Eben Weiss - The Ultimate Bicycle Owners Manual

S o youve decided to get a bicycle.

Congratulations!

If you feel confused and overwhelmed by the vast and bewildering bicycle marketplace, dont worry, because admitting you need help is the first step toward becoming a cyclist. Before we go any further, it will help if you have a basic understanding of the history of the bicycle.

In the 1870s, buying a bicycle was easy: You went to Ye Olde Velocipede Shoppe, picked out a nice high-wheelerknown as the penny farthingand maybe took a header into a pile of horse manure on the way home. Done. Shopping was easy. The hardest part was riding the thing. First, in order to get started, you had to give the bike a push from behind. Then you had to scramble on top of it while it was rolling, which would have been like climbing onto the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle. Once you were up there, you had to stay up there, which was not easy, thanks to the fact that you were essentially sitting on top of a giant wheel. Its hard to stay upright on a bicycle when your center of gravity is way up on the third floor. If you were able to mount and ride the bike successfully, you still had to climb back down when the ride was over.

Seems like a lot of work, right? Why was that front wheel so gigantic anyway?

Because the penny farthing was propelled by means of a direct drive, which means the pedals and cranks were attached directly to the front wheel. So, the diameter of the wheel is what determined how fast and far the bicycle would go when your legs turned the pedals. If the wheel was small, youd have to pedal frantically in order to get anywhere. (Think about how long it would take you to travel a mile on a childs tricycle and youve got the idea.) Therefore, the front wheel was laughably huge.

Even so, people went crazy for the penny farthing, and the world experienced the very first bike boom.

Then, two big things happened.

1. In 1885, John Kemp Starley began manufacturing a rear-wheel, chain-drive bicycle with more or less symmetrical wheels.

2. John Boyd Dunlop founded the Dunlop Pneumatic Tire Co. in 1889.

Equal-size wheels? Air-filled tires? This was cyclings chocolate-in-the-peanut-butter moment. Fitting a bicycle with a chain drive meant that you no longer had to change the wheels diameter in order to optimize the systems mechanical advantage. Instead, the gear ratio was determined by the size of the chainring and cogs, which were mounted on the hub of the rear wheel. And presto, a rear-wheel-driven bicycle that could be designed for comfort. Starleys bike, with its diamond frame and two symmetrical wheels, was vastly more stable than a penny farthing, and it was far easier to straddle and ride. As you can imagine, riding a bicycle with symmetrical wheels wrapped in cushions of air was a much more attractive proposition than bouncing around high above the manure-strewn streets on solid tires. It was also a lot safer, for the simple reason that you were much less likely to fall off your bike. In fact, this new design was marketed as the safety bicycle. By the end of the nineteenth century, pretty much all bicycles were rear-wheel-driven safety bicycles rolling on pneumatic tires. The machine became so popular that cities and municipalities began paving the roads with macadam in order to accommodate the growing legions of cyclists.

So you can thank bicycles for paved roads, and you can also feel free to tell any impatient driver who says roads are for cars that they should be thanking you for the pavement theyre driving on.

Penny farthing.

Penny farthing fail.

Now were well into the twenty-first century, and here you are looking for a bike. The good news is that fundamentally not much has changed about the bicycle since the turn of the last century: Were still (mostly) riding diamond-framed safety bicycles with pneumatic tires. (Yes, there are recumbents and other rethinkings of the upright bicycle, but well address those later.) Sure, bikes have gotten a lot lighter, and yes they have much more sophisticated gear changing and braking systems, but if a late nineteenth-century cyclist were to ride through a time wormhole into today, he or she would have no difficulty riding any of my bikes. (Apart from dodging all the cars of course, but well address that later as well.)

The bad news is that a century of constant refinement, endless marketing, and incessant hyperspecialization means that shopping for a bicycle can be as vexing as trying to see the UFO in one of those Magic Eye paintings. In fact, you may be so frustrated youre ready to say, Screw it, Im leasing a Hyundai. Dont give up. The problem is more with the twenty-first century than it is with cycling. Bikes are simple machines, and unfortunately the simpler something is, the easier it is to ascribe all sorts of mystical attributes to it. Thats why people take classes in order to learn how to drink wine, but when they go to lease a Hyundai theyll make their decision based on the location of the cup holder.

Ultimately, the secret to choosing a bicycle is avoiding confusion, so here are some basic dos and donts to keep you on track, starting with the donts.