Capital Bikeshare Load Management

Riding in across the 14th Street Bridge, I pass this relatively new Capital Bikeshare station on the way to work, or if on a recreational ride. Here on a Thursday morning (relatively late for me, after 9 am) this station at the Jefferson Memorial has only one bike left - but still, there is one. I don't think I have ever since a station with no bikes other than right after the earthquake, when they were all grabbed up.


Only one Bikeshare bike left

While it isn't clear how much ferrying of bikes around is required to keep the Stations equipped with the optimum number of bikes for that location, based upon typical use patterns, I do see a large CaBi truck from time to time that is used for this purpose. The fact that it is so rare to see a station without any bikes (or one completely full) indicates to me that the CaBi people are pretty good at this.


1941 bike rental station for recreational riding at the Tidal Basin

Not far from the Jefferson Memorial (to the east rather than southwest), presumably where one can now rent paddle boats, there was this bike rental outlet years ago. Of course for the most part the users of CaBi bikes are a different profile than these sorts of bike renters. Today despite CaBi I still see riders in DC using other bike rental companies - they seem to be tourists rather than residents. The CaBi model and other bike rentals are different in that CaBi is really about point-to-point in less than 30 minutes, then you "check out" another bike to continue on. I have only once seen a CaBi bike locked up at a location without a rider. (For one thing, they don't come with locks.) Other rental bikes do come with locks and are more for all day cruising.

Driving, Smartphoning, Biking

OK, at this point we were both stopped

A bit east of 14th St, traveling west on Independence Avenue SE (in Washington DC), I found myself pacing alongside a new-ish Mercedes with a fellow driving and typing on his phone.

People in cars should keep in mind that for a cyclist, nothing can be worse than finding oneself "sharing" the road with a driver whose attention is diverted in this way. This guy is an accident waiting to happen - and if it's with a cyclist, the Mercedes wins (and the cyclist loses).

I'll confess - I didn't take this while we were still moving but only after he stopped and I stopped alongside. But it tells you something about his engagement with the outside world that he was oblivious to me alongside while driving and when I stopped and took his picture.

What I really don't get is when people like this guy, in order to (sort of) do two things at once do them both poorly - or at least the driving part. It's a dead giveaway that you don't have your mind on the task at hand when an old guy like me can keep up with your Mercedes.

Russian Diplomats as Cyclists in 1895

Article in the Washington Times from 1895 describes the spread of cycling among foreign diplomats assigned to Washington, including the Russian minister.

Diplomats Proficient Upon the Shining Wheel

Russian and Austrian Ministers Are Expert Riders, and the Chinese Attaches, in Gay Costumes, Are Bicycle Devotees.

The bicycling craze has taken a strong hold on Washington society, and has extended into the diplomatic corps.

The foreigners have become greatly interested in the fad of the hour, and many of them are already proficient riders of the shining wheel.

The first to lend in this respect was the Russian minister, Prince Cantacuzene, who no sooner was able to keep his equilibrium upon the "bike" than he induced his daughter to become accomplished in the same manner. Every afternoon during last autumn, and almost every late afternoon during the winter, the Prince and Princess Cantacuzene might have been seen spinning over the miles of smooth asphalt in the city on their bicycles.

At first, of course, when the bicycles were brought out and placed in front of the legation they created no end of excitement in the neighborhood, and the dwellers along that particular square made a brave showing on the front porticos and at the windows to watch the mount and triumphal start.

Gradually, however, as tho novelty wore off, the prince and his young daughter, who were debarred from taking any active part in the season's gayeties on account of the fact that the Russian legation was in mourning for the death of the Czar, were allowed to depart upon their afternoon bicycling trip without this attendant notoriety.

Later in the article it is noted that at this time there was some modesty among cyclists ~

As a matter or fact, the favorite place with the members of the diplomatic corps, and society generally who ride the bicycle, is the great open space back of the President's mansion, "Executive driveway," as it is sometimes called now, since the old name of "White Lot" has been abandoned by the fashionables.

There the bicyclers congregate in large numbers all during the spring and autumn evenings directly after dark, for as yet the majority of society has no fancy for being stared at in daylight when bicycle riding.

The Czar who died in 1895 was Alexander III, the father of Nicholas II, who was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. I hadn't realized, but his heir for a time was his brother, who was killed in a bicycle accident in 1899: "The death of Grand Duke George, Czarevitch of Russia . . . the hemorrhage which caused the death of the Czarevitch was the result of a fall from his bicycle which be sustained while on an excursion in the hilly country near Abbas Tuman. The paper adds that he died near the scene of the accident." (From another newspaper article.)

It does seem Czar Nicholas II did ride bikes, as shown here and here

The most well known photo of a cyclist in Russia from today is shown below, taken by a writer for the New Yorker who lives in Moscow:

Russia's Tianamen image. twitter.com/ioffeinmoscow/…

— Julia Ioffe (@ioffeinmoscow) May 6, 2012

.

John D. Rockefeller and His Shaft Drive Bicycle

A fellow who supplied oil for the automobile society with an exotic bicycle

Title: [John D. Rockefeller, full-length portrait, standing with a bicycle]
Date Created/Published: 1913.
Medium: 1 photographic print.
Library of Congress
Link to full record

An amusing photo from the Library of Congress - John D. Rockefeller with a bicycle. And not just any bicycle, but a shaft drive bike. Yet another example of a shaft drive bike, an early attempt to provide a superior alternative to using a bicycle chain. The shaft drive approach has the advantage of a clean design look to it, but the mechanical efficiency is lower than a traditional chain and the cost is higher, so the shaft drive approach has never caught on. (I have looked at the subject of shaft drive bikes before, here and here for example.)

Mr. Rockefeller does not have the most expensive model "chainless" bicycle available. This is pretty clearly the Columbia basic shaft drive bike, looking at the Columbia 1912 catalog.



This is the basic Columbia "chainless" bike for 1912

The basic Columbia shaft drive bike was only 75 dollars, having come down from $100 in 1900. You can see the "headbadge" (the company logo, under the handlebars on the headset of the bike) shown in the catalog matches what is shown in the photograph of Rockefeller.


By 1912, this bike was available in this two-speed model and a "spring fork"

The price of this more deluxe model that includes "hygenic cushion frame" (whatever that means) was $100.

DC Area Folding Bike Inventor Dies

Obituary in the Washington Post for Harry Montague who designed full size folding bicycles, patented various processes, and created a company to sell them.




Perhaps the best known Montague achievement, a model sold to the U.S. military

The Montague "Paratrooper" shown above is a full size hardtail mountain bike with the added feature that it folds quickly and easily. The same bike can be purchased for "civilian use." Another version of his military bike, not available for civilian purchase (as far as I can tell) was the TENS, or "Tactical Electric No Signature" (as in radar signature) mountain bike, that had an electric power unit in the oversize rear hub.

Because a Montague does not have a "down tube" (the frame tube that runs from where the pedals are up to where the front wheel is) they are distinctive looking. I have seen a few on the bike trail. The Montague fills a niche for everyday users (not the military) but probably is limited in potential popularity even if they are cleverly designed and well executed. Certainly in terms of "breakdown" speed they are way ahead of using S&S couplers for a full size bike (that require messing, literally, with the chain and so on). But you still have close to 30 pounds of steel and rubber in two pieces (the front wheel is the second piece) that would need to be stuffed in a large bag and carried. Not necessarily easy for carrying along into an office building or on public transit in the way a Dahon or a Brompton would be (among others).

The guy I talked to who owned one said it solved a particular problem he had - he wanted a mountain bike he could take easily on his boat on an occasional basis. So for him, carrying a heavy-ish big sack isn't an issue. And the idea of having something that goes into a car trunk more easily than a standard bike rather than using a bike rack certainly has it's own appeal, even to me.


They are good looking bikes. Clever fellow. Also, David Byrne of the Talking Heads who traveled in recent years with a bicycle used a Montague.

~~~~~~~~~

This is an old post. Someone complained that I used a photo without permission, so I took the photo out and reposted. There may be some way of resetting the date to that of the original post so this doesn't look like a new post but I don't know what it is.

LA Gets the Shaft (Drive Bikeshare Bikes)

The LA Times has an article about a new bikeshare program in Los Angeles: "Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will unveil a $16-million bike-share program Sunday that aims to put thousands of bicycles at hundreds of rental kiosks across the city."

Much of how the LA bikeshare program will be structured is like Capital Bikeshare (which isn't particularly surprising) however the bikes themselves are fairly different. I don't really get how the company, Bike Nation, makes money at this - they pick up the entire capital investment cost (the sixteen million bucks). Here is another description of the business aspects - the comments are fairly interesting.


It appears this patent is for the Bike Nation bikeshare bike, with airless tires, shaft drive, and absurd basket (but not with final design's step through frame)

To me the technical aspects of the Bike Nation bikeshare bike are the most interesting. The LA Times article notes that, "The bicycles are made without a chain and have special tires to reduce the possibility that they will get a flat or break down during their trip."

Opinionated as I may be (for someone who doesn't really know that much), I do not have strong feelings about the airless tire business. Sheldon Brown, some years ago, didn't express much enthusiasm, noting that, "Airless tires have been obsolete for over a century, but crackpot 'inventors' keep trying to bring them back. They are heavy, slow and give a harsh ride. They are also likely to cause wheel damage, due to their poor cushioning ability. A pneumatic tire uses all of the air in the whole tube as a shock absorber, while foam-type 'airless' tires/tubes only use the air in the immediate area of impact." However it doesn't seem impossible that someone clever could come up with a design that could do a decent job with shock absorbing and not add much weight or performance problems. It does appear that most airless tires to date are not very easy to get on or on the wheel rim, but for a bikeshare bike that would be a mechanic's problem.

I have much less enthusiasm for the shaft drive idea.

The Bike Nation bike doesn't use a traditional chain but rather a shaft drive. Shaft drives have been around since the 1890s but never really caught on since they are (a) more expensive, and (b) less efficient. Also, taking a rear wheel off a bike with a shaft drive is going to be more annoying to repair a flat than a standard chain bike (but of course not a problem there with airless tires!).


Shaft drive bikes have been around . . . practically forever

Shaft drive intuitively seemed to some like a great idea compared to "dirty" traditional chains, but they never became popular. For motorcycles somewhat, for bicycles no. That doesn't mean that various bike companies haven't tried to bring it back from time to time . . .

Eventually Bike Nation will supply more info about "What’s so special about the Bike Nation bicycle?" but for now, the link for "more info here" doesn't work. (Perhaps they are still doing research.)


A bikeshare program bike in Paris, with a chain and air-filled tires - but what do the French know about cycling

Also, the French bikeshare bike has a deep basket, while the LA bikeshare bike has a flat shallow basket. I guess with bungee cords stuff could be made to stay in the basket.

Learning to Live with the e-Bikes

Until recently, I almost never saw e-Bikes - there is one fellow near where I live who rides along much of the same route I take who, depending on our respective schedules, I would see often enough, but that was pretty much it.

Suddenly I am seeing them a whole lot more - I assume this is a result of higher gasoline prices combined with increasing options for the e-Bikes available. I am having trouble getting used to them, which is not very tolerant of me, I guess.




An e-Bike, parked on the bike rack where I work

Wikipedia has a reasonably good article describing e-Bikes, although some of the conclusions aren't terribly current, based on 2010 information. The kind of e-Bikes I am seeing are various types of "hybrids" that combine pedal power and electric battery driven power - I think most of these require pedaling in order for the electric drive to engage, but it isn't obvious when looking at them whether this is true. By federal law, they are supposed to be limited to 20 mph with electric power alone and 750 watts.

The above e-bike, which has been parked recently at work, is a http://prodecotech.com/bikes/storm-500/">Prodeco 'Storm-500' model (the 500 is for 500 watts). It has the most common configuration I am seeing, with the drive in the rear hub - I believe that the the drive system (in the hub) is made by a separate company, because I see this same sort of hub on different companies' products. The main utility of this is that it means the chain doesn't have to carry the power of the motor's propulsion, just the (much lower wattage) energy of the rider, so presumably no special chain is required and all the parts of the bike associated with the chain are the same as a regular bike. (Another way of achieving this result is to put the drive in the front hub.)

The information on the Prodeco web site is a little vague. It does not appear one has to pedal to engage the motor, since it has a "Press the Throttle for ‘Power-On-Demand’ propulsion system." I assume the frame is still, but perhaps it is aluminium - they don't say. The "group" is reasonable, although I'm not sure I agree entirely with the later part of Prodeco's statement that it has, "High quality components (as with all Prodeco, we use only the highest quality components)." In some of their choices, they could have made more costly choices that would have represented higher quality, I think. The most obvious place to offer something better would be the cable actuated disk brakes, where hydraulic would seem a better (but more pricey) choice. But if one accepts that the cable brakes are OK, then what they have is "the highest quality" (since there isn't that much difference between the choices, as far as I know). The rotors are nice and big, which should help.

The Prodeco site also leaves the bicycle weight out of their "product details" - but lifting the Storm-500 up at the bike rack, it's clearly over 50 pounds. (I did find a review of the 200 watt Storm model saying it weighed 46 pounds, so "over 50" seems about right comparing features etc.) One of Prodeco's priorities is to keep the weight of the bike down compared to other companies' products, but without the electric propulsion, riding this bike would be a real chore at this weight. So I'm not sure I'm very impressed with its "low weight." For $1,299 however, it seems like a pretty good deal, all things considered.

It still takes some getting used to, having folks who don't exactly look like Speed Racer zipping along on the trails with these things - again, I need to work on my tolerance. I remind myself that they are more like cyclists than motorists, and therefore presumably our ally - but I'm not all that sure. I read in Wikipedia that one in eight bicycles sold now in the Netherlands are e-Bikes, so we likely have many more such bikes on the roads and trails in our future.

Something to ponder.

By the way, electric bicycles were attempted very early after the introduction of the diamond frame "safety" bicycle - here is a short item from the 1892 "Pittsburg Dispatch" (yes, spelled without an "h" at the end of Pittsburgh).

ELECTRIC BICYCLES

One Devised in England for Which Great Things Are Claimed.

SOME GROUND FOR GRAVE DOUBT as to the Practicability of the Machine Until Thoronghly Tested

THE LATEST ABOUT THE SUBTLE FLUID

The electrical bicycle is again cropping up. This time it is in England, and its inventor promises to give the public a machine that can go from the most northerly to the southern extremity of Great Britain without stopping to have its batteries refilled. The weight of the batteries when filled with liquid is to be 44 pounds, and the whole weight of the apparatus is to be 155 pounds. The English financial papers also announce that a small company is to be brought out with a capital of $15,000 for the manufacture of electric cycles. Until, however, the practicability of the electric cycle is demonstrated beyond question, the public may be pardoned some degree of incredulity concerning it. The electrical tricycle, which was designed by a well-known electrician in this country some two years ago, failed to reach the practical stage, and although the storage battery is turned to better account in England than here, the record of English electrical bicvcles is not by any means satisfactory. Whether this latest form of bicycle will be an improvement on its predecessors remains to be proved.

By "subtle fluid" they mean electricity. Of course, electric, steam, and gas-powered two wheel and three wheel vehicles evolved into cars. Round and round the cycle goes. So to speak.

Little Lost Bikes

Riding to work, I saw these bikes by the tidal basin, not far from the Jefferson Memorial. Three days in a row! (Going home, navigating the intersection there, I kept forgetting to look to see if they were still there in the afternoon.) Today I looked up the vendor, Capital City Bike Tours online and sent them an email.


After more than 48 hours locked here, still both in one piece

Michael,

Thanks for the email and the heads up. I appreciate you letting us know about this. As it turns out, some guests who rented them decided to not bring them back. Anyway, we took care of it and picked them up today.

Thanks again and have a great day!

So, they were then rescued. Even if they are slightly beach cruiser-ish rental bikes, better they should return to service in one piece.

I was reminded of the photo book, Bicycles Locked to Poles This is a most peculiar book of photographs of books, mostly partially or completely vandalized, locked to poles in New York City.


This isn't from the book, but is the sort of thing that is

Of course bicycle theft has been a problem since . . . there were bicycles to steal. The Washington Times had an article, for example, in December 1899 that reported on this issue:

THE THEFTS OF BICYCLES
How the Thieves Secure Possession of Valuable Wheels.
The methods of regularly organized gangs of robbers exposed by the police - Machines, shipped out of the city others rebuilt - One good effect of the cold weather.

According to the reports at Police Headquarters the bicycle thieves who have been carrying on extensive operations for months past and particularly during the warm weather period, have to a very great extent ceased their operations. As a result tho complaints of bicycle thefts which until recently have been numerous are now reduced almost to a minimum, and the prospects are that as long as the cold weather continues the present condition of affairs will exist.

The diminution in the number of complaints, or rather the fact that a decrease in the number of thefts is apparent. Is attributable, say the police, directly to the weather conditions. The police claim that cold weather is in more than one way responsible for the scarcity of bicycle thefts.

Detective Muller, of headquarters, whose especial duty it ist to look out for and recover lost or stolen bicycles, and arrest all such thieves, stated yesterday that the most annoying thief which the police had to deal with was the sneak who made a business of stealing bicycles.

According to Muller no one can tell where the bicycle thief is going to turn up. He will steal a bicycle in one portion of the city in the morning, and before the sun sets will have made off with one and sometimes more from other sections. Almost invariably the thief leaves no clew [sic] and is only captured when, after weeks and sometimes months, he gains enough temerity to offer his ill gotten gain for sale.

Even then it is often the case that the original stolen bicycle is so disfigured that it is almost an impossibility to identify it. The recent arrest and conviction of a regularly organized gang of bicycle thieves and the recovery from them of a number of bicycles exemplified the difficulty met by the detectives in establishing the ownership of such recovered property. . . . .

The article continues further with more details of bicycle theft in DC at the turn of the last century. I like the idea that cold weather is good since people keep their bikes indoors, don't use them, and therefore they aren't stolen so much.


An ad from 1898 pitching "Bicycle Protective Company" services

Bicycle Protective Company? Well, we don't have that today.

Searching for "Queen of the Wheel"

Even though I'm a librarian, I am often surprised by how difficult it is to find images from cycling history that have been digitized and put on the Internet - particularly when you are pretty sure they are out there!

Looking at David Herlihy's book, Bicycle: the History, one can find many interesting photos from cycling history - if one searches for really interesting ones in the book online and finds them, perhaps nearby will be other interesting cycling history photos - well, it's a theory. Which brings us to "Queen of the Wheel," a photo taking up all of page 413 of Herlihy's book with a caption that says, "'Queen of the Wheel,' copyrighted in 1897 by the Rose Studio of Princeton, New Jersey."

Aha - "copyrighted" - so I thought to myself, perhaps he got this from the Library of Congress, since photos deposited for copyright that are now in the public domain are sometimes digitized and put into PPOC, the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog.


Queen of the Wheel from the Library of Congress

Title: Queen of the wheel
Creator(s): Rose Studio, photographer
Date Created/Published: c1897.
Medium: 1 photographic print.
Summary: Photograph shows studio portrait of a partially nude young woman, dressed in white flowing material, sitting on a bicycle, holding a glass of wine.
Library of Congress
Full record:www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011661551/

So, as it turns out, this was correct - sort of. The Library of Congress has digitized "Queen of the Wheel" but when I looked in the "Illustration Credits" in Herlihy's book, this item is credited not to the Library of Congress but to "The Granger Collection, New York." So, what is that? Their slogan is, "The people, places, things, and events of the past . . . in pictures!" (R) but "Registration at this site is open to professional buyers of pictures only, not the general public." and "At this time we are unable to furnish any illustrations for personal or school use." So for most of us - this is not for us.

What likely happened here is that Granger (or someone) had the item duplicated at the Library of Congress in film and then digitized that reproduction. (I can't be sure that the Granger copy is from the LC item, but it seems most likely - as with all such images-for-sale outfits they aren't going to tell you such things.) In fact, the Library of Congress image is not from the original either, but digitized (as it says in the record) from "b&w film copy neg." One also notes that the record does not include the dimensions of the original item, a cue that the original wasn't even looked at in order to create the digital version. (So, to be clear - LC has the original, but digitized a surrogate to save wear-and-tear on the original.) To sum up - Granger (or someone) at some point in the past bought a film copy for their own use, the Library kept a copy of the negative for itself, and only relatively recently digitized that negative and made it publicly available.

What is amazing to me is that one can go to Granger and purchase digital copies of many such photographs and other visual materials that are in the public domain or you can go to places like PPOC and find high resolution copies that are free. (But remember, as PPOC says in every record, "Rights assessment is your responsibility.") Granger's view is they have a copyrighted interest in these reproductions that they can defend (their image of the image) while the government view is that the government agency (the Library of Congress) does not have any copyright in the reproduction - all rights are associated with the underlying source material (in this case, in the public domain) and not in the government funded reproduction. (Note that I am speaking for LC officially . . . )

For example, Granger will sell you a high resolution copy of the cowboy with a bike that I blogged about recently. Or you can purchase copies of Lewis Hine images of bicycle messengers from the early 20th century, such as the one below, that are freely available in PPOC. (Here are 158 photos of messengers by Lewis Hine, mostly with bicycles - a very compelling, if sad in some cases, set of photographs.) Granger's version of the Shreveport messenger, by the way, is from the color version below that they then converted to grayscale. PPOC has both the color version from a print and a grayscale version from the glass plate negative. The two are cropped somewhat different.


A Lewis Hine photograph in the public domain at the Library of Congress

Title: Fourteen year old messenger #2 Western Union, Shreveport. Says he goes to the Red Light district all the time. See Hine report on Messengers. Location: Shreveport, Louisiana.
Creator(s): Hine, Lewis Wickes, 1874-1940, photographer
Date Created/Published: 1913 November.
Medium: 1 photographic print.
1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in.
Library of Congress
www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ncl2004002194/PP/

A final mystery - Granger's title for the photograph "Queen of the Wheel" is "One for the Road" and they give the publication date as 1900, both clearly wrong. So even though Herlihy got the image from Granger, he then corrected their citation information. Strange.

My search for Queen of the Wheel was kind of a dead end - the only digitized photograph from this "Rose Studio" in PPOC is this one. And I still don't know if it was created as some sort of 1890s erotica or if it was to serve as the inspiration for one of the many stylish bicycle company posters of the time, such as this one below (with a man, for a change).


Orient cycles lead the leaders

Spring Tire Change - Front & Rear Wear

Before the winter was "scheduled" to start (which never appeared here in Arlington VA) I switched my tires on my "bad weather" bike. Because of the mild not-very-winterish weather and because of some trouble with my steel road bike, I ended up riding my carbon fiber Scattante commuting more than I would have expected. I did spend a lot of time cringing, because there seemed to be considerable amounts of broken glass lately on the trails, but I think I only had one flat on this bike - actually, I don't think I had any on this bike at all, but that can't be possible, can it?

As spring has sprung, I was eyeballing the Scattante's tires after another week riding it every day and observed that the front tire, while having plenty of rubber, looked like a grit magnet - see below. Small bits of stuff that have stuck to the tire over time have opened up small holes but perhaps more worrisome, the tire surface has a grainy aspect (not so visible in the photo) that doesn't look the way one would want a bike tire to look.


Michelin Pro-Race 3 23 x 700 road tire, mounted on front

Anyway - this is the front tire. When I last switched tires on this bike, I decided to have one manufacturer's tire on the front and a completely different tire on the back. Michelin road tires, when new, are very rounded, so that without a rider, the bike sits up on a very narrow strip of tire. Of course, with a rider, this flattens out - still, in my mind this seems good for lowering so-called "rolling resistance." However these Michelin tires, when mounted on the rear, wear out that raised area at a terrific rate, so that rotating front-to-back (and back-to-front) just means that much of the time you have at least one tire if not two with significant center-line wear.

So I was at Performance Bike and I saw these Vredestein Fortezza SE tires for thirty dollars. As a road tire, these were a but odd looking compared to the Michelins I have used - a very flat surface meets road, even new, even without a rider. In my idiosyncratic thinking, it seems reasonable for the rear tire to be flat(er) since it is providing the traction to push the bike (and rider) down the road. And after a not while, based on my experience, it will be flat anyway, so why not just start that way? So I bought a couple of these tires and put one on the back the same time as a new Michelin Pro-Race 3 on the front.


Vredestein Fortezza SE after a couple of thousand miles on rear

I guess Vredestein makes serious road tires, but this "Fortezza SE" model is something that is peculiar to Performance, near as I can tell. That isn't necessarily bad - and after all, my Scattante is a Performance Bike house brand bike, although none (zero) of the group are Performance house brand stuff, just the frame. But I thought I might get only so-so results. In fact, I figured I would end up replacing the Fortezza on the rear relatively quickly, but instead I have decided to replace both the front and the back tires at the same time. Mostly the Fortezza looks better than the Michelin on the front - it certainly doesn't have all those holes. Whatever it is made of sheds grit more consistently. But there is this one spot (visible in photo), and another smaller one (not in photo), where the rubber has worn through so you can see the material below. Uh-oh! And checking with a caliper, about 1/3 or more of the material in the center area of the tire is worn off generally. So it's time to change this tire, but I have gotten pretty good results from it, I think.


The new Vredestein Fortezza SE mounted on the rear

The Vredestein, for whatever reason, has a somewhat pebbly pattern when new down the middle and some fine angled tread-like lines in the blue area just next to the rubber in the center - this helps give some sense of tire wear but contributes nothing to traction (I assume) but isn't enough to slow things down, either.

1890s bike tires were mostly smooth, and in those days the early tires with any tread used that as a marketing feature.


Part of a VIM tire ad from 1897, praising the "pebbled tread"

Of course, the VIM tire people were very big on clever marketing - they were the ones who built the giant tricycle that required nine "riders" to operate it as a way to push their product.

Different Views of Women & Cycling, the 1890s in Stereographs

The rider's attire, typical for at least some women riders of this time, but still regarded by some as unorthodox

It's unclear where the above photo was taken.

Title: The start
Creator(s): American Stereoscopic Company.,
Date Created/Published: c1897.
Medium: 1 photographic print on stereo card : stereograph.
Summary: Woman standing with bicycle.
Library of Congress
Full record


Were the women with umbrellas connected with the women with bicycles?

The women in this photo who one assumes are cyclists, with the bicycles, are dressed more conventionally. Perhaps that is because they are in Washington, D.C.

Title: Capitol and Fountain, Washington, D.C.
Date Created/Published: c1896.
Medium: 1 photographic print on stereo card : stereograph.
Summary: Group of women, some with umbrellas or bicycles, by spraying fountain; Capitol in background.
Library of Congress
Full record


Presumably to be considered humor

Perhaps because this was a posed photograph, the bicycle depicted is not a "step-through" but a man's frame. And, although it is a little hard to be that sure, it seems too large for the woman holding it. Since she is wearing a conventional dress, she would have trouble riding a bike like this - not just because of the dress and tube but because her skirt would get caught in the rear wheel - bicycles for women wearing long dresses would include a "net" over the fender to the center of the rear wheel that would keep clothing out of the wheel, which is missing here.

Title: Woman in a room with a bicycle saying to a man and child, "Sew on your own buttons, I'm going for a ride"
Date Created/Published: c1899.
Medium: 1 photographic print on stereo card : stereograph.
Library of Congress
Full record

Cycles Clément, Paris, Poster (1898)

As presented in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog this item was scanned in two parts and it presented as two images - it isn't so easy to appreciate.


I have stitched together images of the top and bottom half of the poster

Descriptive record ~
Title: Cycles Clément, Paris; Pneu Dunlop / / PAL.
Creator(s): Paleologue, Jean de, b. 1855, artist
Date Created/Published: Paris : Caby & Chardin, Imprimeurs, [1898]
Medium: 1 print (poster) : lithograph, color ; 152 x 107 cm.
Summary: Advertising poster for bicycles showing a woman wearing a Gallic rooster on her head and carrying a laurel wreath in one hand and a bicycle her other hand and wearing winged sandals on her feet.
Full record

There is a Wikipedia article about Clément-Bayard that describes his bicycle company briefly - over time he manufactured "bicycles, pneumatic tyres, motorcycles, automobiles, aeroplanes and airships." Apparently he had an agreement to make Dunlop pneumatic tires under license, which is included in the poster as "pneu Dunlop."

I understand that the "Gallic rooster" is a symbol of France, but it seems unusual to have him perched on the woman's head.

Lawyer Lips, Cams & Skewers

For much of cycling history, a simple nut was fine for most bikes to keep the wheels on

One of the things I most appreciate about bicycles is that the basic design of the "safety bicycle" developed in the 1890s is highly efficient and has come down to today as what most people recognize as your basic bicycle. Of course, in 100-years there have been some nominal improvements, some good and some not so good. The ones that are often not so good are those that are the most significant departure from basic simplicity and elegance of design.

Which brings me to "lawyer lips," cams, and skewers. You need some kind of fastener to hold the wheel's axle to the bicycle in the "dropouts" that are a metal slot for the axle to fit into (and to "drop out" of when not tightened). For many years, as shown above, the simple design was a threaded end to the axle, a washer, and a nut that could be tightened.


The two types of skewers to hold your wheel on your bike

The problem with this, of course, is that it required carrying a tool to loosen the nut to take the wheel of to make repairs. So the "quick release" skewer was invented. Sheldon Brown has gone to the trouble to describe the two types of skewers in detail, so I will try not to duplicate his efforts, but suffice to say that the first version, the "enclosed cam" skewer (the upper one in the photo above), is considered to be superior in holding power to the "exposed cam" skewer, a later design believed to be cheaper to produce but marketed as being lighter in weight, thus ringing the bell of cyclists for whom lighter is always better.


My experience with exposed cam skewers intersects with disk brakes on this
Traitor (yeah that's a company name) Ruben bike

A few years ago, while forgetting that simple design is generally better, I decided that this Traitor Ruben would be a wonderful replacement for my long-serving REI heavy steel commuter bike for riding in bad weather. And the Avid BB-7 disk brakes do provide excellent stopping mostly (except when they don't, but that's a separate blog post) in rainy weather, which is nice. So I bought the thing.


One could argue this does not look like "simple design" - anyway, as shown the skewer is removed showing the dropout more clearly

So now we get to "lawyer lips" - as it turns out, Wikipedia even has an article on "lawyer lips", explaining that they are "tabs fitted to the fork ends on the front fork of bicycles . . . to prevent a wheel from leaving the fork if the quick release skewer comes undone." Sheldon Brown also has an entry in his glossary about "lawyer lips" that is useful for background. The "lawyer" part is that if the fork has such lips, then you probably aren't going to be able to sue the manufacturer when you have an accident after a wheel falls off, because the manufacturer can show they did everything possible to prevent that happening even when the skewer is loose.


The Traitor Ruben front fork has one "lawyer lip" - enough, I guess

Unfortunately however the disk brake on the back introduces another wrinkle. The disk brake, when applied, generates considerable torque that tries to stop the bike, but also given the way the dropout is oriented on this thing, to yank the wheel out of the dropouts. About a year ago I had this happen and I thought the problem was that a bike shop had not tightened the skewer properly. The other day it happened again and I did a little reading (thanks Internet!) and realized this is more likely a design problem. The dropout is oriented poorly, exacerbating the problem (I think), plus they could have lawyer lips for the back dropout (although that is apparently not much done, if at all) and finally they used the crummy skewers.

There isn't much I can do about the dropout orientation or the lack of lips, but I have replaced the skewer with an enclosed cam skewer. So, safe to ride?


The brake should have been put on the lower chain stay, and not the seat stay, so the torque would automatically seat the axle in the dropouts, even with a loose skewer

I now think of this bike as my "purchase in haste, repair at leisure" bike. Live and learn. . .

Starting a Search for Bikes in a Trove

A week or so ago I posted some information about some places I go to in order to find information about the history of cycling, including photographs, newspaper articles, and books in the public domain (that is, not under copyright).

Another good starting point for bicycle history research is "Trove", a search system from the National Library of Australia. Trove has several positive aspects for beginning research - one is that their search includes many types of collection materials, including photographs and manuscripts as well as books (and others). Also, for some of the materials, in particular photographs, they have "ingested" metadata for collections outside of the National Library of Australia and even outside of Australia. The metadata has to be available to them in an appropriate format so they can do this but as a "one-stop" starting place it's great.


Bobby Walthour racing in France, a 1908 photograph found in "Trove" - Walthour is below on the track, just being passed

I recently read (and enjoyed) a biography about the famous American cycle racer Bobby Walthour (that I also reviewed). I wasn't terribly happy with the one photograph of Walthour I found at the Library of Congress. Searching for "Walthour" in Trove turns up photographs, newspaper articles, and books (and some stuff that isn't the right Walthour, but it isn't very much and I can ignore that). The newspaper search in Trove is one area where the search is limited to Australian "content" but unlike the U.S. Chronicling America, it extends to 1954 rather than 1923. It says something about Walthour's international racing reputation that there were articles in Australian newspapers about his racing achievements, mostly winning races in Europe in the early 1900s. His retirement from racing was also reported in Australia. (Arguably Walthour and Major Taylor set the stage for Lance Armstrong's achievements, but the gap of ninety or so years erased any popular awareness of them.)

There are 23 photos (now) in Trove with "my" Walthour, including several that are far more interesting than any I had found earlier. As it turns out, almost all the photos in Trove are from Gallica at the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF), part of a collection of press agency photographs, Agence Rol. Agence photographique.


Walthour riding (probably warming up) in France (1909) - note incredible size of front chain ring and "negative rake" of the fork

To display results from other institutions' collections, Trove transfers you to the other institution's website - so to see BnF materials you end up using Gallica. So having been led there by Trove, I turn my attention to Gallica. And as it turns out, when I search Gallica directly for "Walthour," I find some Walthour photographs that haven't reached Trove - six additional photos from Agence Meurisse.


Walthour portrait from Gallica, Agence Meurisse, 1909

So while Trove is a good place to start a search, perhaps its greatest benefit is introducing you to other search systems that you can search further, such as Gallica. Each of these systems has its own pecularities - Gallica, for example, seems to offer only low resolution images as its "high res downloadable" versions, which while adequate for web display such as in this blog would be poor choices for any printed usage.

Sometimes one wants newer material. One good resource to keep in mind is the image search in Google for their Life magazine archive - a search for "bicycle" turns up a wide variety of items from the 20th century. I was surprised to find that six-day races were being run as late as 1948, as shown in this photograph. Apparently this image search retrieves using an exact match, so a search on "bicycle" doesn't find items where the description would have only included "bike" or "cycling" - but the related item information is smarter, and from previous six-day race photo, I found this rather astonishing six-day race photo of "Bicyclist William Anderson reading a letter while biking during a six day bike race." Is it really possible to ride this way?? And we worry about talking on a phone while riding! But then I suppose he isn't out in traffic with cars . . .

Fire Fighting Bikes in Germany (1910)

In an earlier post, I looked at an article in the Scientific American from 1896 about a four-seat bicycle that carried a pump to fight fires - a cycle-borne fire engine, in Germany.


Line-drawing illustration from Scientific American article

Looking for articles about six-day races at Madison Square Garden in the early 1900s, I bumped into an article in the New York "Sun" of 1910 titled, "Fire Fighters of Europe" that looked at the kind of equipment used and compared it to what was used in New York City. Five different photographs show unusual approaches, such as a boat-as-fire-engine in Venice, plus a photo showing the bicycle-fire engine in a small German town.


A photograph of a similar unusual bicycle

It is a little difficult to see the details in this image (which was produced from microfilm of the newspaper) but it appears that this cycle is not the same as the 1896 model - the pump unit seems to be near the front, and it looks like there are three riders on each side and not two, so this looks like a six-seat bicycle.

The article's author suggest that, "It is a swift and effective method, but is not likely to be imitated in this country."

Bicycles: Vintage People on Photo Postcards (Book Review)

Bicycles: Vintage People on Photo Postcards by Tom Phillips

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book presents color 3/4 size copies of 200 selected black and white postcards taken of people with bicycles in the United Kingdom from the 1890s through 1950. (The color reproductions show the sepia tone better than a black and while reproduction.) The postcards are presented two to a page, organized so that several postcards with children are together, of women in groups, and so on.

There is a brief introduction and then about six pages by Tom Phillips who selected the post cards. He cites the numbers of different photos in the book as examples, so to see them a certain amount of paging back and forth is required. At first I found this a little annoying, but I got used to it. Some of the photos also have notes at the end, but most don't. Most do not have a year given for when they were taken - it's an interesting exercise to try to sort out when some were taken. As noted in the introduction, the style of dress changed more than the basic bicycles did.

View my list of cycling books and reviews

Where Does "Content" About Early Cycling History Come From?

I sometimes blog about cycling history, particularly from the 1890s and early 1900s.


Montage image including Major Taylor (in the center) found in an online historic newspaper, an issue of The Daily World, from December 1908

How and where do I find photos and articles? As a librarian, I have some experience helping users find what they need, but I confess that with the amount of "content" that has been digitized in various formats, I can do most of my research sitting at home - although digging around can take some time.

Here are some of the places I look:

Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC): I have found many public domain photographs online in PPOC, such as the one below (that is one my favorites).


Bicycle messenger from 1913 Isaac Boyett, "I'm de whole show." The twelve year old proprietor, manager and messenger of the Club Messenger Service, 402 Austin Street, Waco. The photo shows him in the heart of the Red Light district where he was delivering messages as he does several times a day. Said he knows the houses and some of the inmates. Has been doing this for one year, working until 9:30 P.M. Saturdays. Not so late on other nights. Makes from six to ten dollars a week. Location: Waco, Texas

While most can be found searching simply on "bicycle" that is a subject term that has been assigned or appears in the item's title, alas this is not true for all. The record (that is the basis for searching) for the photograph below from the Library of Congress' Harris & Ewing collection does not have the word "bicycle" in it anywhere - I found it by looking at page after page of thumbnails of the collection to see if there were any bicycles hiding in the collection - and there were!


Photo of a senior State Dept Official commuting by bike, 1914

Full text and images of books and magazines: Many books and magazines about cycling that are in the public domain have been digitized, although not nearly enough (in my view). Good places to search are Google books, "Texts" (mostly books) in the Internet Archive, and Hathitrust, either their online catalog or the full text (of the materials) search.

The Hathitrust materials have the fullest records associated with them - a simple search on "bicycle" for items that have a "full view" (that is, are available fully online) brings up more than 160 items. Most are books published before 1923 (for which copyright has expired) but others are government documents or otherwise in the public domain, such as a 1974 book, "Bicycling for Everyone" where I found a nugget about cycling in the 1890s:

"The discovery and progressive improvement of the bicycle," editorialized the New York Tribune in 1895, "is of more importance to mankind than all the victories and defeats of Napoleon, with the First and Second Punic Wars . . . thrown in."

Well - it's a point of view.

Most of the books that I have found I have then done screen captures of interesting illustrations and posted them in Flickr set that as of today has 172 "photos". (I put copies of PPOC photos here, too.) It is easy to embed images from Flickr in the blog.


From "Bicycling for ladies with hints as to the art of wheeling, advice to beginners, dress, care of the bicycle, mechanics, training, exercise, etc., etc." by Maria E. Ward, published in 1896 - the photographs are by by Alice Austen who tried to create real action shots but with the technology of the time, used a posed approach for this and other photos in the book

Some books are located in other places and I root them out. For example, below is an image from a book digitized by the Library of Congress that isn't available through the systems mentioned above,


"The bicycle: its selection, riding, and care" by L.F. Korns, published in 1892 - a full PDF is available and a page-by-page view - the images in the page viewer are better

Public domain newspapers: The Library of Congress Chronicling America program has searchable newspapers published before 1923 from many (but not all) states. The image at the top of this post was found by searching on the bicycle racer Bobby Walthour's last name - the text of the newspapers has been OCR'ed with OK accuracy, but a lot of browsing of search results is required to find interesting stuff.

When I post these screen captures of public domain published materials that are fully available on the Internet, I include links to the full presentation on the original system as well as a link to other sized versions in my Flickr set. That way anyone reading my blog post can follow up with further reading/examination of the original book, or article, or whatever it was.

Since these items are in the public domain, anyone can reuse what I present without my permission, of course - and one other blogger that I know of has. A fellow in England blogs about this same period using the same sorts of resources that I do, and when he wanted some Christmas-y images last December for a blogpost he made use of an image from an issue of "Cycling Life" of Santa Claus that I had blogged about a year earlier.


This image, lost for more than 100 years, has now appeared in two blogs

In this post he reused material I had presented in a more recent post, including my corrected and properly formatted version of the (ironic) poem, "The Introspective Scorcher." Again, all in the public domain, so available for the taking. (In fact, in my Scorcher post I reused some material from some of my own earlier posts . . .)

Of course if someone makes use (re-use?) of some public domain "content" that they found with my help, like any librarian, I am glad to be acknowledged.

Flat Tire Blues?

Really, though, it wasn't so bad . . . or anyway it could have been worse.

Lately I have been commuting every day on my 30 year old Bridgestone. Two weeks ago, I got ready to go and when I put air in the rear tire, it started coming out faster than I could put it in! The edge of the hole in the wheel that the stem passes through had a rough edge that had made a hole in the rubber of the tire that extends a small way up the stem creating a leak. This was not a "puncture" flat of the usual sort but still, flat tires tend to come in "threes" so I guess I wasn't surprised when yesterday I had a flat tire on the way to work.


My nice 1982 Bridgestone Sirius, with air in the tires

Before 7 am these days, it is dark out. Plus the weather yesterday was strange - the temperature this early was close to 60 degrees - but rain was threatening so I was pretty sure that stopping to fix a tire was going to increase my chances of getting wet. As it turned out, I was just at where the Four Mile Run trail passes under Route 1 and the GW Parkway near the south end of the airport, so I pulled over between two lights and at least could see what I was doing.

I like to imagine I can fix a flat in ten minutes or less, but it is always more like 15. Off comes the tire and I pull out the tube and mark the tube with my Sharpie as to which side of the tube was which - if I don't do that, then when I find out where the hole is it is just that much more work figuring out if the sharp thing that came through the tire is still there or not. (I never like putting in a fresh tube not knowing what caused a whole in the previous one.) I put some air in the tube and easily found the hole, marked it, then matched it up with the tire and quickly found a very stiff bit of fine wire, say 3/8 inch long, going right through the tire that had punctured the tube. It was nice that there was no damage to the tire at least. Even with Kevlar belts this kind of thing is going to happen, although how this wire had been sitting there on the trail, standing on end waiting for a bike tire to poke into, is hard to imagine. Out comes the wire from the tire, take new tube from tool bag, put wheel back together, fill with air and off I go.


I guess I should have put on some rubber gloves

Nine riders went by while I worked on my tire - none of the fair weather bike commuters out on a day like this! I was a little disappointed that of the nine, five rode by in silence (like I wasn't there) and only four offered to help with the usual "got what you need?" or similar. Of course, to stop on a day like this would be to increase the chances of getting caught in the rain. Not that we are going to melt . . .

Having fixed my flat about three miles into my ten mile ride, I then took off - I found that the wind was from the south (which is unusual at this time of day) and I made good time, although I didn't make up for the 15 minute "break" in my ride! Still, it was exhilarating. As I crossed the 14th St Bridge, I could see rain off to the north, but I got to work without getting caught in the rain. On the way to my office, after parking my bike in the garage, I looked out a window and was surprised to see water sluicing down the windows from a downpour. I don't mind riding in the rain, but not so much downpours, so even with my stop I managed to avoid that. Good!

Almost immediately after broad adoption of pneumatic tires for bicycles in the late 1880s, people began trying to figure out a way to avoid flat tires and yet have the obvious benefits of that kind of tire (as compared to solid rubber or other sold tires).


An example of an 1896 proposed alternative to the pneumatic tire

So far, however, nothing like to replace the pneumatic tire (and inevitable flat tires) has been developed that is widely used.

If You Ride the Wheel, You Have to Fix the Wheel

Title (apparently given to its by photographer) is "Paying for his fun"

Another photo (that seems to be the only other one digitized) by the mysterious 1890s photographer, F.T. Harmon, who took the two in yesterday's blog entry. I like his sleeve protectors keeping his shirt clean as he polishes up his spokes.

You can see the rear cog in on the wheel - chains were different at this time and there were only half as many teeth on a cog because the chain had a space for a tooth only between every other link.

From the Library of Congress.

1897 Photos Tell a Story

Something about these photos looks staged to me. Pretty surprising to have a fork stem break. Anyway, although probably posed, there he is with his broken bike.


From the Library of Congress

Now comes along this other fellow, but how he is supposed to help repair a problem like this is difficult to say.


From the Library of Congress

Taken by one F.T. Harmon in 1897.