It's all been done before.

These days if you open any magazine about cycling and flip through the ads the first selling point for pretty much every company is "Innovation". Companies would have you believe that they have an army of engineers tirelessly working to invent new ways of improving a machine that pretty much reached its design apex in the 1960s, when the modern frame geometries became ubiquitous.

I'm sure there are some pioneering engineers in the bike biz. I met one of Cervelo's engineers once, his Powerpoint was rife with misspellings, btw and his main contribution to bike design was the "Drainage Port" in the bottom bracket. But my inclination is that most of them reside near the factories in the Far-East. These days the technical prowess the United States and Europe lies with the marketing and graphic design departments. The Taiwanese build 'em, we'll sell 'em.

Nonetheless we are in a new Golden Age of bicycle development. More people in the states are riding than ever before and this is pushing companies to pump out new, cool things. But how many of these things are really fresh inventions and how many are drudged up from cycling's past? In this and the next few posts I intend to shed light on the origins of some of the new "innovations" in cycling.

Electronic Gears:

Shimano's Di2 battery operated shifting system really is great. It solves a lot of issues that most people never knew traditional cable systems had, and in my opinion has no shortcoming aside from the price. Though, Shimano did not invent electric shifting.

The first commercial electric group was made by Mavic. It was dubbed "Zap" and debuted in the 1992 Tour de France. They followed it up in 1999 with the Mektronic group. Poor battery life and water-proofing issues doomed the group, but it was a step in the right direction. Mavic got out of the shifty-components-game to focus on wheels shortly after.

Campagnolo's latest EPS group went on sale after Di2, but it has been seen in prototypes off-and-on in the pro-peloton for years. Campagnolo claims to have been working on their electric group for 17 years before ever releasing the EPS Record grouppo. What took them so long? Who knows.

SRAM's blue-tooth enabled wireless group is new, truly. But it's also the first cycling component that can be remotely hacked and requires 4 chargers. The "jobs" section of their website says that they've been looking for electronic engineers for the last three or four years, so I'm guessing it was a difficult project. We'll see how long it lasts.

Aero Road Bikes

It's been known that aerodynamics plays a big part in going faster on a bike, but until recently weight has been the main focus of bike design and marketing. But now the "Aero Road Bike" is a staple of every major company's lineup, from the Scott Foil to the Giant Propel (not to be confused with Propel fitness water, another goofy marketing scam to dress up something that's been fundamentally the same since forever) But take a trip back to 1982 and look at the Team Huffy bikes. The tubes have an elongated profile, the shifters are hidden in the aero wake, the cables are all internal and out of the wind, the seatpost gets skinnier in the middle, even the hubs and derailleurs are specially designed for smoothness. Other companies and builders have been looking for ways to cheat the wind for a hundred years before that. So really, it's the advertising that's gotten better, not the bikes.

Integrated Headsets

The regular way of putting bearings between the fork and frame so that you can turn and stuff is to fabricate little cups that press into the frame. Chris King is best known for this. But the trend lately is to build the cups into the frame to save weight. This is hard to do from a manufacturers standpoint, but it's nothing new. Fauso Coppi's bike had an integrated headset as early as 1949, made by Bianchi.

Single-sided Forks and Frames

One of Cannondale's more popular products is the "Lefty" fork. Since it only has one side, you can change tubes and tires without removing the wheel. This is cool, but the concept had been pioneered as early as 1910, with Labor's "Tour de France"

Cool thing about Labor's bike is that the back wheel is a "Righty". I'd like a modern company to remake these bikes, as the ease of tire changes would be good for commuters, and you could get a hub lock to keep the wheel from getting stolen.




Visit back soon and I'll update with more redux components when I see them.