Bicycling Science - some musings

[belgiangoth]

I have owned the Wilson (feat Papadopulos) 3rd edition for a number of years now but have failed to make any inroad into it. I was wondering, are there any other owners of the book who have failed to read it for some time?

I started chapter 2 and read about measuring power, for him to then say that all this would change with powermeters! I realise the 3rd Edition was printed in 2004, so I wonder whether it's even worth wading through that section and what the latest on that subject is.

I'm also finding that I need to start developing notes (like learning for an exam) to try and make sense of where he's going and what he's trying to say. Am I alone in this?

[Samuel D]

I have all three editions of this book. They’re not novels! I only dip into the relevant bits for background on the topic of my contemporary obsession. I wouldn’t attempt to read these books from cover to cover. If you did that, you might find the somewhat stilted writing style off-putting although I find it apt and charming.

Although it’s clearly the best work of its type, it’s not a book like Jobst Brandt’s The Bicycle Wheel, which is such a flawless jewel of a thing that it’s hard to criticise at all. Bicycling Science could never hope to be like that because its scope is staggeringly broad. It would be unreasonable to expect David Gordon Wilson to have that level of expertise for every subject his book covers. Nor can many people write as sparsely and beautifully as Brandt even if they have ten years to polish a small book as he did.

One of the greatest assets of Bicycling Science is its enormous bibliography. In fact the whole book is essentially a condensed summary of our understanding of cycling as reported in other publications by about the turn of the century. This makes it a peerless starting point for in-depth research on any given topic.

It was published in 2004 and based on older works so it lacks depth on carbon fibre, the current electrification and automation of the bicycle, hydraulics, etc. No doubt it is similarly slightly dated on other topics it does cover such as human physiology.

The book is also interesting for featuring the work of Jim Papadopoulos, whom I regard as an outright genius. His Usenet (now Google Groups) posts from the 1990s are astonishing and well worth struggling to unearth with the pathetic Google Groups search facility.

[Brucey]

most books have an axe to grind, i.e. the text is aimed at demonstrating that some point of view is correct. However if you do a good review of the literature on a given topic, it won't obviously contain such a slant; that is reserved for a later, different part of the text in a good book on a given subject. It is a while since I read Bicycling Science but IIRC it was quite like that.

So the answer to the question 'where is it going?' is that at any given time it is probably just trying to cover the ground on a given topic. The later editions will contain sections that have been added and what cohesion there was in the original edition may be compromised as a result.

For a book on science with useful content it is (in the editions that I have seen) quite interesting and readable. But if you are expecting 'Bill Bryson meets a bicycle' then you are going to be disappointed.

cheers

[mig]

it's heavy going that thing.

just saddle up and 'ave it

[JakobW]

Out of interest, Samuel, what are the virtues of the earlier editions? I've flipped through the second and own the third, but I can't recall the differences.

As others have said, it's not really a book to read cover to cover; rather to be dipped in to when you want to look up something of interest. It's an undergraduate-level survey; while I wish there were more detail in some bits (mainly in the steering dynamics and aerodynamics sections), I appreciate that this would make the book bigger, more expensive, and less accessible (& frankly my engineering mathematics are so rusty I suspect much of the detail would be lost on me!).

[Samuel D]

Sorry for my late reply, Jakob.

The first edition is a slim volume that I take to be mainly based on work by Frank Rowland Whitt, who couldn’t find a publisher for his work in the UK and handed his manuscripts to Whitt to try. It was heavily rewritten and updated by David Gordon Wilson as a condition for publication (in America), but the idea and original content came from Whitt. It is the easiest of the three to read from cover to cover, being more cohesive, lighter on the maths, with fewer references, and much shorter. It also strays into the weeds with a long discussion of non-bicycle human-powered machinery that I found interesting.

The second edition is a different book, being written in a more academic style with more references and maths. It goes much deeper into human physiology, bearing drag, tyre rolling resistance, and aerodynamics. Whitt, who was once the CTC’s technical editor, had little to do with this edition because he suffered a bad stroke in 1981 that eventually led to his death.

The third edition is an updated, corrected, and further-expanded second edition. It has a significant new section on steering and stability written by Papadopoulos; in total five chapters should have been written by him, but he couldn’t get his act together to write them in time so Wilson did the rest.

Each book has omitted content from the previous edition, so the committed bicycle nerd will want to have them all.

[SA_SA_SA]

I don't know about the 1st version but the 2nd goes into more detail about the author's (and his students/minions') air-plane rubber brake pad ('unaffected' by wet steel rims but poor friction) and his special front brake which thus had low mechanical advantage till the pads hit the rim when it became higher to compensate (however how high: more than a dual pivot?).

Wouldn't a brake that allowed a bigger pad-rim gap be useful even on todays alloy rims?