Now here's someone I admire:
even though, after seeing him, I'd still be reluctant to ride a recumbent bike in traffic.
The photo appeared on This Big City, where I also found this infographic:
During the 1970's Bike Boom, millions of Americans bought ten-speed bikes. Many people rode them only a few times, or once. Some didn't like the dropped handlebars or small "hard" seats; others couldn't quite get the hang of shifting derailleurs. Given the fragile nature of most derailleurs of the time, the results weren't pretty, especially when the derailleurs were out of adjustment or the rider tried to shift while standing still or under pressure.
Then there were the engineering types and tinkerers who look at any mechanical device and think "There must be a better way." And, finally, there were lots of newly-minted lawyers with too much time on their hands who saw all sorts of potential lawsuits lurking. (Some of them helped to found the CPSC.)
One of the best-remembered attempts to correct the "deficiencies" of derailleur gearing was Shimano's Front Freewheeling system. Basically, it incorporated a freewheel-like mechanism between the chainrings and crank so that the chainrings spun as long as the wheels were spinning. This allowed riders to shift without pedaling.
Some people who were accustomed to internally-geared hubs (like Sturmey-Archer three-speeds) liked this new innovation, which is probably the reason why it developed something of a following in Germany, where many people still cycled for transportation but few were accustomed to derailleurs. However, the FF system was heavy and complicated, and was equipped only on entry-level bikes.
Another attempt to bypass the idiosyncrasies of derailleurs and multiple rear sprockets is all but forgotten today. But it was interesting in its own way.
Before its foray into the bicycle business, Tokheim had about seven decades' worth of experience in manufacturing fuel dispensers and pumps, and equipment for payment terminals and retail automation systems. So, if you've ever owned or managed a gas station, you've seen or used Tokheim equipment.
Like a few other American companies, Tokheim thought the Bike Boom was an opening for a new profitable market. And, like those other companies (including, of all companies, Beatrice Foods!), they thought they could make bike parts and accessories even though they had absolutely no experience with them--or, it could seem, cycling.
Then again, Tokheim's experience with pumps and other kinds of machinery had, it would seem, at least some applicability to designing and manufacturing a bicycle gearing system. It was at least somewhat in evidence in their "Gear Maker" system.
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| The Tokheim Gear Maker |
When drivetrains with derailleurs are shifted to their extreme positions (small chainring with the smallest rear cog or largest chainring with largest rear cog), severe chainline angles can result. This usually results in noisier running; in worse cases, it leads to premature chain and cog wear. In the worst cases (especially with an inexperienced and unskilled rider), the chain can be thrown off the cogs and into the wheels or get stuck between the chainrings and chainstay.
Most cyclists learned, in time, not to shift into the extreme gear positions--or to do so carefully. However, some could never get past that first experience of a missed shift. Or, if they had no previous experience with multi-cog systems, they were intimidated.
That is the "need" the Tokheim system was intended to meet. Imagine an old-fashioned Ferris wheel: the kind with a "spider" that rotates around an axle at its center and "cars" or "gondolas" at the end of each arm. Those cars and arms are in fixed positions and will always reach the same height at the peak of their rotation.
Now imagine that between those arms, there are other arms, except that these arms are expandable and retractable. Thus, the Ferris wheel operator could expand the diameter (and height) of the wheel for more adventurous customers. But the cars of those expanded and contracted cars would rotate in the same plane as the cars on arms with fixed lengths.
The gear in the "gear maker" was like that Ferris wheel. It was operated with a twist-grip shifter. When the shifter was in its "high" position (slackened cable), the chain ran on the smallest gear, which was fixed to the axle. Shifting down made an interposer arm push a series of bars out successively. At the end of each bar were teeth like those of a typical rear sprocket. The chain ran on a larger sprocket something like the "skip tooth" cogs found on some 1970s freewheels. A tensioner--basically a derailleur cage and pulleys--took up chain slack.
For a time, the Tokheim system came as standard equipment on a few Huffy and Murray bikes. I never saw a bicycle sold in a bike shop that was equipped with the Tokheim system, and I don't know whether anyone ever retrofitted it to a bike. For that matter, I didn't know anyone who rode it, and only got to work on a couple of them, so I don't know how they performed in the "real world". However, as the gears were made of plastic, I suspect they wore fairly quickly. And, as Tokheim stopped making it around 1980 and, to my knowledge, never offered replacement parts (and because most of the bikes that came with them have long since ended up in landfills), I don't suspect that very many Tokheim Gear Makers are in use today. But, I think, they are interesting nonetheless.
If you grew up in Brooklyn during the 1960s and early 1970s, as I did, you heard stories about the Gowanus Canal. One such tale held that it was the Mafia's necropolis: Under the cover of night, hitmen hauled bodies from car trunks and tossed them into the turbid water. The sheer number of such corpses, according to the legend, accounted for the foul smell that wafted from water as lifeless as the bodies submerged in it.
A variation on this urban myth said that one reason why the "mob" chose the canal as its graveyard is that the chemicals in the water dissolved those bodies, effectively making their benighted owners disappear from the face of the earth.
While I must admit that I don't find such stories wholly implausible, I must also add this bit of historical fact: Mesopotamians built the earliest known canals about 6000 years ago, while modern sewer systems have a history of not much more than a century. Thus, almost any body of water could turn into a dump for everything from agricultural offal to industrial waste. Really, just about anything that any person or company wanted to dispose could end up in a river, lake, ocean or canal.
Yes, anything--including a bicycle. A onetime riding buddy confessed that a bike he no longer wanted and couldn't sell "ended up" at the bottom of Jamaica Bay. I have no doubt that thieves similarly disposed of bicycles they couldn't fence or simply didn't know what else to do with. And I'm sure that more than a few people have tossed bikes into the nearest stream along with household trash.
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Apparently, the latter fate seems to befall two-wheelers in Amsterdam. So many bikes piled up in Amsterdam's canals that, by the 1960's, they were scraping the bottoms of boats, according to Diane Kleinhout. She is a spokesperson for Waternet, an agency in charge of keeping the canals clean. In the agency's attempt to clear out bikes--as well as scooters, wheelchairs, shopping carts and other wheeled items--Waternet employs bike fishermen.
Yes, you read that right. The job of Richard Matser and Jan de Jonge is to use a huge hydraulic claw to trawl the canal's waters and base for the old bikes and other debris. Their job has been compared to sticking your hand into a sink full of sudsy water and groping around blindly, with your fingers, until find a spoon or whatever you were looking for. When the "fishermen" find a bike, they pull it out of the water and load it into a barge behind the claw. Eventually, the bikes and whatever else the "fishermen" pull up will go to a recycler.
De Jonge says they "catch" about 15,000 bicycles a year. Given that there are about two million bicycles in Amsterdam, that is a small percentage. Still, no one knows why that many bikes end up in the city's waterways. Some are attributed to thieves. Ironically, in a city where, it seems, everybody rides bikes, two-wheelers don't get the same reverential treatment that American bike enthusiasts lavish on them. Utility bikes can be bought for very little money; repairing them can cost more, so--according to one theory--people simply chuck them.
