?

And judging by the wording of the 1977/650b claim, they also turned Tom Ritchey onto the possibilities of off-road cycling.

Tom was definitely riding off-road before I met him, but he favored drop bars and skinnier tires. I don't know about this bike and I reserve any opinion on it.

Tom waited until some guys from Marin asked him in 1979 before he made an off-road bike for anyone other than himself or perhaps one of his close friends like Jobst Brandt. When he did build off-road bikes commercially, he went with the 26" wheels and tires he was asked to use. The reason is obvious. 26" rims and tires were in good supply, and 650-B was some weird European size you didn't get without working hard to find it. If you did find it, it would be expensive. Hardly anyone in my immediate circle even realized that size existed.

 

[Repack Rider]

I took part in at least some of the events under discussion in this thread. I took a lot of notes at the time. I wrote a book about this entire process, it's 264 pages of explanation of all this stuff, and if anyone here had bothered to read it, at least some of the questions would be framed better.

I spent the weekend on the road with Gary Fisher on a book signing expedition. We spent 24 straight hours together, which hasn't happened in quite a while, so we kicked all this stuff around for a day or so. It's obvious to both of us that a "safety bicycle" ca. 1895 is a pretty good facsimile of an '80s mountain bike. There was not a lot of genius in what we did other than the five or six years of experience refining the component group and frame design, so the product hit the market with most of the bugs worked out.

The other "secret" is that Gary and I through dumb luck hooked up with Tom Ritchey, who was building hundreds of beautiful bikes in a garage. There were three other small builders in Marin by that time, and Tom was outpacing them all. It was easy to get a lot of press, because everyone who saw them was stunned by the workmanship and the purposeful design. The first of these bikes were not built for tootling down a country lane, they were built to race at dangerous speeds on dodgy surfaces. They were undeniably fine cycling equipment no matter what the use, and they were impossible to ignore.

Re: how the Japanese refined drive trains. First cranksets we used were TA, a French triple with 26-tooth inner. A five-speed Regina cluster would have worked, but Suntour six-speed had just come in for general use so why not? Representatives of Shimano and Suntour came to our funky garage and asked us what we needed for this new approach to cycling. They were not mountain bikers, so they had to ask someone who understood off-road cycling before they committed a production run to the new market niche.

It was hardly the Japanese who made the market explode, it was American importers of Japanese bicycles, Specialized and Univega, who placed orders from Japanese factories Both designs were virtually identical to the Ritchey/MountainBike.

 

[GrahamJohnWallace]

The most interesting question here is, did the existence of 'Roughstuff' bikes in California have any influence on the development of the mountain bike?

Post hoc, propter hoc? Zero influence. I only found out about the UK scene after our own experimentation had led to the first generation of modern mountain bikes.

Whilst the mountain bike's fat tyres and sturdy frames have definite American roots from the Schwinn Excelsior and similar bikes, the lightweight frames, Alpine gear systems and cantilever brakes all have European origins. How did the US pioneers learn about these components etc? And how influential was the existence of US Roughstuff bikes?

Never heard of US "Roughstuff" bikes, although I was a member of the Roughstuff Fellowship based in the UK.

Thanks Charlie, this unequivocally answers my question in relation to you and Gary Fisher. No influence. You had not even heard about them.

These English 'Woodsie' bikes were definitely important to the first of the US pioneers, John Finley Scott.

John is deceased now, but I knew him well. While this may be true, I never heard any such thing from him. John's "Woodsie" bike was built on a Schwinn World diamond frame that was modified to take a 26 x 2.125 tire. Your source?

There is this video that contains a section about John's interest in English "Woodsie" bikes from Tom Ritchey. The photo of the English Roughstuff bike shown in the video was reportedly given to Ritchey when he was asked to make a copy for Finley Scott.
http://vimeo.com/47207697 The relavent part starts at about 8mins 30 in.

There is also the 2012 InterBike caption... and independently these museum shots of another Roughstuff bike made for Finlay Scott by another US framebuilder in 1978."Before his time: John Finlay-Scott
John Finlay-Scott began converting bicycles for off road use in the 1950's, 30 years before companies began to mass produce mountain bikes".

"John commissioned John Padgett of Nevada City to build the frame of this bicycle for him to ride in the mountains. It is one of eight originals that came to be known as "Woodsies".
It is otherwise equipped with off the shelf components including 650b wheels and cantilever brakes".

"650b Bicycle
1960s
Courtesy of Cupertino Bike Shop, Cupertino California."

This sounds to be very similar to the 1977 bike that Tom Ritchey says that he was asked to make by John Finlay Scott in 1977?

Museum at Longmont Colorado.

https://flic.kr/p/8FmjkH

The Caption on the exhibit reads:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/27089900@N ... otostream/

 

[GrahamJohnWallace]

Re:

There are two distinctive types of history: The type that tries to objectively record what happened, and the subjective type that discusses how important events were.

This thread was intended to be primarily about the accurate recording of what happened and the placing of things in the correct order. However, since not every tiny little thing can be recorded. History is also about the filtering of what should be remembered, from that which can safely be forgotten.

In 1995, the brief flowering of 650b and 700c MTBs in 1980s California was unimportant, as only a few frame-builders had used these wheel sizes. But the more recent success of 29er/27.5" bikes has changed that. Therefore, we now need to rewrite the history of mountain bike to also include bikes that didn't have 26" wheels.

I suspect that there are some other topics in early mountain bike history that may have been overlooked! For instance: The earliest use of cantilever brakes on mountain [bikes] that I know of is when Joe Breeze used them on Breezer No1 in October 1977. Is this correct, or does anyone here know of examples of them being used on earlier Klunker bikes?

 

[GrahamJohnWallace]

Re:

"Tom designed a bike for the late John Finley-Scott based on the English Woodsy." Bikerumor.com, May 2014
http://www.bikerumor.com/2014/05/05/rit ... more-73246

"Don’t call it a comeback. While the 650b wheel seems to be finally here to stay, Tom Ritchey was designing his first 27.5″ bike in 1977. As what Tom himself called his “first effort into thinking about mountain bikes,” Tom designed a bike for the late John Finley-Scott based on the English Woodsy. Built to explore the farm roads and trails in England, Woodsy bikes used 650b wheels which Tom thought would be a great fit for mountain bikes."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1977 Ritchey 650b mountain bike. A Summary of the evidence so far:
Historically, apart from the 1977 date, this version of of Tom Ritchey building a 650b bike for John Finley-Scott, in which no photo of the bike is shown, is plausible.

http://vimeo.com/47207697 (The relevant part starts at about 8mins 30 in).

In this video Tom Ritchey also talks about such a bike. He explains that he built this bike after he had seen Breezer No. 1 (which was made in October 1977) and says he made the bike in 1978 the same year as he made his first 26" wheeled mountain bike for himself and two others that went to Gary Fisher. However all other mainstream histories date these first three Tom Ritchey made 26" mountain bikes to 1979.

Klunkerbill, AKA Bill Savage, director of the film "Klunkerz" gave his viewpoint on this earlier in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=226245
"It never once came up in my research or in my countless hours of conversations with Tom, Joe, Gary, J.F. Scott (RIP) and everyone else who was around back then. The way I heard it, Tom told Joe he 'was planning on making a 650B bike' when Joe finally showed him Breezer #1. That meeting with Tom didn't take place until January of 1979. Joe had been racing that bike for more than a year by the time Tom even saw it. Seeing Joe's bike Tom realized the higher volume of the readily available 2.125 rubber was clearly the way to go on rugged terrain."

This account, combined with Tom's account that his first 650b bike frame coincided with the building of the first 26" Ritcheys, dates the John Finley-Scott bike to sometime post January 1979, not 1977.

The next question is, did J.F. Scott get the 650b "English Roughstuff bike he ordered or a a Ritchey mountain bike? We also know from the letters of Geoff Apps, that Apps didn't start exporting the 650b Finnish Nokia' Hakkapeliitta knobbly tyres until 1980. So in order to build a bike before 1980 fitted with Hakka tyres, like the one shown at InterBike2012, Ritchey would have to have found these obscure 'studded ice tyres' for himself, at a time well before Nokia had a US distributor.

Before the advent of 29ers, the brief flowering of 650b and 700c MTBs in 1980s California seemed unimportant, hardly worth remembering. It's no wonder, given this and the passage of time, that the order of events in Tom Ritchey's head, have got muddled up.

 

[danson67]

Re:

In the subject of canti brakes:

For instance: The earliest use of cantilever brakes on mountain [bikes?] that I know of is when Joe Breeze used them on Breezer No1 in October 1977. Is this correct, or does anyone here know of examples of them being used on earlier Klunker bikes?

Looking through Wendy Cragge's photo archive, it would appear that Otis Guy's 1944 Red Excelsior, ridden by Joe Breeze ran clamp-on cantis on the front on Repack #4 1976:

Could be 1976 or '77, but Alan Bonds appears to have been running a similar set-up on his metallic green Excelsior around the same time.

Unclear if these were custom made, adapted, or the original 50s pressed steel fittings from an Excelsior which just came with the frames, rather than being specifically chosen for Repack duties.:


I suppose my question would be (probably to Charlie K, if he's still talking to us after that Purple tirade ) would be:

-What prompted the decision to go with cantis all round rather than drums/coasters on those first Breezers, when you were still running on chromed steel rims with stumpy Dia-Compe brakes?

My wild speculation:

-Joe B and Charlie K could see the way the wind was blowing...At the time, braking was pretty poor with either drums or cantis, so there was no great advantage in one arrangement over another. The original series1 Breezer rims (according to Joe B via Dr. S 05-08-12) were still the steel Araya 26 x 1.75 and the Schwinns ran S-2 chromed rims. A little while later, with boxy aluminium Araya 7X and UKAI cruiser rims and longer Mafac cantis readily available, the decision would have been much clearer. Fairfax Pat posted this on MTBR Apr 2012: "The rims were upgraded [on Breezer #3] to alloy rims when they came available in '79 as were all the other bikes because they worked better."

-Joe B or Otis G could probably have brazed canti fittings all round and fitted DC 983s onto their Excelsior frames, but the Excelsior forks have such a flat cross section that I suspect they were better suited to the fore/aft loadings of a drum brake than the lateral twist from a decent canti. Also the Schwinn seatstays, with their dropped 16" c-to-c seat cluster, were too low to get heel clearance. Hence the round or oval section blades on the Breezer forks and the higher, 22" c-to-c, past horizontal, top tube and seat cluster, which also allowed a shorter seatpost. Building a whole new frame allowed these failings of the vintage Schwinn frame (and a whole load more, no doubt) to be addressed.

As a small sideline...first off-road specific cantilevers?
Not mountainbike, but I did dig up this scan attributed to 1976 of an experimental Dia-Compe 983 canti set-up on custom mounts by Bob Hadley (BMX Plus/Hadley components/GT/Norba vice pres...) when he was racing:
The arrangement and fork wouldn't be out of place on a standard mountainbike 10 years later...I think this emphasises the contribution made in the following years by the BMX legacy of Redline/GT/Haro/Cooks/Bullseye etc.

All the best,