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

[Brucey]

around the time when this ad was penned, coca cola contained cocaine, Morphine was an over-the-counter 'non addictive' cough medicine, and Absinthe rotted your brain as well as your guts. No wonder that folk such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies; he probably saw them on a daily basis, as presumably did the artist here

[Sweep]

Wonderful brucey.
Look forward to more if you have any.
Love the graphics and some fine examples of advertising ****s

As a technician I trust you can tell us what:

Bonderised BTM tubing

Is in that Healing advert.

[Brucey]

BTM is a mystery to me but bonderising is one name for a phosphate treatment. For many years all Raleigh framesets (amongst others) were phosphate treated, and this helped to slow down internal frame corrosion.

cheers

[Mick F]

Royal Enfield Bicycle ............... made like a gun.

[Brucey]

getting a smiling Joan Crawford to swing a leg over one of their machines (in an ad intended to appeal to, uh, 'impressionable' teenage boys...) would be about equivalent to having, say, Scarlett Johansson do so in more recent times...

[Brucey]

Sex sells and the French really knew how to sell

more here (may offend some folk, but interesting discussion)

https://cyclehistory.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/women-in-cycling-advertising-part-1-sex-sells/

and here it is more about selling to women (than using women to sell to men)

https://cyclehistory.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/women-in-cycling-advertising-pt-2-its-all-about-the-bike-jersey-shorts/

cheers

[bagpussctc]

Not an advert but a lithograph print from volume one of " Cycling " 1891.
"Cycling" 1891.E Dangerfield by rebalrid, on Flickr

[bagpussctc]

1948 "Claud Butler " cover .
Claud Butler . 1948 . by rebalrid, on Flickr

Talking of covers.
Classic add by rebalrid, on Flickr

[Oldjohnw]

A couple I saw and rather badly photographed. On the wall above the urinal in the gents' toilets..

[Brucey]

the cycle traders of America presumably paid the scouts for their endorsement here? What on earth would Baden-Powell have made of it?

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
de dion, Unbelievable simplicity.
My first four wheeled vehicle had one in a very basic form.(Rear axle)
Superb handling Of a sub 700 kg truck and no roll-bars

luv Those posters keep them coming.

[Brucey]

and you thought the 'stupid bloke/smug woman' ad was a recent idea....? Still didn't make shaft drive (here 'chainless bike') any good though....

[Sweep]

Royal Enfield Bicycle ............... made like a gun.

ah yes

was going to comment on that.

I trust the comprehensive user manual told you where the safety catch was.

[Mike Sales]

Royal Enfield Bicycle ............... made like a gun.

And of course BSA stands for Birmingham Small Arms.
I guess the engineering skills must be similar.

[georgew]

Great thread Brucey.......some images from the French competitions for French bicycle builders way back then would be pretty special. Some were beautiful machines and deserve to be more widely seen, though I'm aware that they do feature in an expensive book I've seen.