It's All About the Bike (13 page)

With a rear-wheel, chain-drive transmission, gearing up could be achieved by pairing a relatively large front cog (the chainring) with a much smaller one on the rear hub (the sprocket) to multiply the revolutions of the pedals. The advantage was that the wheels could be the same size and smaller, rendering the bike safe to ride. Later, this drivetrain system allowed for both the development of variable gearing, making pedalling efficient in different conditions, and the one-way clutch called the ‘freewheel', which permits coasting. The engineer H. J. Lawson patented the first machine with a rear-wheel, chain-drive in 1879: the problem then was the quality of chains.

The breakthrough came in the form of the steel roller chain, invented and patented by Hans Renold in 1880. Renold was a Swiss engineer who immigrated to Manchester. In 1879, he purchased a small business making rough chains for textile machinery. The company — today an international engineering group operating in nineteen countries — still bears his name. Manufacturing industrial chains remains the core business.

Renold's roller chain, or ‘bush roller' chain, was made up of two
types of alternating links: the inner plates were held by two bushings upon which rollers rotated; the outer plates were held together by pins that passed through the bushings of the inner links. The roller chain smoothed the engagement of the chain with the teeth on the chainring and sprockets. The dramatic effect was to reduce wear and increase efficiency. The most efficient means of power transmission had been found.

In the first half of the twentieth century virtually every form of transport depended on roller chains. One hundred and thirty years after their invention, the concept of roller chains remains central not just to the bicycle but to the transmission of machines used in a plethora of industries across the world. As a eulogy by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, following Renold's death in 1943, concluded: ‘There is hardly a phase of any industry or public works in which the chain is not to be found making an obscure but vital contribution to our welfare.'
Chapeau,
Hans.

Apart from being the daddy of the chain industry, and one of the fathers of the bicycle, Renold was also a philanthropic boss. He started a works canteen at his Manchester factory in 1895 to
supplement the poor diet of his employees. He introduced the 48-hour week in 1896 (down from 52) without reducing wages. He welcomed the shop steward movement, gave shares to his employees, introduced profit sharing and established the Hans Renold Social Union. Above all, he respected a good workman. As his son said: ‘His whole life was a passion for good work . . . commercial success was of quite secondary interest . . . It might well have been written of him, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”'

James Starley, the pioneering bicycle manufacturer (more of him in the next chapter) who complained in 1877 that he had to make all his chains himself, instantly recognized the benefits of Renold's low-friction bushings and rollers. Straightaway, he commissioned Renold to make chains for the pioneering tricycles he was working on. James Starley died suddenly in 1881, but his nephew and protégé, John Kemp Starley, continued to experiment with the idea of a chain-driven, two-wheel machine. In 1886, he began manufacturing the Rover Safety. It had a rear-wheel chain drive; it is another late nineteenth-century bicycle innovation that has had remarkable longevity. This was the most significant difference between the safety and every bicycle that had gone before. Nearly every bicycle manufactured since has had a roller chain. The final form in the search for an efficient chain drive had been found: it was fundamental to popularizing the bike.

The chain drive was one of numerous technological innovations that succeeded on the bicycle, only to be borrowed by the automotive industry as it emerged at the turn of the century. The list includes wire spokes, pneumatic tyres, ball bearings, steel tubing and differential gears. Together, they ensured that the quest for an affordable automobile was a realistic goal from the start. Many automobile pioneers were former bicycle mechanics
— Henry Ford, Charles and Frank Duryea, William Hillman, William Knudsen and many others cut their teeth building frames, trueing wheels and assembling bikes. Bicycle companies that converted to car manufacturing around 1900 included Bianchi, Singer, Peugeot, Opel, Morris, Rover, Hillman, Humber, Winton and Willys.

The demand for safety bicycles in the 1890s was unprecedented in the history of manufacturing. The industry was forced to adapt quickly to mechanization and mass production to meet demand and the industrial model this created was also part of the economic legacy of the bicycle. Ford and General Motors adopted the model for mass production pioneered by Columbia Bicycles in the USA, Bianchi in Italy and Raleigh in Britain. Ford appropriated the style of management called ‘vertical integration'. Assembly techniques and aggressive advertising (the bicycle boom, which coincided with the ‘golden age of illustration' saw cycle manufacturers snap up up to 10 per cent of all print advertising in the US) were borrowed directly. The car industry took the reins of campaigning for better roads straight out of the hands of bicycle-makers. Annual model changes and ‘planned obsolescence' were cycle industry innovations, though General Motors has since been blamed for introducing the latter practice. The hundreds of bicycle repair shops across the USA were the foundation for the network of motor service stations.

Importantly, the bicycle directed men's minds to the idea of independent, long-distance travel. The two brothers who took the idea furthest were Wilbur and Orville Wright, the ‘patron saints of bike mechanics'. The Wright Cycle Company was a storefront bike repair shop and factory in Dayton, Ohio. They applied their understanding of the equilibrium of riding a bicycle to hypothesize about how a flying machine might behave. They mounted wing sections to a bicycle to make comparative tests for lift and drag. They used bicycle sprockets and chains to drive the propellers. Their bicycle repair business entirely financed the research, development, construction and testing that led to the ‘Wright Flyer', the world's first powered aircraft.

‘In this company, you feel a commitment to foresee the future, but also you feel history all the time,' Lorenzo Taxis, the marketing director of Campagnolo told me. We were sitting in the boardroom above the factory in Vicenza. For several weeks, I'd tried to convince the press office to let me have a tour of the factory. For several weeks, they'd refused. An interview was all I was going to get.

The history of Campagnolo is well known; it's part of road-cycling lore. The company founder, Tullio Campagnolo, was an accomplished amateur racing cyclist. He was competing in a race called the Gran Premio della Vittoria during brutally cold weather on the Feast of San Martino. Different biographies give different dates: 11 November 1927 seems the most probable.
When Tullio reached the top of the Croce d'Aune pass in the Dolomites north of Vicenza, he was leading the race. At that time, racing bicycles still had no derailleurs — the mechanisms attached to most modern bicycles for moving the chain from one toothed sprocket to another, thereby changing gear. It's a French word, with an Anglicized pronunciation — ‘de-rail-er' — meaning to throw off course, or derail.

Tullio's bike had two gears, on a double-sided rear hub with two sprockets — commonly a high fixed gear for the flat and a low freewheel for climbing. To change gear, you had to remove the rear wheel and flip it round. First the wing nuts that secured the wheel in the drop-outs had to be loosened.

In the ice and snow on the top of the pass, with fingers frozen numb, Tullio struggled to loosen the heavy wing nuts and flip his wheel round. A score of his rivals swept past, no doubt jeering under their frosted breath. On completing the race, Tullio is reputed to have said: ‘Bisogna Cambià qualcossa de drio' — ‘Something needs to be done about the rear.' He meant it.

On 8 February 1930, Tullio Campagnolo patented the quick-release skewer — a steel skewer within a hollow hub axle with a nut at one end and a lever with a cam to fasten it at the other. It was simple and brilliant: it operated in all conditions. Instead of unscrewing nuts to remove a wheel, you simply pulled open a lever. It has remained fundamentally unchanged for eighty years. Today the quick-release skewer is a universally standard fixture on almost every bicycle manufactured. Every day, across the globe, tens of thousands of cyclists turn their bikes over to remove a wheel — to repair a puncture or slip the bike into the boot of a car. With their fingers round the levers of the quick release, they silently honour the memory of the inventive guru, Tullio Campagnolo.

The quick-release skewer was the first of some 135 patents the
great man registered. Eighty years later, that spirit of innovation is still strong at the company he founded; it's why I couldn't get past the boardroom.

‘We own many patents. Every day, we are working on new products,' Lorenzo said. ‘There is a lot of technology in the road-racing bicycle, and a certain jealousy of what Campagnolo do. This forces us to keep the know-how within these walls. We are a privately owned company, and Mr Valentino Campagnolo doesn't let the media enter the secrets of the company.'

I had read that, during the boom in the 1890s, Albert Pope of Columbia Bicycles, then one of the largest manufacturers in the world, refused to let any journalists into his factory in Hartford, Connecticut, for the same reason. I mentioned this.

‘Yes. And if you enter Ducatti or Ferrari today, it is the same,' Lorenzo said.

In a way, it's a marketing problem for us. A company like Campagnolo should really advertise the brand through its technology, by letting the consumers see how the products they are passionate about are produced. But we can't. More important to us is innovation: it's part of the DNA of the company. It always has been. Today the innovation is in electronic gear-shifting, in bearing technology, in refining carbon fibre to reduce the weight of our componentry. We have to innovate . . . to stay alive.