It's All About the Bike (9 page)

‘With the advent of the mountain bike, the problem of poor steering components was amplified,' Chris said. We were walking through the main machine shop: it was alive with the buzz and thrust, the boom, drone and rattle of metal being engineered into life. ‘You ride a mountain bike, right? The headset gets jack-hammered. And if you ride in a place where the weather is wet, life is even tougher for a headset. So you need good bearings. And that's what we do here — we make great bearings. Yes, we do make beautiful aluminium pieces in an array of lovely colours to house those bearings, and people justifiably call our components “bike jewellery”. But really, what we do is make great ball bearings.'

The bicycle industry was the first to make widespread use of ball bearings, though the concept was understood much earlier. Galileo described them around 1600. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about them a century before that, and remains of wooden ball bearings have been found on Roman galleys and dated to around
40
AD.
How bearings work is very simple: if two surfaces roll over each other, rather than slide, friction is greatly reduced. On a modern bicycle, there are bearings — spherical hard steel balls embedded in lubricant — between the fixed and rotating parts of the hubs, the bottom bracket, the pedals, the freewheel and the headset. Without bearings, riding a bicycle would be like pedalling a sleigh.

On a cold, wet day in Paris in November 1869, the humble ball bearing made a dramatic entry into the history of the bicycle. Over 100 cyclists, including a handful of women, were gathered beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, before a crowd of thousands. At 7.30 a.m, a flag was waved and the riders set off for the city of Rouen, 75 miles to the north-west.

This was the world's first organized bicycle road race. On desperately poor roads, it was the most ambitious test of man and the machine yet. The prize was 1,000 francs. The victor was James Moore, an Englishman who had grown up in Paris, across the street from a family of blacksmiths called Michaux who were makers of velocipedes. Moore, known as the ‘Flying Frenchie' in Britain and the ‘Anglais Volant' in France, went on to become one of the best known cyclists of his day. He won many races, set the record for the distance cycled in an hour and held several world championship titles, but he is best remembered for winning the first Paris—Rouen race.

The staging of the Paris—Rouen race was disrupted in 1870
by the outbreak of war between France and Prussia, but it was used as the model for all the classic European road races that were to follow, and which endure today. Each new race — Bordeaux— Paris, a 350 mile night—day event inaugurated in 1891, Paris— Brest—Paris also in 1891, Liège—Bastogne—Liège in 1892, Paris—Roubaix in 1896 and the Tour de France in 1903, to name a few — all seemed to try and outdo their predecessors. But Paris—Rouen set the first marker in the lasting relationship between bicycle racing and human suffering. Moore is reputed to have said before the race, ‘I will get there first, or they will find my body in the road.'

It is a heroic sentiment — a sentiment that has been a cornerstone of road cycle racing ever since; a sentiment that has provided an endless resource for the marketing of road racing bicycles, componentry, clothing, holidays, newspapers, books, films and the races themselves. Of course, it's also the sentiment that has blindly condoned drug abuse within the sport for a century, and the sentiment that killed Tommy Simpson in the 1967 Tour de France: they really did find his body in the road, with amphetamines and cognac in his blood, 1 mile from the top of the infamous Mont Ventoux. He'd ridden himself to death. He didn't actually say, ‘Put me back on the bike', but the epitaph on Simpson's gravestone in the churchyard at Harworth, Nottinghamshire, reads: ‘His body ached, his legs were tired but still he would not give in.'

As it happens, Moore's victory in the 1869 Paris—Rouen race was more about technical advantage than human resolve. He was riding the only bike that had ball bearings fitted in the pedal axle. I realize ball bearings aren't as glamorous as the physical and moral fortitude of mankind, but that's the truth. All kinds of machines set off down Avénue de la Grande Armée on 7 November 1869: monocycles, tricycles and quadricycles were among them. James
Moore, and all the other serious racers, rode velocipedes. The race was promoted by the magazine
Le Vélocipède Illustré,
and by the Olivier brothers, owners of Michaux et Compagnie, the successful velocipede manufacturing business.

The exact details of Moore's steed are not established by contemporary reports, sadly. He may have ridden a heavy wooden machine with solid rubber tyres, made by his old family friend, Michaux. Or he may have been on a bicycle specially manufactured for the event by the French mechanic, Suriray. All accounts, however, do agree on one thing: his bicycle that day was the first machine with ball bearings in the pedal axle, ensuring the cranks rotated more smoothly, making pedalling more efficient. Moore won the race by fifteen minutes.

The first patent for ball bearings was granted to Welsh inventor and ironmaster Philip Vaughn in 1794. He used radial ball bearings in carriage axles, to make them easier to pull. Curiously, his idea didn't catch on. Suriray had received the first French patent for ball bearings early in 1869. According to the historian H. O. Duncan, he got convicts at the prison of St Pelagy, near Paris, to grind out by hand the ball bearings for Moore's bike. The problem was that these handmade ball bearings weren't hard-wearing. In fact, early ball bearings wore away to dust quickly enough under the loads applied to them on the bicycle.

In the late 1870s two Birmingham toolmakers, William Bown and Joseph Hughes, registered patents for lubricating bearings and for a ball-bearing race — the smooth ring that the balls sit in — and applied their ideas to bicycle and carriage wheels and roller skates, under the
Aeolus
trademark. Hughes's adjustable ball-bearing race quickly became standard throughout the cycle industry. The big breakthrough came from Germany, though. Friedrich Fischer is considered by bearing enthusiasts everywhere to be the ‘Father of the modern ball bearing'. It's not perhaps a
distinction many covet, but if you ride bicycles, you have much to thank Fischer for. He invented the ball grinder in 1883; for the first time a machine ground balls to a perfectly round shape, in large volumes. The company he founded is still going strong. It was this, the development of precision steel spheres with extremely hard surfaces, that meant that the ball bearing spread to every rotating part of the bicycle, and subsequently motorbikes, airplanes, automobiles, ships, skateboards, printing presses — pretty much any machine you can think of.

Today, bearings are manufactured using highly sophisticated machinery. How well they work depends on various subtle factors, the most important of which is the quality grade to which they are engineered. Well-manufactured bearings, finished to a high degree of precision, properly configured and assembled, and kept clean and lubricated, can last many millions of revolutions — or a lot of bicycle miles. Yet there is a tendency in bicycle component manufacturing to use bearings made of lighter or cheaper materials, reducing the life of the bearings to a tolerable minimum. I've worn out bearings in hubs, bottom brackets and pedals and I've had headsets fail on me. The latter, however, tend not to fail dramatically — you get a warning that things are going awry. Nonetheless, as soon as the bearings do begin to go, so does the steering. And when you've felt the slightest inaccuracy in the steering, when your unconscious has sent the instructions down to your gloved hands, and the handlebars have gone one way and the front wheel has gone another, you can never trust that bike again.

The number of headsets Chris King produced for the first fifteen years was small, but they attracted a cult following. I'd never seen them advertised, nor even heard anyone speak of them in the UK until about five years ago, when I started to notice them on
beautiful bicycles: not necessarily expensive bicycles, but on ones that exuded care and a touch of class.

‘Most of our customers are cycling enthusiasts. They appreciate the precision, durability and quality of our components. And they share our philosophy — make something once and make it last,' Chris DiStefano said. We were walking through the main machine shop. It was weirdly clean. Chris pointed out the venting system that extracts the oil ‘mist' in the atmosphere and recycles it.

‘We don't have model levels,' he continued. ‘You don't buy the entry-level CK component and aspire to owning the next grade, then save your money, buy it, replace the old one and work your way up. You just buy one headset. It might live in six different frames. It might live in just one bicycle, for years, a decade, two. The point is to make it once, and make it the best you can make it, so you don't have to extract the materials again.'

It's a good philosophy. It's far from the most profitable approach to manufacturing, but if Chris King is anything to go by, it is one that can work.

‘We don't do planned obsolescence. We don't have model years. We don't change products annually. In fact, the I-inch threaded headset we still sell today is exactly the same as the model Chris King first started making and selling to his friends in 1976.'

We had worked our way back through the rows of now sleeping machines, past the admin offices, where I was shown Chris King's very empty office — ‘he's on holiday,' Chris said again, twice — to the door of the canteen. The employees were sitting down to lunch. They looked more like a chapter of Hell's Angels than a light engineering workforce.

‘Ah, yes,' Chris said. ‘The Portland look. The longer you live here, the more tattoos you have. It works a bit like oak tree rings. Are you hungry? We do good food.'

The menu made for unlikely reading in a company canteen:
eggs Benedict for breakfast, Caesar salad for lunch. ‘Food is an important part of Chris King, the person and the company,' the chef, Robert, told me, chopping a chicken breast. Food is an important part of cycling, I thought. Whenever I've been on a bike all day, my appetite is greatest in every sense — greatest in the volume of food I can eat, greatest in the sheer sensory pleasure of eating it, greatest in the atavistic sensation of feeling well fed afterwards. Cycling promotes an appetite that is almost as powerful as lust. Along with the peace and spiritual repletion I feel going to sleep after a long ride, satiating hunger is one of the greatest pleasures in cycling.

‘Exactly,' Chris said when I mentioned this. ‘Last night, when I got home from a six-hour mountain bike ride — you know, one of those three-hour rides that knows no end — I ate dinner, twice.'

We sat down for lunch with Diane Chalmers, vice-president of operations at Chris King. She explained that the quality of the food in the canteen was part of the initiative to encourage employees to cycle to work:

Mostly it's the obvious stuff — secure bike parking, showers, ventilated lockers — Portland can be very wet — and route advice. We do all of that. One of the more innovative ways to promote cycling is through food. If you ride to work, you get credit, which you can spend in the canteen. The other way is we run two month-long, cycle-commute challenges. If you ride to work every day in either May or September, you earn two extra days of paid holiday, so a maximum of four a year if you do it both months. We're the only people we know who do this. It works well. It generates a greater sense of community within the employees, and it involves us within the wider community, as one of the month challenges is a Portland-wide scheme. But really, we do it just to promote cycling.

I had been drawn to Chris King by the elegance and reliability of their components. I'd half expected to visit a filthy machine shop full of menacing noise and monosyllabic men sucking black coffee through the gaps in their teeth — a crude workplace that James Moore might have recognized. I'd imagined standing in front of a big man in blue coveralls with a ZZ Top beard; me saying ‘Are you Chris King?' and him saying, ‘So who wants to know?' Instead, I was sitting beside a prepossessing woman in a modern café eating Caesar salad, discussing enlightened pro-cycling policies.

I liked the company, Chris King. In fact, I liked Portland. The city began seriously expanding the bicycle infrastructure in 1993: in the last decade, the number of cyclists has increased tenfold. The people of Portland today make more transport journeys by bicycle per capita than in any other large American city. There is an extensive network of bike lanes, traffic-free paths and bike ‘boulevards', as well as signs and pavement markings for cyclists. In the downtown area, the traffic lights are set to control traffic speeds low enough for cyclists to keep up with the flow. You can take a bike on all buses, street-cars and the light rail network. Car-parking spaces have been capped and there are bike racks everywhere. There is an institute at Portland State University devoted to bicycle and pedestrian research. I'd read that people even move house by bicycle: put the word out and a fleet of cyclists will turn up to shift the kitchen sink.