Vintage Bicycle Advertisements; good, bad. ugly...

[Sweep]

At the risk of spoiling your wonderful thread with pedantry brucey, surely you mean 18 dollars?
Vintage advertising technique.

[Brucey]

these days it would be 17.99 rather than 17.95....

cheers

[Bobbin]

That would have been about £72 going by the P.G.Wodehouse exchange rate !

[RubaDub]

That would have been about £72 going by the P.G.Wodehouse exchange rate !

Shouldn't that be in Reichsmarks?

[Brucey]

the kangaroo was an early form of safety bicycle, in a category of its own known as 'dwarf ordinary', presumably for those who found the idea of a driven rear wheel a bit of a departure from the conventional. I can only imagine that there would have been a fair amount of flex in the frame where the cranks were mounted, and that the bearings to support the cranks must have been very highly loaded. I would expect the drive not to be super-smooth, either, because chains and sprockets at that time were usually of coarse pitch and may not have had rollers either; in 1885 chains had only been in use on bicycles for a few years, and various designs were duking it out for market supremacy. The 'Rover' safety bicycle came out in 1885 and was the first successful safety bicycle of the now familiar form. Arguably the safety bicycle really came into its own when the pneumatic tyre was invented; prior to that there was a school of thought that favoured larger wheels because they rolled more easily on the rough roads of the time.



The high wheeler didn't die off without a struggle; in the ad below (exact date unknown) it is described as 'more fun than a low wheeler', presumably where fun = risk, this line may have had some appeal to natural dare-devils...



cheers

[Brucey]

1895; 'perfection attained' they say. Well, at 22lbs with chainguard and mudguards, it would shame many modern machines. I'm not quite sure what they mean by 'double-tube pneumatic tyres' unless it is exactly literal; you get two chances before the tyre has to come off the rim (or be unsewn) for the tubes to be patched. Note that the bike is referred to as 'wheels', hence 'the league of American wheelmen' and so on.



cheers

[drossall]

1895; 'perfection attained' they say.

It's easy to tell. Any company that truly believes that it has achieved perfection, or the ultimate product, will immediately stop developing any new version, model or upgrade. What would be the point?

[Polisman]

I'm trying to find an advertisement for a French (I think) bicycle featuring a monkey on a bike, any ideas?

[Brucey]

I'm trying to find an advertisement for a French (I think) bicycle featuring a monkey on a bike, any ideas?

if you search this thread for 'monkey' and 'parrot' you will find one upthread. IIRC it is a Columbia ad; is that the one you were thinking of?

cheers

[Brucey]

Other Hercules ads from the 1930s featured steady middle-class types. The more basic model Hercules 'H' model was being pitched at the kind of young man who chatted up shop girls, wearing flannels that are mysteriously unmarked by the astonishingly tight-looking chainguardless chain.



cheers

[Brucey]

from about 1920; lots of superfluous tubes in the handlebars, frame and fork shows signs of the 'more is more' culture, but when it comes to useful stuff such as chainguards, luggage carriers or more than one brake..... naah, you don't need any of that....

Seems to have been going for the 'longest stem and widest bars' trophy.

[Brucey]

in the early days of popular cycling, 'riding schools' were required; you take it for granted that most people learn to ride when they are children these days, but it wasn't always so.

In the ad below some artistic licence, or Victorian sensibility or something has resulted in the lady rider having no feet on view, despite the fact that this is nearly impossible. The wheels are drawn in such a way as there is an impression of speed; I wonder when this was first done?

[Brucey]

Presumably Mrs HJ vom Scheldt was a bit tired and stayed at home....?

[Brucey]

The idea was presumably that kids 'graduated' from one of these to something with an engine. My guess is that when riding up a hill of any kind on one of these, an engine would be your dearest and most fervent wish; there is so much crap nailed to this bike I don't even recognise half of it. What is the cylindrical tank above the dummy tank for? Batteries for the horn?

[DNC123]

The National Motorcycle Museum has many examples of similar machines. When are they powered bicycles and when are they motorcycles is a moot point.

Could be similar to today's e-bike debate.