Cycling UK Forum

More likely the big guy has taken his son climbing?

I thought they were climbing across the mountain towards us, rather than straight up almost vertically.

meic wrote:I thought they were climbing across the mountain towards us, rather than straight up almost vertically.

hmm the guy a the top seems to be looking directly down rather than 2 his left? would only see the back of his head more if that was so? head seems to be in side profile?

breakwellmz wrote:What tyre pressures,what gearing choice?

its not a re-enactment is it? Only there are these 4 guys, (maybe 5 with the photographer?) atop a mountain. If you look where they are standing, it appears to be a road, a well used space devoid of vegetation, as if it was a viewing area well used by cars/coach passengers. Presumably there wouldn't have been that much traffic up there then, unless, as someone else said, they are adjacent to a cable car, and this is the viewing area from that.

I had assumed that they had arrived on that "road", rather than scaling up the cliffside, they are on bikes. It would probably still be too difficult for me on that road, on those bikes.

It appears to be a genuine photo from 1898 by Axel Lindhal, taken in Norway.

A higher resolution image is here: http://wielerboeken.eu/_contentimages/2 ... etsers.jpg

More background here: http://dirtragmag.com/follow-fascinating-photo/

I vote for the alternative date of 1889; by the mid 1890's most keen cyclists would have been riding bikes with pneumatic tyres and a different frame design.

Thanks for the link to the better pic BTW;



you can see that the chap 2nd from left has a slightly different machine to the others, with different footpegs and what looks like two brakes rather than one.

cheers

How many of us are riding on 10, 20 or 30 year old technology?

I imagine there were still plenty of old Luddites even as the bold new 20th century was arriving.

oh sure, yes, that could be the case, but I don't think it is all that likely. All the photos I have seen of mid- 1890's bike clubs have been full of machines with pneumatic tyres. Not only did existing riders replace/upgrade their machines, but there was a huge cycling boom. With the introduction of the safety and then the pneumatic tyre bikes went from being the province of the wealthy and foolhardy to being both better and more affordable for many more people. The chances are that anyone in a picture from that time was odds on a 'new' cyclist, who had taken up the pastime after the introduction of the pneumatic tyre.

I have owned and ridden a bike with solid tyres and if I had two beans to rub together (as those blokes look to have had from the way they are dressed) then getting pneumatic tyres would be an instant no-brainer type decision.

cheers

Brucey wrote: .......you can see that the chap 2nd from left has a slightly different machine to the others, with different footpegs and what looks like two brakes rather than one.

....... and no bell.

When did the safety bicycle become popular?

atleast we know now that the photgrapher probably not one of the cyclists? and from the quality used a glass plate camera rather than a pocket Kodak? I find it hard to believe they cycled up to the top, they dont look like he-men? from the coloured pictures of the area in the web ref. it seems that most of the road in a flattish valley, and only the final short section up is really steep?

mercalia wrote:I find it hard to believe they cycled up to the top, they dont look like he-men?

They probably got off and pushed - it's only a modern idea that you are somehow 'inferior' if you can't ride all the way to the top. They are tourists, not racers.

The one second from the left looks remarkably like my grandfather, though the dates aren't quite right for him. He wasn't a he-man either - but in the early 1900s used to cycle every week from London to Brighton and back on his day off. Not as a training ride but just as a day out at the seaside. He also did several cycle camping holidays in France, Germany and Switzerland before WW1. He rode a lot with friends but wasn't ever a member of a formal club.

Bicycler wrote:When did the safety bicycle become popular?

Macmillan's velocipede was arguably a 'safety' of a kind in that it had a kind of geared drive to the rear wheel and a low seating position. Lawson produced one with a chain drive in 1876 but JK Starley's 'Rover' machine of 1885 was one of the first to become really popular.

The pace of technology development was quite rapid. A typical machine of ~1880 was an 'ordinary' which might have solid steel frame members (some reputedly even used war surplus sword blades for forks, hence perhaps the term 'fork blades' ) with solid tyres and (often) no ball-bearings. Bikes were made in their millions in the bike-boom of the 1890s and each year they got better, lighter, faster and cheaper. By ~1905 you could buy a bike with a three-speed gear, light gauge steel tube frameset, freewheel, ball bearings throughout, pneumatic tyres fitting rims of the same sizes as are used today. The whole shooting match could weigh less than 30lbs and could be bought on HP.

Without the bicycle as stimulus, there might have been no light gauge steel tubes, no ball-bearings, no mass-production machine tools, no screw thread standardisation, no mass-produced gears, no quality steels, no mass production of pneumatic tyres ( the idea had been demonstrated 50 years earlier, but there was no market for it then...) for decades. The development of the motorcycle, the motorcar and the aircraft would have simply been impossible without these things; it is no accident that so many pioneers in these fields were first bicycle mechanics before they did the other things IMHO.

cheers

Brucey wrote:Without the bicycle as stimulus, there might have been no light gauge steel tubes, no ball-bearings, no mass-production machine tools, no screw thread standardisation, no mass-produced gears, no quality steels, no mass production of pneumatic tyres ( the idea had been demonstrated 50 years earlier, but there was no market for it then...) for decades. The development of the motorcycle, the motorcar and the aircraft would have simply been impossible without these things; it is no accident that so many pioneers in these fields were first bicycle mechanics before they did the other things IMHO.

Don't forget the lobbying by cyclists for decent roads as they were falling into disrepair, at least in part, due to the popularity of the railways (links UK & USA).

Rick.