It's All About the Bike (20 page)

Nearly every bicycle wheel made since 1874 has been built using the tangent-spoking method. The innovation would later be borrowed in the motorcycle, automobile and aeroplane industries, among others. It remains the best method for building bicycle wheels to this day.

We now know that the high-wheeler or ordinary (it only became known as the ‘penny farthing' once its popularity was declining in the late 1880s) was a brief vogue that led the bicycle down a technological cul-de-sac. It had two important consequences for society, however.

The expansion of the railway network across Britain in the 1840s had killed the stagecoach business, leading to the neglect of the once excellent turnpike road system. The pioneering work of Thomas Telford, the civil engineering giant known as ‘the colossus of roads', and John McAdam, who invented the first road-surfacing process, was long forgotten. In fact, in the 1870s,
roads were worse than they had been at the beginning of the century. Great lumps of stone, as well as mud and ruts, were the norm. For cyclists, accidents were common. As the Earl of Albemarle, president of the National Union of Cyclists, wrote: ‘The only obstacle that I know of to the use of cycling becoming universal in this country, is that year by year the roads seem in many parts of England to be getting worse and worse.'

The athletic and adventurous young men who rode high-wheelers formed clubs, with captains, uniforms, badges and buglers, who served to protect their members from the potholes — the bugler rode in front sounding the alarm when he came across a crater. The clubs also campaigned to improve roads. By the mid-1880s, the biggest club, the Cyclists' Touring Club, had 20,000 members. It was a powerful force. Through it, the bicycle became a major factor in the rebirth of the idea that roads were a national concern.

In America in the 1870s the roads were even worse. Quagmires in spring and dust tracks in summer, they were known as ‘gutshakers'. For Colonel Albert A. Pope, who began manufacturing Columbia high-wheeler bicycles in 1878, improving roads was the key.

Pope involved himself in every aspect of the bicycle. He established an annual trade show, organized races and financed lawsuits against municipal regulations that prejudiced cyclists. He founded
The Wheelman
magazine and distributed it gratis. He
offered prizes to the medical profession for pro-cycling articles.

Most significantly, Pope spearheaded the powerful ‘Good Roads Movement'. He had a section of tarmac laid in downtown Boston, to show how smooth roads could be. He made a donation to establish a course in road-building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he launched the League of American Wheelmen in 1880, which organization immediately took up the demand for better roads.

In the 1880s, the advancing roadworthiness of the high-wheeler seems to have unlocked the minds of young gentlemen to the possibilities of travelling by bike, as the mountain bike would do again, a century later. C. Wheaton, a manufacturer in Covent Garden, London, produced a ‘Map of the British Isles for Bicycle Tourists' and rented bicycles by the month. Clubs set off to tour France where, from the mid-1870s, the bicycle industry had begun to flourish again. In 1875, Albert Laumaillé rode a 54-inch Coventry Machinist bicycle 1,127 km (700 miles) from Paris to Vienna. In 1882, Ion Keith Falconer, a record-breaking amateur cyclist, Scottish aristocrat and missionary, rode from Land's End to John o'Groats, completing the 1,600 km (994 miles) in thirteen days.

Thomas Stevens, an American immigrant from England, departed from San Francisco Bay on a black-enamelled Columbia 50-inch ‘Standard' high-wheeler, on 22 April 1884. He rode around the world. It took him three years. He pedalled through England, Continental Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, where he wintered as a guest of the Shah. Expelled from Afghanistan, he took a ship from Istanbul to Karachi and rode the Grand Trunk Road to Calcutta, through eastern China and across Japan, before catching a steamer home to San Francisco. ‘Distance actually wheeled, about 13,500 miles,' he recorded.

Crossing the USA in order to, as he said, ‘deliver the message',
Stevens followed wagon-roads, railroad ways, canal towpaths and the few public roads that existed. West of the Mississippi River, there were none. For at least a third of the distance, over mountains and deserts, Stevens dragged, shoved, carried and pushed his 75 lb high-wheeler. He was shot at by cowpokes, chased by coyotes and memorably, to avoid being hit by a train, he hung off a railroad bridge above a ravine by one hand, holding his bicycle in the other.

The drawback of the high-wheeler was the inherent danger of riding one. The saddle was precariously high over the front wheel; the machine pitched forward on encountering the smallest road obstacle, ditching the rider on his head; there were no brakes worth speaking of. Accidents were so common that a new vocabulary was invented to describe them. Riders who went plunging over the front of their bicycles at speed ‘took a header', received an ‘imperial crowner' or ‘came a cropper'. The machines were nicknamed ‘widow-makers'. Women didn't ride high-wheelers; nor did boys, nor older men, nor the shortest, or unathletic young men. The machine was a long way from being ‘a people's nag', the form of popular, utilitarian transport that society increasingly craved.

In the end, the safety bicycle rapidly made the high-wheeler obsolete. The enduring reputation of the latter is out of proportion to the part it played in the history of the bicycle. This is partly because it has become a symbol of the Victorian era, and partly because of its intriguing shape. It lives on, though, in the
calculation of gear sizes (see Appendix), and most significantly in the spare purity of James Starley's tangent-spoked wheel.

When every spoke had been cut to length and rethreaded — by hand in the spoke cutter — then washed, degreased and dried, Gravy applied ‘spoke prep' to the threads. He neatly laid out his tools and the components of the wheel on the workbench and pulled up a stool. He hooked a black ‘Sapim' apron over his head, sat and checked everything over. He was preparing himself, like a potter sitting down to make a bowl.

‘Building a wheel takes you into the zone. It's Zen-like . . . and quite meditative,' Gravy said. ‘A result is a wheel as fine as you can build it. If there are ghosts in there, if you're trying to get rid of a micron at the end and then messing it up, that's no good. Like Michelangelo mixing paint, if it's not mixed right the first time, you start over.'

With that Gravy fell silent. He dropped the spokes one by one through the holes in the flanges of the front hub. Periodically, he gathered all the spokes from one side of the hub together and swept them to the side, like someone tying their hair back. When he'd lined up the label on the hub with the label on the rim — a nice touch — he placed the first spoke through the hole on the rim next to the valve and secured it with a blue nipple. All the other nipples would be silver: the blue one was a visual aid, and Gravy's signature. Then he went round the rim once, placing a spoke through every third hole. He flipped the wheel over and laced a second set. Within minutes, the pattern of the wheel began to emerge. He wound the last few nipples on with a homemade tool.

The wheel was laced. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it could be done so quickly. Gravy paused to inspect the pattern: ‘When I was wrenching on the road, mechanics from
different pro teams would get together and compete. We called it lacing racing.'

He mounted the wheel in his trueing stand, an essential wheel-builder's apparatus that checks the lateral truth of the wheel, and its concentricity or roundness. Working with a spoke key, he made an initial ‘pass', tightening each spoke a couple of turns, working back to where he'd started, slowly bringing the spokes uniformly up to tension.

It was a delightful process to watch. Gravy worked slowly and precisely, yet things happened quickly. The parts sat comfortably in his big hands. There was a harmony in the way the spoke wrench moved. It never clattered into the rim or the hub or any of the still slack spokes. It weaved through the air as if it was an appendage to his hand. I realized I was watching a man do what he was a master at — in itself a privilege.

I've seen skilful bike mechanics work their magic and I had anticipated the visual pleasure. I hadn't expected the wheel-building process to be an aural feast too. The metallic brush of the spokes being gathered in hand, the ting of a spoke as the elbow dropped into the flange, the scuffle of the nipples moving on the workbench, the whirr of the wrench fastening the nipples, the swish of the loosely suspended hub flopping about. Ping, ding, tinkle, chink, clink, jangle — as Gravy worked in silence the room was humming with the century-old melody of a bicycle wheel being made. And this was really the opening
allegro
of the symphony. As the spokes began to come up to tension, they clanged and chimed, changing tone with every ‘pass' Gravy made round the wheel.

‘Sometimes I think I could do it with a blindfold on,' Gravy said, standing for a moment and straightening his back. I could believe this. I'd read about A. G. Duckett & Son, a family run bike shop in East London. It was famous in the 1950s — an era
when most bike shops built hoops for their customers — for the quality of its wheels. Despite failing eyesight, damaged during World War II, Albert Duckett used to finish the wheels himself, just by feel and sound.

Gravy can build 100 wheels a week at full steam. I've built one. I was in Piedmont in the Italian Alps. Flying down a mountain road on a bike loaded with panniers, the sidewall on my rear wheel rim came apart. It was late on a Saturday afternoon when I burst through the door of a bike shop in Aosta. The old man who built wheels didn't work on Saturdays. The shop was closed on Sunday, ‘
naturale'.
One of the three young mechanics might have had a go, but Saturday night was looming. I couldn't be sure if it was the taste of cold beer, the whiff of their Mama's ravioli or the touch of a girl's skin that they ached for, but they certainly weren't going to work overtime building me a new hoop.

They did, at least, sell me a new rim at a discount. I sat down on a bench in a square beneath the Roman walls of the town and set to work. I had a set of notes I'd written two years earlier, in Penang, Malaysia. There, too, my rear wheel had failed. I'd written the notes watching Abar, an aged Cantonese-Malayan with mahogany-brown skin cured like leather, build me a wheel. Using pidgin English, Bahasa Malaysian, Cantonese, sign language and drawings, Abar had managed to convey the rudimentary techniques of wheel-building. In the evening, beneath the stucco arch of his bike shop, we ate satay kebabs, coconut-milk rice and mangosteens from the passing hawkers' trolleys. As I rose to leave, Abar tapped the pocket of my shorts where the notes were neatly folded. There was a sense he was passing on a charm.

Sitting on the bench in Aosta, it felt like a curse. I just couldn't get the spokes to lace up correctly. Twice, I laced almost the whole wheel and had to undo it again. As the light began to fade,
I tried a third time. It worked. Each spoke found its true hole. The three-cross pattern was uniform. I trued the wheel laterally as well as I could, using the brake blocks as a makeshift trueing stand. It was the work of an amateur, but I was euphoric. I strapped the panniers back on the bike and set off up the Aosta valley towards the Grand Saint Bernard Pass. On the 25 mile descent to Martigny in Switzerland the next day, the wheel held up. Though it needed almost daily attention, it got me home.

I've still got Abar's notes. I found them recently, neatly folded in the back of my battered 1994 edition of
Richards' Bicycle Repair Manual.
The ink on the verso has soaked through and there are blotches of what could be satay kebabs, but the instructions are legible: (1) Cassette side up, feed ‘in bound' spokes in alternate holes . . . (2) Turn hub over. Draw perpendicular line down from spoke nearest valve (get spoke straight); find hole of flange
nearest
the line of that spoke; take
hole on right hand
of that and place spoke in. It then goes through on rim, one to right of hole where spoke on other side goes . . .' Re-reading it, I thought it might be code. It was impenetrable. That I used these notes to build a wheel, my first and last, on a bench in a park in Aosta as the aged townsfolk gathered like bluebottles for
passeggiata,
is no less of a wonder to me now than the bicycle wheel itself.