The Wright Brothers

This past week I finished listening to the biography on the Wright Brothers by David McCullough. To be honest, I entered this book with no special interest in the Wright Brothers or their story. I bought the book because it was by David McCullough[1], and because I needed to spend some credits on Audible before I lost them.

My personal mental image of the Wright Brothers has always been that of simple bicycle merchants who took up a hobby and ended up inventing a very basic and rudimentary - albeit the first - flying machine.

I had no idea.

Obviously and understandably the overwhelming majority of what the book focused on was their development of powered flight - and the story it told in this regard was excellent. I learned a great deal about how that happened, the innovations in engineering and understanding required to achieve it, and the struggles along the way. But as a bike guy, the book also left me interested in learning more about the bikes.

They were not simple bicycle merchants, they were bicycle builders. Builders in an era in which the bicycle was really coming of age - moving away from the ridiculous penny farthing designs into something very much like what we ride today.

I wanted to find pictures of their bicycles and learn more about their construction. The book mentions two models designed and built by the Wrights - the Van Cleve and the St. Clair. A very few examples of their bikes are still known to exist - one of them is at The Smithsonian National Air and Space museum, and can be seen in pictures here at Bikerumors.com, and the site Wright-Brothers.org maintains a page specifically about the bicycles, including photographs and old ads for both bicycles, and providing information on their construction.

What is striking about both models is how utterly modern these 100 year-old-plus bicycles appear. The Wright’s innovated in bike design ahead of their work in aviation. They invented a self-oiling hub - a vital item give the mostly unpaved and hence dusty streets and roads of the day. They also developed the notion of threading pedals to their posts with threads going to the right on one side (which was standard) and to the left on the other so that side wouldn’t unscrew and fall off. This was, apparently, a common problem with bikes at the time - you’d just be riding along, and the act of pedaling would cause one of your pedals to loosen, and ultimately just fall off.

What I love about this solution - threading it backwards - is that it seems so very much of a piece with what I learned from the biography about their approach to flight. It is the type of thing that, in retrospect, seems a very simple solution. But it clearly took an elegant perspective to be able to step back from what everyone was already doing, and find a different way of thinking about it in order to solve the problem.

I can heartily and happily recommend The Wright Brothers biography - it was an excellent listen from Audible, and I’m sure it would be an excellent read on your iPad or Kindle (as well as printed on pieces of the processed corpses of trees, if one wants to live that way) as well.

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1. everything I’ve read (or listened to) by David McCullough - The John Adams Biography, The Truman Biography, 1776 - has frankly been so excellent that even if it’s not about a subject I thought I was interested in (Truman was not high on my list) I will go ahead and give it a try anyway. I’ve yet to be disappointed.  ↩

EVO - by HUGE Design + 4130 Cycle Works

The Bike Design Project is a competition geared towards encouraging development of bicycles oriented at building the movement away from cars and towards biking as transportation.

There are five teams, from five different cities, building bikes for this contest. The EVO - by HUGE Design + 4130 Cycle Works in San Francisco got my vote.

All of the concepts are at least somewhat interesting, and some have some neat features - integrated blinkers and lighting, a collapsible carrying rack that slides in and out of the top tube, USB charging hooked up to an internal battery built into the bike.

But it seems to me that those neat features are also a problem.

This project appears to be oriented around developing bikes that will be useful, utilitarian transportation. In that respect, In a lot of ways a good urban bike, I suppose, would be like a well designed economy car - flexible, efficient, and durable. The original Mini and the Honda Civic, and the current Honda Fit, might be examples of this.

A USB port might ring the "cool" bell for a proposal in current day, but it's time limited in its utility. What happens when we stop using USB as a charging standard?

The life span of a good bicycle is measured in decades. My regular ride is over 20 years old, and still going strong, and I routinely see bikes of a similar vintage and older. Things like USB ports, as well as proprietary lighting designs of various sorts, will likely sit non-functional on the bike in years down the road.

Which is why I like the Evo.

The Evo is built around a modular attachment system - that's the reason for the tall sections at the front and rear of the frame points. The concept is simple - an "urban" bike needs to be able to do multiple things across the course of a day or a week, and one set of fixed items will not do the job, so the bike needs to be be able to change quickly. They show a variety of attachments for it, and since the attachments are not a part of the bike itself, there is room for growth and change based upon future need. If an attachment item breaks it won't have an impact on the utility of the bike itself the way built-in items will. In addition, the owner can purchase only the components he or she needs, and not be stuck with unwanted items - no small kids in your family? No child seat.

Further, the mounting point itself looks to be fairly straightforward, suggesting that multiple vendors could design attachments for it, opening the door for a variety of specialized items.

If I lived in an urban setting and relied on a bicycle for daily transportation I could absolutely see a bike like this meeting my needs for a long time.

Arizona Winter Ride

This was my view on my bike ride this morning.

It was the last day of our Arizona trip. We had a very nice time, both with friends and as our little family exploring the Tonto National Forest, Tonto National Monument and Roosevelt Dam.

We had a little time left to kill before our flight in the evening, and it seemed a shame to have come out west in the middle of winter without having taken the opportunity for a bike ride. A quick internet or Yelp search will show that there are a lot of shops in the Phoenix area that rent bikes of various sorts and kinds. I went with Arizona Outback Adventures. I initially picked them because they had road courses mapped out that started and ended at their shop - a major bonus since I'm not familiar with the area. And that was great, but I have to say that the service and the shop was just awesome! I was coming in with very little notice, and they accommodated me quickly and politely, included a helmet, a rubber band for my pants (I don't do the whole spandex bike clothes thing) and a couple bottles of water all as part of the rental.

The course mapped out was perfect: A 15 mile ride laid out following the bike lanes in Scottsdale. I asked about the traffic - many of the lanes were on 4-lane roadways. The folks at the shop assured me that Scottsdale is a "pretty bike friendly town". This was absolutely the case - all traffic treated me as if I was supposed to be on the road with them, with no horns, no angry passers-by. Probably my favorite example of this attitude was from the roadside maintenance crew. Two gentlemen were out there alongside the road, next to the bike lane, running weed whackers. Each of them stopped as I rode by to keep from hitting me with debris.

All that, and the view! I wouldn't move to Arizona just for the weather - I mostly enjoy winter in Illinois. But for that sort of biking environment... Well, that might be something to consider.