It's All About the Bike (12 page)

Even a gentle ride on roads around the shires of England can anaesthetize my hands. I've tried raising the handlebars, lowering the saddle, tipping the saddle fore and aft, not gripping the bars too tightly, gripping the bars more tightly, reducing tyre pressure, most types of gel gloves, thicker grips, cork handlebar tape, gel handlebar tape, and yoga to strengthen the muscles in my lower back. I even gave up smoking. But still, if I sit on a bike all day — road, commuter, mountain bike, it doesn't matter — my hands will go numb at some point, often for some time, and the chances are I'll be woken that night by a dull throbbing in my fingers.

A doctor I once met randomly on a bike ride told me it was carpal tunnel syndrome, the medical term for a compressed median nerve in the wrist. Perhaps. The median nerve, which controls the motor and sensory functions for most of the hand, is in the centre of the base of the palm — a part of the body that is frequently, if not always, under pressure on a bike ride.

There is no doubt that a good fit between bike and rider helps. Brian Rourke was confident that numb hands would be less of a problem on my new steed. And with the Ram bar in my hands, I felt sure I'd stumbled on another part of the solution.

‘You have small hands too,' Antonio said, gripping my wrist. ‘Then this bar is good for you. See the radius of the bend . . . round but a very shallow radius. We call it Varied Radius Concept. It offers more positions but — this is critical — it's easier to reach the brakes. Ten years ago, all the bars went anatomic — you know with a flat spot in the bend — but this forces you into one position only. Then the racers, they wanted round again.'

Brian Rourke had told me about this too. I certainly wanted
a handlebar with a traditional, continuous bend, with a shallow radius. From the side, these bars have a superior aesthetic. Being able to reach the brakes would be a bonus. I hadn't intended to buy a plush and expensive carbon fibre handlebar. I'd come to Milan because I wanted to meet Antonio and see the home of Cinelli. I'd imagined going away with a humble aluminium bar; something Cino might have designed himself. With the carbon bar in my hands, I was wavering. It was exquisite to touch. Yes, they had this bar in the right size for my shoulder width — 42 cm. Oh, and look, here was a beautiful stem in 120 mm — again my size.

Of course, Cino Cinelli would have embraced carbon had he still been alive and applying his inquisitive mind to the bicycle today. And at least the shallow drop of the Ram bar was very similar to the Giro D'Italia model he popularized in the mid-1960s, even if he would have fainted at the sight of the drinks' tray.

Drivetrain

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

(Seamus Heaney, ‘A Constable Calls')

The Khunjerab Pass (3 miles) is one of the highest paved road passes in the world. It's the bleakest point on the Karakoram Highway, which connects the Indus River valley in Pakistan with the Takla Makhan desert in Xinjiang, China. I've cycled over it twice. The second time, it took me a week to reach the Pass from Gilgit, the former Silk Road staging-post at the bottom of the Hunza valley — that's seven days' cycling uphill. There was plenty of inspiration along the way: kids running into the road shrieking, ‘Gorah! Gorah! Give me one pen!', the unfettered generosity of the Ismaili Muslims who inhabit Hunza, the egg curries and noodle soups served in the truck stops and the sheer beauty of the mountains. Nonetheless, you need all the physical and mental strength you can muster to cross the Khunjerab Pass on a bicycle.

After the customs and immigration post at Sust, there are 130 miles of no man's land to reach the Chinese post. It's an empty and alienating place. The last 10 miles before the Pass are the steepest. They are hellish. On a cold September day, I wrenched my heavily loaded bike up this road, in bottom gear, standing on the pedals for
three hours, extracting every last drop of strength from my legs.

At midday, I reached the Pass — a short, flat section of tarmac edged by snow. I was exalted. It was a pivotal moment: the highest point of my three-year round-the-world ride. I stood there alone, wrapped in all the clothes I had, eating dried mulberries and taking photographs. I'd passed a herd of yaks and a Tajik shepherd near the top. Otherwise, I hadn't seen a vehicle or a person all morning.

As I was packing up, I looked over the edge of the Pass, following the coiling road down into a valley that separated rows of the snow-capped Pamir Mountains. There was a bicycle coming up towards me. I was astonished. Half an hour later, a couple on a recumbent tandem arrived on the Pass. The young Scottish woman at the front, Leslie, was a paraplegic: a climbing accident had left her paralysed from the waist down. She was turning the cranks of the bike with her hands. She was cold and almost mute with fatigue. They didn't linger. I took their picture. They were gone. I was alone again among the white peaks. They seemed somehow smaller.

Physically we are still Stone Age hunter-gatherers. I concede that the modern age of obesity is eroding a truth that has been unassailable for 5,000 years, but for the majority of humankind, 40 per cent of our anatomy is still in our lower limbs. It is a lot for a species that no longer roams across the tundra looking for dinner. It's why the cult of exercise took hold when manual labour declined in the western world. It's why investing in a health club business in China is a good idea today. And it partly explains why the bicycle is the most efficient form of human-powered transport we have ever devised.

Almost alone among human-powered machines, the bicycle uses our largest muscles, the leg muscles, in a near-optimum way.
Today, the drivetrain of a standard bicycle — the handful of components that transfer the efforts of a rider to the rear wheel — comprises the chainrings, the bottom bracket, the cranks, the rear freewheel block with sprockets, the pedals and the chain. It's a highly efficient engine. It's the mechanism that makes the wheels of a bicycle — and my world — go round. It has been argued that the first bicycle equipped with a drivetrain was the brilliant climax to the search for efficiency in tools that began in the Stone Age.

Then, the use of tools first put some daylight between the animal kingdom and us. Nonetheless, we failed to maximize our muscle potential — the most significant source of energy until the Industrial Revolution — for an alarmingly long time. Rowing (anything from a coracle to a galley), tilling, sawing, digging, chopping, shovelling, pumping, lifting — these are all tool-based activities that predominantly made use of hand, arm and back muscles. The principles of cranks have been known about and utilized for millennia, in pumps, lifts and even lathes, but we had a blind spot about driving them with our legs. Nearly all cranked machines were hand-worked. Even one of the world's first submarines, a 50 ft cast-iron vessel deployed by the Confederate army during the American Civil War, was operated by a crew of seven winching an iron shaft attached to a propeller, by hand.

The first ever drivetrain attached to a prototype bicycle was, not surprisingly, hand-activated. In 1821, Lewis Gompertz, a Surrey coach-maker, built a Draisine with an elementary transmission integrated to the steering column: a toothed mechanism at the bottom engaged with a pinion on the front hub. As the rider pulled, the steering column drove the wheel. (Well, sort of.) Around the same time, a London mechanic designed the ‘Trivector', a bicycle that carried three people, all engaged in propulsion by hand, while one of them steered by foot. Gaetano
Brianza from Milan built the ‘Velocimano' tricycle — the rider again used lateral hand-levers to propel it.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the list of great European minds who had taken a tilt at devising a mechanism that effectively transmitted the rider's efforts to the driving wheel of a machine was embarrassingly long: it included Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Michael Faraday and Nicéphore Niépce, the photography pioneer. Still, no one recognized that our legs are more powerful than our arms. The many attempts to build hand-cranked velocipedes and tricycles would, eventually, put Leslie on top of the Khunjerab Pass — a wonderful thing. For the rest of humanity, it was a technological impasse that beggars belief.

The great leap forward happened when someone finally attached rotary cranks and pedals to the hub on the front wheel of a Draisine and invented the velocipede. Who was the first to do this is the subject of great debate among bicycle historians. Almost certainly it was a Frenchman, around 1865. The candidates are Pierre Michaux, a Parisian blacksmith; Pierre Lallement, a young mechanic from Nancy who emigrated to the USA and first patented the idea there in 1866; and the Olivier brothers, Marius, Aimé and René, sons of an industrialist from Lyon and investors in the Michaux bicycle company. The historian David Herlihy believes each of them played a part. Whoever it was, humanity is indebted. It was a breakthrough, not just for the bicycle: here was a clear path to maximizing the capacity of muscle power in every human-powered machine.

The addition of cranks and pedals led to the first international bicycle craze. In 1868, the velocipede spread quickly from Paris across France, then to Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, the USA and Britain. The machines were made of wrought iron and wood. They were hard to steer, heavy, inefficient, expensive
and extremely uncomfortable, hence the popular nickname ‘boneshakers', but they did at least make use of the right limbs.

In physiological terms, we get maximum power out of our muscles if they are allowed to function in a cyclical way, and relax for six times longer than they work. It's to do with blood flow. Cycling with regular pedals and cranks, our legs only push on the pedal for a small part of each pedal rotation: about 60 degrees. For the other 300 degrees of the revolution, the main muscles in that leg — hamstrings and quadriceps — are at rest, and able to absorb blood, carrying replacement energy.

So, pedalling matches almost perfectly the optimum ratio between muscle rest and work, which goes some way to explaining way the bicycle is such an efficient human-powered vehicle. Of course, Michaux, Lallement and the Olivier brothers knew nothing of this. It's simply coincidental; human biologists discovered this fact long after the bicycle became popular.

In 1869, during the heady days of velocipede mania, the world's first bicycle race was held, in the wealthy Parisian suburb of St-Cloud. The consequence of this was that people now wanted the bicycle to go faster. A drawback of the velocipede was that
there was only one, ‘low' gear. In a low gear, the pedals on a bicycle are easy to turn, but you have to pedal fast to get any speed up. In a high gear, the pedals are harder to turn, but you don't have to make them turn so quickly to make the bicycle go fast.

The ‘direct-drive' mechanism on velocipedes meant that the front wheel went round once, for every rotation of the pedals. The obvious way to achieve a higher gear was to increase the diameter of the front wheel. Throughout the 1870s, front wheels grew and grew: the upper limit was effectively the length of the rider's inside leg. The largest production bicycles, made popular by professional racers who were reaching speeds of 20 mph, had front wheels of 5 ft in diameter: the circumference of the wheel, or distance travelled per pedal rotation, was 15.45 ft. It was a simple but effective solution to the need for speed. A higher gear also provided a better coupling, or ‘speed match', between the human body and the machine. The catch was that machines with large front wheels were difficult and dangerous to ride. In fact, the more the front wheel grew, the further the bicycle drifted from Drais's original vision of a mechanical horse — a democratic machine for utilitarian use.

Mechanics across the industrialized world knew this. In the 1870s, the search for an efficient drivetrain intensified: lever, pivoted-lever, ratchet and front-driving chain mechanisms were all tested, without success. The goal was a system that allowed for a pedalling frequency suited to the capability of the human body to produce power, and to transmit that power from the feet to the driving wheel with as little energy loss as possible — all on a bicycle that was practical to ride. Through popular periodicals like
Mechanics Magazine
and
English Mechanic,
there was a great cross-fertilization of ideas on the subject in Britain. By the end of the 1870s, it was understood that a mechanism connecting the
pedals to the rear wheel of the bicycle via a
chain,
and not to the front wheel, which impeded steering and held back the development of gearing, was desirable, if not essential.